Mental Health Crisis Interventions and the Politics of Police Use of Deadly Force

Several decades have passed since the process of deinstitutionalisation commenced across Australia, shifting the care, treatment, and accommodation of mentally ill individuals from psychiatric custodial institutions to community-based settings. Despite many years of “reform,” a number of prominent national and state-based inquiries have shown that the process of returning these individuals to community living and community care has been afflicted by significant deficiencies. Principal among these is an ongoing deficit in the requisite mental health funding, programmes, supervision, and support services required to fulfil the very ambitions of deinstitutionalisation-namely, a reduced incidence of both mental illness and the number (and mistreatment) of mentally ill individuals in society (Wylie & Wilson, 1990; Rosenberg, Hickie, & Mendoza, 2009).