Leonard Swanson

Leonard Swanson is a Ph.D. student at The University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. He studies interventions to improve crisis response to decrease police-involved killings of people with mental health issues, decrease arrests of people in crisis, limit utilization of acute crisis services, and increase post-crisis connections with mental health resources.

Leonard has linked crisis program data with jail administrative and Medicaid data to assess outcomes of emerging mental health diversion programs with quantitative causal inference methods. Lately, he is interested in interventions that address mental health crises over the phone at 911 emergency communications centers.

His prior work has examined county-level factors of successful behavioral health diversion from criminal legal systems, Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), post-overdose response teams, co-response teams, and mobile crisis teams. Leonard’s work was acclaimed by CIT International’s Excellence in Research award in 2023.

Secondary research interests include the psychology of mystical experiences and jazz cultural exchange.