County crisis stabilization unit to reopen as closed facility run by private contractor
Eight newly funded mental health beds are scheduled to open on May 28 in Santa Barbara’s currently dormant Crisis Stabilization Unit (above).Credit: Google Maps
In response to growing frustration with Santa Barbara’s chronically dysfunctional mental health infrastructure, county supervisors approved a spending plan to add 12 new involuntary retention beds. Eight of them will be placed in the Crisis Stabilization Unit (CSU), which is reserved for individuals facing short-term mental health crises and will have a maximum stay of 23 hours.
When the CSU was first built nine years ago near the county’s mental health campus off Real Street, it was intended to provide a cooling off place for individuals at risk of reaching their boiling point, in the hopes of diverting those needing the services of the county’s chronically overstretched Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF), which has just 16 voluntary beds reserved for those who pose an immediate threat to themselves or others.
PHF beds are locked for at least three days, but CSU beds were not. Patients cannot be hospitalized against their will. This greatly reduced the usefulness of this facility for those seeing acutely ill patients. This, combined with staffing shortages that have long plagued the county’s Department of Behavioral Health, explains why the facility has remained unused or severely underutilized since its grand opening.
Under the new arrangement, CSU will become a closed facility. And it will now be run by Crestwood, a private mental health care contractor, rather than Behavioral Wellness. The same spending plan approved by supervisors also covers the cost of adding four new beds to Crestwood’s 32-bed Lompoc facility for severely mentally ill people currently incarcerated in the county jail. .
“These are locked beds for people on probation that provide intensive mental health treatment,” explained Spencer Brandt, staff assistant to Superintendent Das Williams. “Four beds may seem like a small number, but considering the PHF cap is 16, this is a significant increase in capacity.”
Overseas regulators say $23 million in state funds raised through so-called community corrections partnerships (CCPs) are aimed at keeping people with serious mental health issues out of the criminal justice system and into intensive care instead. voted to authorize the expenditure of
The newly built CSU beds are scheduled to be put into service on May 28th.
