Nearly a year after closing its doors to patients, the Doña Ana County Crisis Triage Center is back in operation. Micah Pearson is a community advocate and former patient of the CTC, and said having the center reopened is crucial to address gaps in behavioral healthcare.
“Within 10 minutes of walking in here, I was talking to a peer support worker and they provided a nice, calm, quiet environment for me to get out of my head as opposed to a loud, chaotic emergency department where you wait for 4 hours to even just talk to anybody in a triage environment or 12 hours to get back up into a psychiatric unit, if they're lucky, if they have one,” he said. “When I was in jail, I was lucky that the jail had a psychiatric unit. That took me a week to get into. But here I was in a calm, quiet environment where they were able to talk to me and I was able to chill out.”
Last January, RI International, the facility’s previous behavioral health provider, ceased operations after the company was denied grant money by the board of Doña Ana County Commissioners, narrowing the options for individuals seeking treatment amid mental health crises.
According to the latest data from the New Mexico Department of Health, mental health emergencies accounted for 7.4% of emergency department visits in the state between July and September of last year. Pearson said that having the CTC operational will be instrumental in helping individuals in crisis avoid potentially traumatic experiences within emergency clinics and the criminal justice system.
“To have a center that provides the services that we do for our general community is unbelievably vital. And the fact that we're able to, with the reopening, we're able to come back and actually take another look at it, have a 2.0 release, as it were, and look, learn from what we did the previous time and have a just another shot at it where the community comes together and really works together this time to provide wraparound services, better connections than we did the first time, makes it even a better web with a greater interconnectedness.”
County Commissioner Shannon Reynolds was one of the officials who voted against the grant that led to the previous provider leaving, but said he’s happy to collaborate with Summit Behavioral Health due to the company already having a successfully operating behavioral health clinic in the southern part of the county.
“Summit [Behavioral Health] is planning to have full time staff here 24/7. They’re going to be following the right policies for intake. They're going to be open and available. They're going to be basically doing it right. [RI] International was trying to actually, in my opinion, capitalize on revenue without actually providing the needed service. The service was good, but it wasn't what we really needed, it wasn't comprehensive enough to meet the needs of the entire community.”
While the CTC has only been open for a few weeks, Sandy Emanuel, Market CEO for Summit Behavioral Healthcare, said that there’s been a considerable amount of collaboration within the community to get the center open, and called the relationship with law enforcement critically important.
“Law enforcement comes across individuals in the community all the time who are having a psychiatric or a substance abuse crisis, and we're a resource for them that they can easily hand off and let, you know, psychiatric professionals take care of the individual as opposed to law enforcement trying to figure out what to do with them, spending a lot of time with them, navigating other systems to try to figure out how to hand off somebody in a safe manner,” she said.
Since the triage center closed last year, Jamie Michael, Director of the Department of Health and Human Services of Doña Ana County, immediately began searching for a provider to fill the void. And while there’s still considerable work to be done, Michael said having Summit Behavioral Health at the helm has her optimistic about the future of mental healthcare in the community.
“It's such a relief to make it to this point for me, for the entire team at the county, to see all of our work result in something so successful and to see the open arms for everyone in the community to really welcome the facility back open. It feels good. And now I can kind of redirect some of my time and energy to other critical things that we need to focus on.”
As the Crisis Triage Center begins again under a new provider, community members and leaders alike are hopeful that the reopening will not only address current needs, but set a new example for mental health care in Doña Ana County and beyond.
