Occupational Therapy and Criminal Court Mental Health Initiatives: An Important Emerging Practice Setting

Abstract

Occupational therapy is well equipped to help people with mental illness in criminal justice contexts. Criminal court mental health initiatives, meanwhile, have emerged as a “rehabilitative response” to disproportionate numbers of people with mental illness caught in the criminal justice system. These initiatives—namely, mental health courts and mental health diversion—belong to a family of problem-solving courts animated by the theoretical concept of therapeutic jurisprudence. Occupational therapy is on the periphery of these developments, but this article argues that the growing emergence of these initiatives presents an important and expanding new area of practice for occupational therapy.