Database Not Available

The Situation:

During certain processes, such as fiscal year end and software upgrades, my Oracle database is placed in restricted session. As expected, an attempt to use the Django application results in the error “ORA-01035: ORACLE only available to users with RESTRICTED SESSION privilege”. This error is thrown from deep within the ORM code.

The Question:

How can I grab this error within my application to be able to send a meaningful error message back to the user instead of the 500 page? I’d also like to stop the email sent to the administrator (me) each time this error is triggered.