New children's facility aims to close mental health care gaps in Hennepin County
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A brand-new facility for young people with complex behavioral and mental health needs will open in Minneapolis later this month.
The Hennepin County Youth Stabilization Center opens after increased attention on gaps in children’s mental health services. More than 1,000 children with mental health crises boarded in Minnesota emergency rooms last year, sometimes for days or weeks at a time.
Margaret Vimont is Chief Operating Officer at Nexus Family Healing, the company which will operate the new stabilization center for Hennepin County.
She spoke with MPR News host Clay Masters about the new center.
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The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity. Click the audio player above to hear the conversation.
Can you talk a bit about the need for this facility? What gaps will it fill?
Kids are getting stranded all over this country in emergency rooms and juvenile detention centers when they have mental health needs that really need to be met with a mental health program. This is a solution where in a lot of these situations, the families and the youth are facing some really difficult challenges. Often emotions are running high and things feel quite escalated.
A facility like this that gives them 30 to 45 days of a safe and supportive environment. That really puts the youth and family in the middle of looking at the challenges and establishing a path forward that can help them take a breath, calm down, and then work with all the systems involved to chart a path forward.
What particular kinds of mental health needs is this designed for?
We have a lot of kids that are struggling with anxiety and depression. Sometimes their mental health needs are expressing themselves with some pretty severe behavioral health needs. So they might present as angry or aggressive. They may have some inclination to, perhaps internalize their difficulties, and that might lead to trying to harm themselves, or even thoughts of suicide.
We’ve got a high-intensity model that’s geared toward taking a very wide swath of mental health challenges. Really, the only limits on a facility like this would be medical needs that would require continual nursing. But other than that, it can really take a wide swath of mental health challenges for kids.
The Youth Stabilization Center will be within Hennepin County's Behavioral Health Center. What is unique about working with children, and how is that reflected in the facility’s design?
Well, we put youth and families in the middle. And of course, developmentally, youth are at a very important crossroads in their life, even when they’re not facing challenges. This is designed to be reflective of them and their experience.
When a child is behaving in a distressing way, the question isn’t, “What’s wrong with you?” The question is, “What’s happened to you?” and then, “Let’s connect about that and start the healing process forward together.”
Residential mental health services for children and adults have significantly declined across the country and here in Minnesota over the past couple of decades. What do you see is behind that trend?
A lot of different things have happened. If we go pre-COVID, we really wanted kids to stay in community, so we really needed to not have as much group care and more care in the community, whether that’s foster care or care for kids while they’re in their own homes. So, there was really an intentional shift away.
Then we hit COVID, and then a lot of things happened. Not only did mental health concerns swell, but also it did highly stress some of these resources and further declined the availability of group care. And so now Minnesota and most other states are trying to figure out, How can you have a balanced system of care?
What really works is to have everything you need along the spectrum. So, if families can get what they need when they first are facing a challenge, that can avoid a lot of need for higher-end care later.
So, you want all that prevention work to be firmly in place. And then, of course, you need availability of out-of-home placement, either foster care or in group care or residential care when needed, and if you have that whole system that’s developed in a robust way, then that’s what serves youth and families the most and prevents people from needing higher-end care when all could have been avoided if the families got what they needed when they were first facing that challenge.
