Why We Built the Crisis Web
If you have never had a loved one in acute psychosis, there is something you believe that isn’t true. You believe that when someone is in a psychiatric emergency, there is a path. Call for help, get an evaluation, get treatment. Maybe it’s slow, maybe it’s imperfect, but a path exists — the way a path exists when someone has a heart attack or a stroke.
Families in the Severe Mental Illness (SMI) community know something different. We know that in the first 24 hours of an acute psychosis crisis — the hours that matter most — nearly every thread a family can pull leads to a dead end, then looping them right back to where they started while the crisis continues unabated, and the brain deteriorates with no end in sight.
We built the Crisis Web to be shared with others, those that don’t understand. Like legislators.
What the Crisis Web is
The Crisis Web is an interactive map of an acute psychosis crisis — the first 24 hours, from the moment a family realizes someone they love is not safe.
You start at the center: What do you do? Then you follow any thread, making the same choices real families make. Call 911. Drive to the emergency room. Try mobile crisis. File a commitment petition. Beg the person to come voluntarily.
And you see where families actually end up.
The threads are honest. Some end at a dead end. Some route a medical emergency into the criminal justice system. Some loop back to the beginning — the discharge that lands you right back at “What do you do?”, the evaluation that ends with “they’re not dangerous enough yet, come back when something happens.”
Every wall on the map is paired with something else: **the reform that removes it.** Because this is not a map of despair. It is a map of policy failure — and policy can be changed.
One more thing the map makes clear: the exact steps differ by state and community. Who answers a 911 call, how a petition works, whether mobile crisis even exists near you — all of that varies. The walls don’t. Every family, in every state, meets some version of them.
Why We Made It
Because just telling people about the walls has never been enough.
Families in our community have testified, written letters, shared stories, and sat across from legislators trying to explain why their son or daughter went from psychosis to homelessness, or to jail, or to a grave — while the family was begging for treatment the entire time. And too often, the response is disbelief. Surely you could have called someone. Surely the hospital would have kept him. Surely there was a way.
There wasn’t. But that reality is nearly impossible to convey in words, because it contradicts everything people assume about how emergencies work in this country.
There is also a deeper misunderstanding at the heart of it. Our loved ones are not refusing help out of stubbornness or choice. Many (most!) are living with Anosognosia — a neurological symptom of the illness itself that prevents the brain from recognizing it is sick. It may affect as many as half or more of people that live with psychosis (ie. Schizophrenia). When the law waits for a person with anosognosia to “choose” treatment, or waits for danger before allowing intervention, it isn’t protecting freedom. It is guaranteeing the crash.
The Crisis Web turns all of that from an argument into an experience. You don’t have to take our word for it. You can try to find the way through yourself.
How We Hope it Gets Used
If you are a legislator or a policy staffer: spend five minutes in the web before your next mental health vote. Follow the threads your constituents are following tonight. Notice that every wall you hit is labeled with the reform that removes it — those labels are your to-do list. When a family testifies before your committee, this map is the terrain they are describing.
If you are a human rights or civil liberties advocate: we are asking you to walk the web with us. We share your commitment to dignity and autonomy. But follow the thread where a person in psychosis is turned away because they are “not dangerous yet,” and then arrested days later for behavior the illness caused. A right to be sick, with no right to be well, is not liberty. The people most harmed by these walls are the people inside the psychosis.
If you are a journalist: the Crisis Web is a reporting tool. Behind every dead end on this map are real cases — many documented here in personal stories and here in public account stories: Reference them. Cite them. We built this record so no one can claim they didn’t know.
If you are a family in the middle of it: we made this for outsiders, but we know you may find it too. Please hear this — if you have been circling these threads for months or years, you are not failing. The map is broken, not you. Your exhaustion is the evidence.
The Vision Behind It
The Sandy Pruett Project exists to build a public record of denied care, so that stories become evidence and evidence becomes reform. The Crisis Web is that record in visual form: every wall, every loop, every dead end our families know by heart — laid out where legislators, advocates, and journalists can finally see it.
Our vision is simple: a system where care happens at psychosis — not at danger, not after tragedy.
Walk the web. Then help us tear it down.