Designing code to handle specific error messages processed by a generic function

I am a beginner in Python, but I have referred several questions related to individually handling error messages in Python and I've also read best practices of raising exceptions. However, this is more of a design question to handle error messages when a single function is used to process/validate errors.

There are individual functions that make different API calls. To handle the response, all these functions use the following generic function:

def print_if_error_and_exit(response, debug, message_override_map=None, exit_on_failure=True):
if hasattr(response, 'status') and (response.status < 200 or response.status >= 300):
    overriden_message = message_override_map.get(response.status) if message_override_map else None
    if overriden_message:
        error_message = overriden_message
    elif hasattr(response, 'message'):
        error_message = response.message
    else:
        error_message = 'No error message found'

    if exit_on_failure:
        print_error_message('Error (HTTP {0}): {1}'.format(response.status, error_message))
        if debug:
            print_error_message(repr(response))
        sys.exit(1)
    else:
        raise ResponseException(error_message)

Now, we want to retain this function but also have a capability to provide custom, API-specific human-friendly error messages. One of doing that would be to call this function with a dict that can take HTTP status code along with the customized message. However, this might not be the best approach, and I was wondering if there was a better way of achieving this objective.