Improving Access to Mental Health Treatment

Quarter Turn Strategies is a nonprofit research and education organization focused on improving access to appropriate mental health treatment. We conduct research, provide public education, and collaborate with stakeholders across legal, clinical, emergency response, government, community, family, and patient perspectives to identify where systems break down and how existing pathways can function more effectively.

Our name reflects how we approach this work. Meaningful change does not always require wholesale reinvention. Focused, deliberate adjustments can improve how existing laws, programs, and systems function while broader reforms continue to develop. We identify those opportunities through research, public education, and collaboration with people who work within and rely upon public systems of care.

Our work is centered at the intersection of mental health policy, social vulnerability, and emergency response. The 911 system operates as an all hazards, all needs point of entry. It cannot turn people away because another system is unavailable or unprepared to respond. It therefore provides an important vantage point for understanding where people lose access to care and where public systems need stronger pathways, coordination, and capacity.

Build Systems for People With Complex Needs

People should be able to access appropriate care when they seek help. When those with the most complex and persistent needs primarily receive assistance through emergency response, it can indicate that the broader system has not been able to reach them, engage them, or sustain their care.

Effective systems must serve people across the full spectrum of need, including those who cannot independently navigate traditional service pathways. They must also provide continuity beyond the immediate resolution of a crisis.

Quarter Turn Strategies studies these gaps and works with public agencies, professionals, researchers, community organizations, families, and people with lived experience to identify practical improvements.

Use Approaches Supported by Evidence

Quarter Turn Strategies promotes informed examination of practices across the continuum of care. Effective systems should prioritize appropriate stabilization, meaningful engagement with services, and measurable progress toward improved functioning and independence.

Sustainable improvement requires planning, coordination across settings, and attention to outcomes that reflect real world conditions. Success cannot be measured solely by whether an immediate crisis ends. It must also consider whether the person received appropriate care, remained connected to treatment, and experienced greater stability over time.

Provide Person Centered Care

Appropriate care exists along a continuum and may change as a person’s condition and needs change. The least restrictive appropriate setting is not always the least intensive setting.

When illness significantly impairs insight or decision making, effective care may require a temporary structured or supervised setting. Any such intervention should operate under applicable law, include due process protections, use clear treatment goals, undergo regular review, and support progression to less restrictive environments when clinically appropriate.

A complete system avoids the false choice between leaving a person without effective care and placing that person in indefinite custody. Care should be proportional, purposeful, and directed toward recovery of capacity, stability, and greater independence.

Understand and Use Existing Legal Pathways

Public systems operate within established legal, regulatory, and professional frameworks that shape access to care and decision making authority. Quarter Turn Strategies examines how these frameworks function in practice, including where lawful pathways may be underused, inconsistently applied, or poorly understood.

Through legal and policy research, public education, and technical collaboration, we help clarify what existing law authorizes, who is responsible for acting, and how legal pathways interact with clinical and operational systems.

This work includes examining gaps between statutory duties and local practice while preserving due process protections and appropriate professional judgment.

Build Solutions Through Stakeholder Collaboration

Lasting system improvement requires the participation of the people affected by public systems and the people responsible for operating them.

Quarter Turn Strategies collaborates with people receiving care, families, people with lived experience, patient rights representatives, clinicians, service providers, first responders, public agencies, courts, researchers, community organizations, and policymakers. Each sees a different part of the system. No single perspective is sufficient to identify where pathways fail or determine whether a proposed solution will work in practice.

Meaningful collaboration requires more than collecting viewpoints. It requires examining how responsibilities, legal authority, professional standards, operational limitations, and individual needs intersect. It also requires addressing disagreement directly while maintaining a shared focus on lawful, appropriate, and effective care.

Different disciplines are trained, equipped, and authorized to respond under different conditions. Multidisciplinary approaches allow each participant to contribute within the scope of that participant’s knowledge and capacity. They also reduce the risk that people with complex needs will be excluded from care because their condition exceeds the resources, authority, or safety thresholds of a single program.

Quarter Turn Strategies helps stakeholders develop a shared understanding of the problem, evaluate available evidence, clarify existing legal pathways, and identify practical improvements that can be implemented across systems.

Build a Complete Continuum of Care

An effective system requires adequate capacity across the full continuum, including evaluation, stabilization, treatment, structured care, step down services, and community support.

When part of that continuum is missing, people may cycle repeatedly through emergency departments, 911 response, homelessness services, and the criminal legal system without receiving care that addresses their underlying needs.

Quarter Turn Strategies supports research, education, and cross sector planning that help communities understand these gaps and evaluate how existing resources can be used more effectively. Investment in appropriate care can reduce dependence on repeated crisis intervention while improving outcomes for people, families, responders, and communities.

Measure Outcomes and Then Reassess

Public systems should be evaluated through transparent information about access, continuity of care, system use, and long term stability.

Quarter Turn Strategies supports the use of reliable data, clearly defined measures, and public accountability to determine whether laws, programs, and practices are functioning as intended. We also examine qualitative evidence from the people who provide, seek, and support access to care when available data do not capture how systems operate in practice.

Measurement should inform continued learning. When an approach is not producing the intended result, public systems should identify why and reassess it.

Why We Do This Work

Quarter Turn Strategies exists to improve public understanding of how mental health laws and systems function in practice and to identify changes that can improve access to appropriate care.

Our perspective is informed by direct experience in frontline environments, where people seek help during moments of crisis and public systems must respond under real world constraints.

We believe systems work best when they meet people where they are, maintain engagement over time, and support meaningful progress toward stability and independence. Through independent research, education, and collaboration, we work to help public systems better serve people with the most complex needs.