Planning to Evaluate a Mental Health Court? What Are Some Challenges?

Privacy laws and regulations can hinder the collection of data for persons simultaneously involved with the mental health and criminal justice systems.

Privacy laws can hinder evaluation efforts by prohibiting access to certain types of data. The issues surrounding regulations and laws protecting the privacy of persons involved with the mental health and criminal justice systems must be addressed before beginning a program evaluation. For instance, records that provide details on particular individuals and their attendance at certain clinics for certain services may be sealed. In this case, an evaluator can make arrangements to obtain aggregate level data instead that will help answer questions such as how many received what types of services during specific time periods.

The structure and administration of a mental health court may serve to help or hinder an evaluation.

In some jurisdictions the mental health court and the traditional court are administered and managed separately. Evaluation designs, such as randomized controlled trials, that call for data collection from mentally ill defendants in the mental health court and the traditional court will require a more collaborative evaluation approach in these jurisdictions than in jurisdictions in which the mental health court operates as a program of the traditional court.

Definitions of client success vary widely.

There is wide variation in the degree of mental health problems and the ability to work with mental health court participants to set treatment milestones. Therefore, it is difficult to identify common indicators of success and presumptive timeframes for reaching treatment milestones.

Documenting services received by mental health court participants can be challenging.

It can be difficult for a mental health court to track the type, quality, and duration of services mental health court participants receive because the services often occur at multiple locations by multiple providers in the community. This is problematic for an evaluator concerned with assessing the role of particular services on outcomes. One solution is to gather data on services billed to the mental health court.

Mental health courts often serve individuals with unstable living situations, making it difficult to collect self-report data.

Participants in mental health courts are sometimes homeless or change residences often. It can be particularly challenging to contact these individuals via phone or mail to collect follow-up data. One approach to resolve this issue is to collect information on places frequented by the individual, identifying features, etc., at the point of acceptance into the mental health court. With this information, the evaluation team can try to locate the individual in person to obtain follow-up data.

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