Survey of Mental Health Courts compiled by NAMI, GAINS, TAPA, and the Consensus Project

Click here to download the survey as a PDF file.

NAMI, the National GAINS Center for People with Co-Occurring Disorders in the Justice System, the TAPA Center for Jail Diversion, and the Council of State Governments (coordinator of the Criminal Justice / Mental Health Consensus Project), with substantial help from Mr. Paul Spaite, Esq., have compiled a survey of mental health courts, which includes information on over seventy such court programs around the United States that are operating or in the planning stages.

The partner organizations have compiled this survey in order to provide access to as much information as is available to those already involved in mental health courts and to those thinking about starting new courts. This document is particularly critical because the design, operation, and administration of mental health courts vary dramatically, and, in many ways, each court is unique to the jurisdiction where it is located.

Mental health courts are just one approach among many to improving the response to people with mental illness who come into contact with the criminal justice system. For examples of some of the many other types of programs active in jurisdictions across the country, please visit the Consensus Project's searchable Program Profiles.

The survey, still in draft form, is now available as a PDF file. If you are not yet registered with the Consensus Project, you must register before you can download the document. The document is large (1,035 KB) and may take some time to download. Plans to convert this file into a Web page (HTML) are pending.