PEORIA MAGAZINE January 2023

A PROUD AND INNOVATIVE HISTORY

the traumatic reality for far too many central Illinoisans over the years. “It’s heartbreaking,” said Mary Sparks Thompson, president of UnityPoint Health-UnityPlace and the person in charge of seeing to it that, at long last, help is on the way. TO THE RESCUE Approvals have been granted, property has changed hands, funds are being raised and plans are being drawn up for what likely will be called the Young Minds Center, an all-encompassing juvenile behavioral health facility to be located in the former Heddington Oaks facility in West Peoria, previously the home of Peoria County’s public nursing home. UnityPoint officials expect to open the state-of-the-art center a year fromnow. The need is clear and overwhelming. Indeed, UnityPoint officials have noted that over the last five years, some 2,600 childrenwere turned away locally for the treatment they needed due to a lack of resources, space, staff, all against a backdrop of elevated demand. “That’s just staggering to me,” said Thompson, a nurse and social worker by training who moved to Peoria for the UnityPoint job in early 2022. “We need to stem the tide there.” Children facing especially severe and life-altering challenges may be referred to alternative in-patient hospital placements in Chicago or Springfield, but for some families, that’s a whole other hardship and hurdle. “If you can imagine having a child in crisis and they have to be two hours away,” said Thompson. “Part of the success in treating children and adolescents is to involve the family or their natural support system in treatment. It’s very difficult to do that when they’re physically remote or removed from the child. And it’s lonely for that child.” An average stay of seven to 10 days is “a very long time,” said Thompson. “It’s just so disruptive.” Not every struggling child needs

hospitalization, of course, and for the “old-school social worker” in Thompson, the less restrictive environment, the better. Nevertheless, while UnityPoint has “great community partners that do a yeoman’s job,” the reality is that some children “need highly specialized care and it’s just difficult to find placement for them.” In theYoungMindsCenter, UnityPoint will spend up to $30 million becoming that place, converting what was once a large and sprawling nursing home into an inpatient and outpatient facility catering to children age 4 to 12 and adolescents age 13 to 17 in a park-like, neighborhood setting. The number of juvenile beds in town will double to 44, as will the professional staff available to assist them. Modern classrooms will provide ongoing education. Children can be segregated by gender and age – “How you talk to a child who is 6 is different than how you talk to a 17-year-old,” said Thompson -- which allows for patient specific, developmentally appropriate treatment, which in turn “enhances clinical outcomes.” An outbreak of COVIDneed not take beds out of service. Meanwhile, there’s room to house community partners providing the preventive and post-discharge services young people need and the ongoing training that professionals require. Substance abuse treatment will be part of the program, when necessary. The kids will have their own dining facility, an indoor recreation center and outdoor courtyards. It's a significant change in scenery from the urban, more institutional feel of the eighth floor in the main hospital tower where UnityPoint provides its juvenile behavioral health services now. “We can take an existing facility, repurpose it to meet a community need that’s being unmet, and do it in a cost-efficient way both in terms of our costs and the cost benefit to the community,” said Thompson. “The real goal is to make the care approachable, to make it easy for families to receive services, to try to provide that care in a very warm, healing environment.”

This newest effort is something of a natural evolution for UnityPoint, which asMethodist Hospital began pioneering community-based mental health care for local adults way back in 1954, adding adolescents to the mix just over three decades later. At the time, psychiatric hospitals tended to be regional institutions, such as Zeller Mental Health Center, which closed in 2002, and Peoria State Hospital before that. In 2019, UnityPlace was created through themergerofUnityPointHealth, Human Service Center and Tazwood Center for Wellness with the mission of providing comprehensive, integrated mental health and addiction services to the region. Today, UnityPlace operates 39 programs across four different levels of behavioral health care, including a 65-bed psychiatric unit for adults. “We have soup-to-nuts behavioral health service in central Illinois, so a chance to bring together all those different types of resources under one umbrella was really exciting to me … part of an ongoing effort to be where clients need us when they need us,” said Thompson. “Our goal is to be best in class and to really be a national center for others to model.” A STRESSED ERA Mental illness diagnoses are up, but so are hospitalizations and suicides, dramatically in some cases. “Depression, anxiety and grief are the three main things that we’re seeing,” said Thompson. “We know that 17 percent of Peoria 10th graders seriously consider suicide. Tome that’s heartbreaking.” So what’s going on? Are American children just less resilient than they used to be? On the plus side, people who once suffered in silencenowaremore likely to seek help, in large part because “there’s a reduced stigma,” said Thompson.

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