Symposium on mental health diversion

Mental health diversion for adults includes strategies to avert or reduce incarceration and provide access to and retention in treatment and other services. Its necessity is premised on reducing re-offending and high emergency service use of those targeted for diversion. To garner policy and fiscal support, innovative community services intervention models and an understanding of the costs and benefits of mental health diversion are needed. This symposium examines mental health diversion in terms of programmatic elements necessary for success, participant characteristics and the costs and benefits of police and jail diversion.

The symposium will begin by examining the medical clearance feature necessary to facilitate speedy and cost effective diversion and the types of psychiatric and medical assessment processes required to ensure appropriate and integrated treatment planning. We will follow with a discussion of client characteristics of co-morbidity and childhood trauma that while distal, contributes to current adult psychopathology, violence risk and poor criminal justice outcomes. We then describe the costs and benefits in one community's system of police and jail diversion programs, contextualized through other research in this area. Depending on the model and community commitment, mental health diversion can be an effective and positive intervention.