Perry Behavioral Health Choices offers panorama of local services

In recent years, the organization has been awarded many capital grants, helping it contribute to the many new facilities and services available in New Lexington.

Some of the success in getting grant funding is due to Theressa Kane, executive director of PBHC. Kane has been with PBHC for about 35 years, starting while she was still in college. During her 10 years as director, the company has expanded significantly. PBHC owns more than a dozen buildings they have renovated in the community.

The acquisition of the buildings and addition of programs have been gradual; a process Kane describes getting “one after the other, one at a time… We get a project or get an idea, and then we figure things out, and then we decide to move forward. The first thing I do is tap the state and say, ‘Do you have any defaults?’ Then negotiate from there.”

On how they’ve gotten so many capital grants, Kane explained that “they take requests all the time.” PBHC has also been able to take advantage of additional funding from other programs that have “defaulted,” meaning they received grant funds but didn’t use them. “That’s been, for me, the secret success to us getting capital grants,” Kane said. “I didn’t ask for an allocation. I asked for leftovers. Apparently, you do pretty well that way.”

Kane is also proud that PBHC is one of the very few places in Ohio that offers “a full continuum of care under one company.” PBHC offers a wide range of services, tailored to individual treatment needs. Below are profiles of each building and the services it offers.

Outpatient Services

Outpatient Services is for anyone with behavioral health disorders who wants to receive treatment. It offers low-intensity and intensive outpatient services, as well as medication-assisted treatment. It also takes walk-ins, from Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Information on Outpatient Services can be found at perrybhc.org/outpatient/.

Stanton Villa Treatment Center

Stanton Villa is one of PBHC’s residential spaces, serving adult women. Treatment and stay can be 30-45 days, and individual rooms are provided instead of dorms. In addition to the treatment program, it offers educational classes, an art studio, and more.

In the way of direct services, Stanton Villa provides cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and other self-help groups, according to PBHC’s website. Priority for admission is given to women with dependent children, pregnant women, and IV drug users.

Stanton Villa is named after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an American social activist who helped lead the women’s rights movement.

Evolution

Evolution is another residential space, this one for men, with a 10-bed capacity. The building has offices, dorms, laundry rooms, restrooms, a kitchen, healthcare rooms, and more. “Men will come into this program, and they live here, average length of stay is about six weeks,” Kane said. “They go into classes; they have therapy… they have fitness; they do all kinds of things just so they get back on track.”

Before becoming home to Evolution, part of the building was McBee’s Jewelry, and another part was a Hallmark store. The previous owners, Dan & Monica Saunders, sold the building and closed the business as a part of their retirement, at which point PCHB bought the building with capital funds.

ClearView

ClearView is a “withdrawal management program.” This is in contrast to a detox center; while the latter is focused on medical stabilization, ClearView also provides therapy. According to the PBHC website, ClearView “assists individuals who desire abstinence and, or recovery from substance abuse disorders through a safe, medically-monitored withdrawal management program with the use of medications to ease the stress of physical withdrawal, as a well as placement in the appropriate level of aftercare.”

Services provided include medication-assisted therapy, medically monitored withdrawal management, cognitive behavioral therapy, and motivational interviewing. Among other features, the facility has private suites, up to 15 bathrooms, a kitchen, and two shower rooms.

When the project was started, ClearView was a $1.5 million project. However, PBHC covered it all from a capital grant, a startup grant, and support from the community.

Youth & Family

This program is one that Kane is especially proud of because it focuses on youth in a field, substance abuse disorders, in which it’s generally easier to find services aimed at adults. Youth & Family Services provides many treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy, family therapy, motivational interviewing, integrative family and systems treatment (IFAST), and more.

An interesting detail about IFAST at Youth & Family Services is that it helps conduct research through its evidence-based program. Kane noted that the same program is also done in Hong Kong, and PBHC gets visits from Hong Kong representatives.

The facility features many different offices and a monitored area designed to simulate a living environment for parents and their children, to help parents earn custody of their children. The building also has showers for the kids who don’t have running water at home.

Those at the Youth & Family facility strive to make it as friendly as possible for children. For example, the workers can bring in their dogs to help entertain the kids.

Activity Center

Described by Kane as a “community center,” the PBHC Activity Center is designed to host events or gatherings in New Lexington. The building features offices and giant meeting spaces available for use. Upstairs is a space for the PBHC art program. There is also a fitness studio in the back of the building.

