Growing Momentum For Crisis Stabilization Centers

Here are four new crisis stabilization centers launching around the country that promise to improve public safety while reducing visits to emergency rooms or jails.

1. “Travis County, [Texas] To Keep Mentally Ill From Jail.” 

For The Texas Tribune, Stephen Simpson reports on the launch of a crisis stabilization center in the greater Austin, Texas region, which will give people in the throes of a mental health crisis somewhere to go to get the help they need. For now, the center offers “a 90-day care and treatment program at [a] 25-bed facility,” but “the county [plans to] build a more permanent and larger facility.”  

The launch of the crisis center is part of a broader mental health pilot program that also includes a new first responder protocol that allows “law enforcement officers and paramedics [to] quickly drop off someone in crisis and stabilize them instead of taking them to jail.” 

What local leaders are saying:

• County Sheriff Sally Hernandez told the Texas Tribune that she believes the program has the “potential to end the cycle she has witnessed for decades” in which “a person [is arrested], comes to jail” and then gets “re-arrested shortly after.” The crisis stabilization center solves “the frustration on the law enforcement end that we have nowhere to take them.” Thus, the center gives “need[ed] hope for those with mental illness and for our officers.” 

• County Judge Andy Brown, who championed the pilot program, told the Tribune that he took inspiration from other newly built stabilization center models around the country. For example, in Miami, “$4 million a year was saved because [people arrested] with mental illness were not taken to jail.” Moreover, “in Nashville, 80% of [those] taken in by the [crisis stabilization center] don’t return to jail … In these places, we’ve seen people getting services that they need; and, in turn, making their community safer. We need to start setting people on a better path.”

2. “Clark County Buys Unused Hospital To Create Behavioral Health Crisis Stabilization Center.” 

For The Nevada Current, Camalot Todd reports on Clark County, Nevada’s $10 million purchase of an unused “24-bed psychiatric hospital [that will now be used as] a crisis stabilization unit [offering] short-term behavioral health care, including psychiatric stabilization and substance withdrawal treatment,” as well as “medication management, case management, and housing placement assistance.” The county will open the doors to the new facility later this year. 

Abigail Frierson, the deputy county manager, explained to the Las Vegas Review-Journal that this new facility, a “first of its kind” in the county, was a critical missing piece of the the local public safety infrastructure: “Without a facility like this, first responders really only have two options for folks experiencing behavioral health crisis, and that’s the emergency room or jail… [that’s why the crisis center is] a big step in the right direction in terms of making sure people are connected with the care that they need.” 

3. “Connecticut’s First 24-Hour Crisis Stabilization Center” Opening Next Month. 

For Yale Daily News, Ariela Lopez and Kenisha Mahajan report on the new crisis stabilization center, called The REST Center, opening in New Haven’s next month that will “provide short-term interventions for people who are experiencing a crisis and need stabilization.” The center is staffed by “a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, nurses, licensed clinicians and peers with lived experience” and will be open 24/7, year-round. Patients can “arrive by ambulance, police transport or from a crisis team… [or] from the city’s emergency service departments.” John Labieniec, the REST Center’s vice president of acute and forensic services, told the newspaper that the new model works with both “police and mobile crisis [to ensure that] no one is turned away.” 

From New Haven’s successful mobile crisis response unit to its hospital-based violence interruption program, the crisis stabilization center is just the latest program to launch in the city that leverages health professionals—not armed police officers—to respond to calls for service. Jorge X. Camacho, a criminal law professor at Yale, said that what’s happening in New Haven reflects the broader “trend of increasing enthusiasm by police officials to collaborate with these types of crisis intervention methods…[because the programs are] a really useful and beneficial supplement to the efforts of police officers to effectuate public safety.” 

4. “Crisis Center Aims To Keep Kansas Youth Out Of Detention.” 

For KCTV5, Johnson County’s local CBS News affiliate, Nydja Hood reports on a new Youth Crisis Stabilization Center, which the county Board of Supervisors recently approved to “provide a place for young people to go when they experience a mental health crisis or emergency [and] provide early intervention services and focus on treatment and rehabilitation as an alternative to detention.” 

County leaders announced that the new center will have 10 available beds when it opens its doors later this Spring. The center will be staffed by “a clinician, case manager, nurse, as well as several behavioral health specialists.”And it will provide “around-the-clock observation and supervision of youth receiving services.”

Tim DeWeese, the county’s mental health director, wrote that because research shows that “65-70% of minors in the juvenile justice system have a diagnosable mental health condition, “we’re better able to prevent negative outcomes later in life … when we connect youth to treatment instead of detention and help them develop coping strategies and learn to regulate their emotions.”