LOWELL — Access to mental health resources expanded in Northern Middlesex County with the July opening of crisis stabilization services for adults and youth through Vinfen, a Greater Lowell community behavioral health center. The CSS program is a component of the organization’s community behavioral health center, located at 391 Varnum Ave. in Lowell’s Pawtucketville neighborhood.
Vinfen’s CSS program includes six beds for youth ages 13-18, and seven for adults (18-plus), and allows for short-term stays of three to five days. It fills an important gap in the continuum of behavioral health services available in Lowell.
“There is an urgent need for greater access to crisis stabilization services in Lowell,” President and CEO Jean Yang said in a statement. “This type of program is transformative and impactful, diverting individuals from ER visits and adding capacity to help those who may have co-occurring medical issues and behavioral health issues.”
Until this month, Lowell was the only major city in the commonwealth that had no overnight behavioral health crisis beds.
Embedded within the CBHC model, a CSS program provides person- and family-centered stabilization and support for individuals experiencing a mental health and substance use crisis in a structured, supportive environment and as a therapeutic alternative to a hospital admission.
In January 2023, the outgoing Baker-Polito administration opened 26 new community behavioral health centers as part of its Roadmap for Behavioral Health Reform plan, a statewide initiative for managing the behavioral health crisis in the commonwealth.
The state Executive Office of Health and Human Services, in collaboration with the Middlesex County Restoration Center Commission, announced that Vinfen would deliver the wraparound clinician-based services for people with complex mental health and substance use disorder issues in Middlesex County.
Within its first seven months of operating the CBHC, Vinfen had served more than 1,400 crisis cases at its 24-7 walk-in center.
“We’re one of the largest such organizations in Massachusetts with over 3,000 employees working every day serving people with mental illness,” Yang told the Lowell City Council last September, during which she received a citation on behalf of the organization.
She spoke about her family’s personal experience with mental health challengers.
“Many of you probably have loved ones with mental health challenges, as I do myself,” Yang said at the September meeting. “There are serious challenges that need to be addressed. Fortunately, there are organizations like Vinfen that are bringing solutions to the community every day.”
In addition to the CSS services, Vinfen offers two other critical and up-and-running programs of the mobile crisis intervention and same-day and next-day outpatient services.
The mobile crisis intervention provides a year-round, round-the-clock mobile response in the home, school, workplace or other community settings for youth and adults experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis. Clinicians work with the individual in crisis and, when appropriate, family members or other supportive people in their lives.
Additionally, same-day and next-day outpatient services serve youth ages 4-18, and adults.
Traditional approaches to the mental health crisis have involved a police response, which police, health and community leaders are working to change.
In 2018, the Middlesex County Restoration Center Commission, co-chaired by Middlesex Sheriff Peter Koutoujian and Danna Mauch, started work around a compassionate premise, built on science-based practices, that people suffering from mental illness or substance abuse disorders needed a different approach to the incarceration and hospitalization model that had proved to be both costly and ineffective.
The commission, Koutoujian said, was focused on improving health outcomes for that population, to enhance public safety and save taxpayer dollars. Region 3, an EOHHS zone of 50 communities, including Lowell, had one of the highest emergency department boarding rates in the state.
Boarding refers to the practice of holding patients in emergency departments or hospital hallways, while waiting for a bed to open up, tying up both emergency department beds and police officers in the process.
Mauch, who is president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health, said the current incarceration model of mental health care wasn’t working.
“People were falling through the cracks,” she said during an interview in January about the commission’s work. “They were pretty big cracks because it meant you fell into the hands of the police or the most expensive, high-stakes ER heading to hospitalization.”
With Vinfen’s services and programs, some of those cracks can be filled pending the opening of a standalone Middlesex County Restoration Center facility.
“The work is hard,” Yang told the council in September. “But we have trained professionals who can help, and we count on your support and we have to do this together. I’m proud to be part of Lowell.”
For more information about Vinfen’s community crisis stabilization services, call 978–674–6744 or visit vinfen.org.