Living with Serious Mental Illness, Police Encounters, and Relationships of Power: A Critical Phenomenological Study

Abstract

The criminalization of mental illness has drawn and kept a disproportionate number of people living with mental illness in jails and prisons across the United States. The criminal legal system is ill-equipped or unequipped to provide meaningful mental health care. Police often serve as gatekeepers to the criminal legal system in the midst of encounters involving people living with serious mental illness. The literature that examines police decision-making amid these highly discretionary encounters has been primarily situated in post-positivist, quantitative methodologies focused on police perspectives. There is a dearth of research with the direct involvement of people living with serious mental illness that employs more advanced qualitative methodologies. The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experience of police encounters from the perspective of people living with serious mental illness through multi-level analysis of the interpersonal and structural contexts which underpin these encounters. This critical phenomenological study used interpretative phenomenological analysis as process. A sample of 16 adults were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling and completed semi-structured interviews. The findings reported two descriptive areas for participants—aspects of serious mental illness and contemplations of power. The findings also included the interpretive analysis organized around six themes that emerged regarding the lived experience of police encounters: (a) significant context, to include serious mental illness, was made invisible, (b) the carceral response to serious mental illness and interpersonal issues, (c) law enforcement’s power to force submission, (d) facets of escalation, (e) law enforcement encounters lacked essential care, and (f) law enforcement encounters served as a microcosm of the criminal legal system. The implications of the study’s findings on police encounters as they are currently framed in the largely post-positivist, quantitative body of research are discussed. In addition, the current wave of national police response models and reform are considered and connected to implications for social work practice. Finally, culminating in the findings’ implications for a growing edge of critical phenomenology that incorporates intersectionality and disciplinary power and the central role of an abolition feminist praxis at the nexus of mental health, crisis response, and collective care.