Robyn Hacker, PhD, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Law & Psychiatry, has received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Psychological Association, Division 18, Section of Criminal Justice.
Hacker’s dissertation was titled, “Experimental Evaluation DEFUSE: Online de-escalation training for law enforcement intervening in mental health crisis.” The project involved the development and evaluation of a structured, online program to train law enforcement officers about mental illness and de-escalation.
Recent studies estimate that 33 percent of all calls to law enforcement involve someone experiencing a mental health crisis. Furthermore, up to 92 percent of officers report responding to at least one call involving mental illness in the previous month. Despite these statistics, training on mental illness is not a requirement for becoming a law enforcement officer. In fact, many departments do not offer any training covering this topic; often officers must opt-in to such training.
DEFUSE was built to bridge this gap; it is a promising national solution for training law enforcement on mental illness and effective de-escalation strategies for resolving mental health crises without force. To date, no other intervention specifically developed for law enforcement and providing a curriculum on mental illness and de-escalation has been evaluated through a randomized controlled trial.
Results demonstrated that DEFUSE increased officers’ self-efficacy, empathy, knowledge of mental illness and de-escalation strategies, and improved proficiency in demonstrating de-escalation strategies.
Hacker, who graduated from the Yale Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology in June, is being supervised during her fellowship by Sherry McKee, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale.