“Hitting the wall”: Lived experiences of mental health crises

BACKGROUND: As Norway moves toward the provision of home-based crisis response, knowledge is needed about understandings of mental health crisis and effective ways of addressing crises within the home. OBJECTIVE: To elicit and learn from service users’ experiences about the subjective meanings of crisis and what kind of help will be most effective in resolving mental health crises. THEORETICAL: A phenomenological-hermeneutic cooperative inquiry method was used to elicit and analyse focus group responses from mental health service users who had experienced crises. RESULTS: Findings clustered into three themes: (1) Crisis as multifaceted and varied experiences; (2) losing the skills and structure of everyday life; and (3) complexities involved in family support. CONCLUSION: Several aspects of crises require an expansion of the biomedical model of acute intervention to include consideration of the personal and familial meaning of the crisis, attention to the home context, and activities of daily living that are disrupted by the crisis, and ways for the person and the family to share in and learn from resolution of the crisis.