MANSFIELD – At the beginning of August, the Mental Health Recovery Board introduced new Behavioral Health Urgent Care locations to the Richland County area.
The three sites, located at Catalyst Life Services and Family Life and Counseling offices will serve those seeking guidance right away, without an appointment and outside of the regular counseling services’ business hours.
Joe Trolian, executive director of Mental Health and Recovery Services, had the idea to create these Behavioral Health locations in early 2020. However, with the pandemic, he had to postpone his initiative.
“The nature of mental illness is you get a very narrow window of opportunity to get people in when they truly need to have the services,” Trolian said. “And so we were willing to come up with a better way to be able to quickly provide services, not necessarily emergency care but for those people who it’s not an emergency… but just needed to get access.”
In March, Trolian went to Erin Schaefer, executive director of Catalyst Life Services and Steven Burggraf, founder and executive director of Family Life Counseling, and told them about his idea. Both parties were thrilled and willing to participate.
“These are difficult times,” Burggraf said. “Folks have a heightened level of anxiety because of the pandemic. And oftentimes, there are urgent mental health needs that occur—situations where people would normally be able to manage those situations, stretch them beyond their resiliency whereas before maybe they would have been able to manage… And, in that moment, makes the situation very difficult.”
“When Joe sat down with us and talked to us about wanting to pilot [Behavioral Health] based upon our appreciation for the need we said, ‘certainly we would participate,’” Burggraf said.
Trolian sees the Behavioral Health locations as a real help to schools. Oftentimes he hears from school principals and counselors about wanting students who need help to receive assessment and be seen by a counselor.
Family Life Counseling has two urgent care sites, one located at their Mansfield office at 151 Marion Ave. and the other in Shelby at 169 Mansfield Ave. Despite the short distance from Mansfield and Shelby, Burggraf described a barrier in which the two communities deserve separate mental health care services in their respective areas.
“For folks that are in need and are going through a crisis, that just multiplies the necessity for something to be in the community,” Burggraf said.
Catalyst Life Services currently has one location at their Mansfield office located at 741 Scholl Rd.
Catalyst originally had a program called “Open Access” in which they provided walk-in assessments during the morning. Once Trolian came to Schaefer with his idea, she saw it as a natural fit based on what Catalyst was already doing. They only needed to make a few adjustments to become a Behavioral Health Urgent Care.
“We have strived over the years to adapt to what the needs are of the community,” Schaefer said. “And so, for us, it was about how do we adapt to what the needs are of the community. And so rather than having people only come in the morning, we recognize that there are people who were coming in the door later in the afternoon.”
“Urgent care just formalized that process for us and allowed us to develop more of that model for what we were already essentially trying to do,” Schaefer said. “We just didn’t have the formal way of doing it because we didn’t have necessarily a dedicated staff, whereas now we have dedicated staff.”
The overwhelming number of new patients coming into both mental health facilities made it easy for Burggraff and Schaefer to determine that opening the three Behavioral Health access locations was the right move. With funding from the Mental Health Recovery Board, they were able to intensely recruit more staff and help walk-in urgent care patients.
The Mental Health Recovery Board wanted people to be able to go from the hospital to the agency without having to go home or get lost in the process. The Behavioral Health locations makes that possible on all fronts, according to Trolian.
When individuals walk into their chosen urgent care, a licensed clinician will do a diagnostic assessment to determine what services are necessary and will provide resources and referrals if needed.
Patients who already receive treatment at one of the agencies but decide to go to an urgent care outside of their regular treatment agency (ex. A Catalyst patient going to a Family Life and Counseling urgent care) can still be evaluated. And if the person grants the urgent care permission, their appointment and evaluation will be sent over to the regular treatment center for them to have a follow-up with the individual.
The Behavioral Health locations also follow up with the patient after their visit.
The Behavioral Health Urgent Care locations open as early as 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday
As more become aware of these new Behavioral Health Urgent Care locations around Richland County, mental health recovery has the potential to make further progress in the future.
“If they like it, I hope they let us know to either expand or enhance or do what we need to,” Trolian said.
