Illinois county mental health center first in state to serve youth, adults

Key Takeaways

DuPage County, Ill.’s Crisis Recovery Center, which provides 24/7 mental health and substance use stabilization and support, is the first facility of its kind in the state to serve both adults and youth. The center offers immediate care and cuts down on unnecessary emergency room visits and interactions with law enforcement for people in crisis. 

“We want people to understand that it’s OK to not be OK, but it’s not OK to not have somewhere to go,” said DuPage County Board Chair Deborah Conroy. “And in DuPage County, we have somewhere to go.”

The Crisis Recovery Center, which is located on the county health department’s campus, can hold up to 42 people at a time and has served nearly 1,500 people since it opened in September. 

“The health department has been a crisis provider for many, many years, and we only saw the need increasing — the number of calls on our crisis hotlines and 988 and how many mobile crisis responses we were doing,” said DuPage County Health Department Deputy Director Lori Carnahan. “And what we really saw as a community was that that missing piece was that place to go. 

“It was really a full community effort coming together to say, ‘These are our priorities,’ and then getting from that point all the way through, really took a village.”

From the concept of the center to its opening, the county worked with community stakeholders, including schools, hospitals, EMS, fire and people with lived experience of substance use disorder and mental illness, to identify needs and determine processes for operations, Carnahan said. 

“We had regular meetings with many different stakeholders to really be able to say, hospitals, for example – how do we set up these protocols so that if somebody needs to go to an inpatient stay, they don’t have to go back through the emergency room?” Carnahan said. “Or if they show up there, but really need to come to us, how can we work together to make sure that that’s a seamless transition?”

DuPage County worked for nearly a decade to acquire the funding and public policy changes needed to create its Crisis Recovery Center. The county looked at mental health support centers in California, Florida and Virginia for inspiration, and tailored the end-product to address local priorities, Carnahan said. 

“What we found is that there wasn’t one specific model that met all of our needs,” Carnahan said. “But we pulled together all of the pieces that we saw in each of those models and really geared it toward what we were hearing from our community needs, such as the youth pod and a place for substance use and sobering.”

The county has seen an increase in younger children needing mental health services since COVID-19, Conroy noted. That’s not unique to DuPage County; following the onset of the pandemic, depressive disorders in youth rose globally by 28.6% and anxiety disorders by 25.1%, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

The Crisis Recovery Center youth mental health unit serves children ages 5 to 17. 

“Hopefully, we won’t see as large of a need at that younger age, but there’s always some,” Conroy said. “And the goal is that if we can care for those young folks, that is all that many less adults that will have to struggle.”

For youth clients, the center focuses on not only making sure they get the immediate and follow-up care they need, but also that their families have support, Carnahan noted. More than 287 youth have received services through the Crisis Recovery Center to date, according to county data. 

“We really try to make sure that whole [family] system is brought together,” Carnahan said. “So, they don’t have to continuously go into crisis.”

Many clients and their families have shared how grateful they are to have a space like the Crisis Recovery Center to go to, and one youth expressed how great it was that they didn’t have to go to the hospital to receive help, Carnahan said. 

“When you look at the Crisis Recovery Center that we’ve built, every piece of it was designed for the person in crisis, so really making that calming and soothing environment as a place that people want to come to get help,” Carnahan said. “Instead of an emergency room or a jail setting or other traditional settings that really don’t make the person in crisis feel that they’re welcome.”

The building of the $25.8 million Crisis Recovery Center was made possible through a combination of American Rescue Plan Act dollars, a state capital grant and county health department funding (which included a $1 million U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant).

The DuPage County Board has dedicated the interest from its millions of dollars in opioid settlement funding toward operating costs, which will also be supplemented by community mental health boards and the health department budget.

“It really is braided funding … It’s not one funding source that’s going to have this be that sustainable model,” Conroy said. “It’s having all of our partners come together and work together to be able to have different funding levers that we can pull.”

Other counties looking to adopt a similar model don’t need millions of dollars for a new building to see results, Carnahan noted. 

“I think it’s an opportunity where other counties and other places that might feel overwhelmed by it, they can really start small and be able to build from there,” she said. “Because the actual model of that safe place to go, and having all of those partners there together, can be done on a smaller scale if funds are limited.”

The center’s location on the county health department campus enables people to access not only care, but also comprehensive support services in one spot, Conroy noted. Crisis services are available to all DuPage County residents, regardless of insurance or ability to pay. 

“I think that the continuum of care needs to include so many different things, and all of those are available through our health department,” Conroy said. “So, if somebody comes in and they don’t have insurance, but are more than likely eligible for Medicaid, they’ll get the help they need to get signed up. 

“If they need housing or food or any of those things, those resources are available on our campus, and the [Crisis Recovery Center] can connect them to those.”

Having substance use and mental health support under one roof is beneficial, because they’re often co-occurring issues, Conroy noted. 

“We have people coming in for detox, but they’re also coming into a warm handoff, and they see that the services for mental health are there,” Conroy said. “… If somebody has an addiction issue, they likely have an underlying mental health issue, so it opens their eyes to realizing that there really is help and care for both.”

Staff include crisis service counselors, case managers, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners and engagement specialists, who are people with lived experience with substance use disorder and/or mental illness. Engagement specialists help de-escalate situations and work with the families and individuals on ongoing services, according to Carnahan. 

“Just even sitting at our front desk at that main entry point when somebody comes in, they’re being greeted by somebody with that lived experience,” Carnahan said. 

In the facility’s first quarter, 95% of people admitted were able to be community stabilized and left the center the same day they entered with links to community-based services tailored to their needs, according to Carnahan. 

“This is a piece of the continuum of care that didn’t exist, so when people leave the crisis recovery center, they have a treatment plan,” Conroy said. “That isn’t the case when they leave an emergency room.”

Roughly 61% of people receiving services through the center bring themselves in or are brought in by their family, according to county data. That reflects the work the county and health department have done to get the word out about the Crisis Recovery Center and the services it offers through social media and appearances on local television and radio, Conroy noted.   

“We’ve done everything we can, and continue to, to get the information out to our communities — through our schools, hospitals, doctors, social workers, firefighters, first responders, everybody,” Conroy said. “We’re constantly talking about it, constantly trying to make sure that people are aware of it … and we won’t back down from that, because the more people that know, the more people we can help.”