DARTMOUTH, Mass. – To address a chronic lack of mental health services for adolescents in southeastern Massachusetts, Southcoast Behavioral Health has opened a 24-bed psychiatric unit and, pending approval of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Substance Abuse Services, will also open an outpatient treatment center. Southcoast Behavioral Health CEO Kevin Burchill told Providence Business News that the approval process is expected to be completed by February, with the first patient arriving in March. Both the inpatient and outpatient facilities are designed to treat adolescents between the ages of 13-17.
They will be housed in the 120-bed psychiatric hospital, which Southcoast Behavioral Health operates at 581 Faunce Corner Road in North Dartmouth. The new adolescent wing was unveiled to the community earlier this month.
“There is a statewide shortage of placement options for adolescents suffering from psychiatric disorders,” Burchill said in the statement. “Each year, hundreds of adolescents across Massachusetts end up in the care of acute-care hospitals that lack both the space and the specialized staff and services to treat them. On an average day at St. Luke’s Hospital alone, one child or more ends up at the emergency room in need of mental health services.” With this new treatment center, Burchill said these patients will be able to receive the specialized services they need near home and promptly, rather than wait – perhaps for days – for a bed to become available elsewhere in Massachusetts.
The unit’s staff will include clinicians with expertise in treating behavioral health and substance abuse diseases, including child and adolescent psychiatrists. Patients discharged from in-patient stays will be eligible to access services through the unit’s outpatient center.
“Ensuring our patients receive the highest quality of care close to home is central to our mission. Families and patients should not have to travel long distances to find top-quality treatment options,” Burchill said. “The good news is that, because their brains are still developing, adolescents are usually highly receptive to behavioral therapies that can benefit them throughout their lives.”
There’s a growing and acute need for adolescent psychiatric care, especially in greater New Bedford and Fall River, where thousands of children living in low-income homes suffer from untreated mental health disorders, Southcoast Health reported. Untreated, mental health problems often lead to poor school performance, chronic absenteeism or quitting school as well as difficult family relationships, involvement with the child welfare and/or juvenile justice systems, substance abuse, risky sexual behaviors and suicide.
“This 24-bed unit will help ease the chronic shortage of inpatient adolescent services that we, at Southcoast Health, experience every day,” Southcoast Health President & CEO Keith A. Hovan said in the statement. “From January to November of this year, our three acute-care hospital emergency departments boarded more than 850 patients ages 21 or younger, while they waited as long as a few weeks for a residential placement.”
Statewide statistics provided by Southcoast Health are alarming:
- Twenty percent of low-income children, ages 6-17, have mental health problems; 80 percent of those receive no treatment;
- Almost 70 percent of children in the state and local juvenile justice system have a diagnosable mental health disorder, with at least 20 percent of them experiencing symptoms severe enough that their day-to-day functioning ability is significantly impaired.
