You know that thing where you read about a mental health program getting canceled and your first thought is “of course it did”? Not because you’re cynical, but because somewhere deep down, you already knew it would fail before it even started?
Burlington just announced they’re scrapping their mental health crisis response program. The one that was supposed to send mental health professionals instead of police to certain emergency calls. City Council members are “expressing skepticism that nobody would be left behind.”
Let me tell you what’s actually happening here, because I see this pattern every single week in my office.
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: We keep creating programs that look good on paper but ignore the fundamental truth about how humans actually work. We design these beautiful systems for the people we wish existed, not the messy, complicated humans who actually need help.
I had a client last week – let’s call her Sarah – who works in community mental health. She came in exhausted, not from the work itself, but from watching another well-intentioned program slowly collapse. “I knew it wouldn’t work,” she told me, “but I couldn’t explain why.”
What Sarah knew intuitively is what Burlington is discovering the hard way: You can’t fix a human problem with a systems solution.
Think about it. When someone’s in crisis – really in crisis – they’re not operating from their logical brain. They’re in survival mode. Pure fight, flight, or freeze. And in that state, they need one thing above all else: another human who gets it. Not a program. Not a protocol. A person.
But here’s where it gets interesting. The programs that fail? They’re usually designed by people who’ve never been in crisis themselves. Or if they have, they’ve forgotten what it actually felt like. They create these elaborate response teams with intake forms and assessment tools and evidence-based interventions.
Meanwhile, the person melting down on the street corner just needs someone to look them in the eye and say, “Yeah, this is really hard right now.”
Most people don’t realize that every failed mental health program is actually protecting something important. It’s protecting us from admitting we don’t actually know how to help each other anymore. We’ve professionalized human connection to the point where we need a degree to hold someone’s pain.
I see this with couples all the time. They’ll come in with communication worksheets and therapy homework from their previous counselor, but they can’t look each other in the eye and say what they’re actually feeling. They’ve been so trained to “use their tools” that they’ve forgotten how to be human together.
The Burlington program fell short of its vision because the vision itself was the problem. It assumed that mental health crises are technical problems requiring technical solutions. Send the right professional with the right training, and crisis averted.
But mental health crises aren’t technical problems. They’re human problems. They’re about disconnection, overwhelm, and the collapse of meaning. You can’t solve those with a response protocol.
Here’s what I’ve noticed after twenty years of sitting with people in their darkest moments: The thing that actually helps isn’t my degree or my training or my evidence-based interventions. It’s my willingness to sit in the mess with them without trying to fix it. To say, “This is brutal. Tell me about it.”
What if I told you that every mental health crisis is actually a connection crisis in disguise?
When someone’s standing on a bridge or screaming in the street or locked in their apartment for weeks, they’re not just having symptoms. They’re broadcasting a signal: “I’ve lost my connection to what makes life bearable.”
And what do we do? We send strangers with clipboards.
The City Council’s skepticism about leaving people behind reveals the deeper truth they can’t quite articulate: We’re already leaving people behind. Not because we lack programs, but because we’ve forgotten that healing happens in relationship, not in systems.
I worked with a man once – former EMT, burned out after a decade of crisis calls. He told me the calls that haunted him weren’t the ones where he couldn’t save someone. They were the ones where he had to follow protocol instead of his humanity. Where he had to transport someone who just needed to be heard, not hospitalized.
This isn’t about Burlington. It’s about all of us. We keep creating programs to avoid the uncomfortable truth that helping someone in crisis requires us to show up as full humans, not just professionals. It requires us to admit we might not have the answers. It requires us to sit with someone in their pain without rushing to fix it.
Your discomfort with this isn’t weakness. It’s honesty. Most of us are terrified of other people’s big emotions because we’re terrified of our own. So we create programs and protocols and professional boundaries to keep the messiness at arm’s length.
But here’s the thing: The people who actually make a difference in crisis situations? They’re the ones who’ve made friends with their own mess first. They can sit with someone else’s chaos because they’ve sat with their own.
Burlington’s failed program isn’t really about mental health response. It’s about our collective inability to be with each other’s pain. We want clean solutions to messy problems. We want professionals to handle what communities used to hold. We want someone else to know what to do so we don’t have to face our own helplessness.
The truth is: Every mental health program that treats crisis as a technical problem will fail. Not because the people designing them don’t care, but because they’re solving for the wrong variable. They’re trying to systematize what can only be humanized.
What actually works? Ordinary people who’ve done their own work showing up for other ordinary people. Not with answers or interventions or evidence-based anything. Just with presence. With the radical act of saying, “I don’t know what to do either, but I’m here.”
That’s not a program. That’s just being human. And maybe that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to avoid all along.