The center will host its first-ever blood drive on July 8, from noon through 6 p.m. You can find all the facility’s upcoming events on their Facebook page at facebook.com/perrybhc.

Miscellaneous

PBHC also runs a used bookstore called “Twice Turned,” initially designed to provide employment for women at Stanton Villa to get something on their resumes.

While initially it employed only women workers, men now work there too. The individuals who work there get experience in customer service, job etiquette, and other skills they need to get started in the workforce. They take donations of books and are open every Monday through Friday, 9-11 a.m. They are located at 201 North Main St. in New Lexington.

Another service in the same building, upstairs from “Twice Turned,” is adjunct therapy services. Adjunct offers options that help clients “solidify their recovery,” as Kane says. It provides activities for people in recovery, such as art, yoga, fitness, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, drumming, and more. It’s all meant to help discover what they’re passionate about, and what they can focus on instead of their compulsions.

Another residential area offered by PBHC is the Sobriety Village for women. It offers four large bedrooms, two bathrooms, and two apartments. This program is very similar to Stanton Villa and its services.

Yet another facility offering a different service is the Carriage House Peer Center, which Kane calls “her favorite.” The Carriage House is a building for peers in recovery to help each other through the complex process. Inside the building, which serves as a rehabilitation center, are many cozy furnishings and amenities for people in recovery to enjoy, such as cable TV, a fireplace, a computer room, etc. “They’ll host Superbowl parties and things like that,” Kane described. “They did March Madness down here, but again, it’s a safe space for people to hang out and not be around people that are using.”

Sharing some history for this building, Kane said, “When I first started in the field, they didn’t allow people (working in the field) to be in recovery. It was frowned upon to bring them back, and let them work, because, (people would say), ‘They’re drug addicts, you can’t trust them.’ Which is crazy, because if you don’t believe in rehabilitation, then why do you do this? It was counterproductive thinking to what we were actually doing, so I’m very proud to say we have a peer center that’s run by people that are in recovery.” The people that work at Carriage House are great people, with “many stories to share.”

Another building that even PBHC staff use is their Daycare Center, which is strictly for clients or staff. The building is licensed by Perry County Job & Family Services.

Nearby there is another facility called Eclipse, a brick building that serves as a recovery house for up to six men and is a part of Evolution. Right next door, separate from the building, is the PBHC clinic, which offers medication-assisted treatment for clients.

Two more buildings PBHC owns are near the Perry County Fair Grounds. One is their Training Center, and the other is the Shop. The Training Center offers 10 beds for men and collaborates with Perry County Job and Family Services to help men find trades or jobs.

The building was funded initially from two capital grants. Regarding its men-only status, Kane explained that it includes a focus on helping men gain or regain custody of their children, in which they can sometimes face more difficulties than women. The average length of stay, according to Kane, is about a year to a year and a half.

The other building, the PBHC Shop, collects donations of household goods. Its purpose is to provide needed items for people who finally get out of treatment, making it easier for them to get back out on their own. It’s set up as a store, and they’ll take people’s lists of things they need, giving them what they can to help get them on the right track.

PBHC also has administrative offices, housed in once run-down buildings that PBHC bought and renovated. Their leadership, finance, and billing teams all find homes there. “We’ve grown so much we’ve expanded into the other buildings, so we’ve run out of space everywhere,” Kane remarked.

As for the future of PBHC, they own the old gas station by ClearView, which according to Kane, will eventually be a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) building. While not widely available, TMS has been studied for decades and is now coming to New Lexington as a service through PBHC.

TMS is a method used for treating fixing trauma and damage to the brain, using magnetic stimulation. Some potential benefits are better sleep, focus, cognition, self-control, and mood. Kane said patients who have undergone the treatment include athletes, veterans, and more. She hopes it will be helpful for people with addiction, based on the approach of fixing negative behaviors in the brain. Kane said this was her “ultimate goal” with this project.

While PBHC doesn’t have a capital grant for this facility, it does hve a legislative allocation, which is essentially money set aside for projects by state legislators.

This facility would be one of a handful of its kind in Ohio, another one being at The Ohio State University. PBHC currently has extra funding from the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction to offer the service to veterans and first responders. Kane is hopeful the location will be open by the end of this summer.

According to Kane, the TMS building serves as PBHC’s most recent project and will likely be the last of their expansions for a while.