Attending to Persons with Intellectual and/or Other Developmental Disorders in Crisis Settings

Crisis response is growing across the United States with increasingly broad phone, text, and chat response systems that lead to the need to triage callers who may be in need of further outreach. This might include deploying a mobile crisis response team and/or referring a caller to a crisis stabilization unit. Some individuals will ultimately need psychiatric inpatient hospitalization or acute substance use services. The nuances of the crisis service system continuum are in a period of incredible growth. Most of the crisis response systems have had the issues of persons with mental illness and substance use disorders at the forefront of their planning. It is important, however, to consider the needs of anyone who arrives in a crisis setting. Increasingly, it is recognized that persons with I/DD will also present as having crisis needs, and the systems and providers who support them will need to be prepared. Such individuals may have areas of different abilities along social, communication, and cognitive dimensions. They may present in crisis with other individuals who provide information about them, yet the individuals in crisis will still need to drive their own care. There are countless ways that these matters may play out, both to the benefit of the individual or, if not attended to properly, in a way that could result in trauma, distrust in providers, and poor outcomes. The information set forth earlier aims to help advance the field and individual practices to ensure that persons with I/DD receive equivalent care and treatment with information that helps focus on this population's unique features and needs.