In the first three months of 2015, no fewer than 1,111 county residents — deemed so mentally ill they posed a threat to themselves or to others — were shipped to the Aurora Vista del Mar facility in Ventura County because all of Santa Barbara’s in-patient beds were full. For the same period the previous year, the number of patients was 1,219. Combined, that’s nearly three times more than the number of psychiatric patients whom county mental-health workers could shoehorn into Santa Barbara’s chronically bed-deficient Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF).
Given that each bed-night at Vista del Mar costs the county’s Department of Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Services (ADMHS) $850, it’s little wonder the county has been spending $7 million a year to treat Santa Barbara’s mentally ill out of county and that the department has been running over its allotted budget. With this context in mind, the euphoric reception with which three county supervisors and a host of high-ranking mental-health administrators greeted last week’s grand opening of a small, short-term crisis-intervention facility made sense.
“This is the most exciting day, I believe, for the county,” declared Supervisor Janet Wolf, in whose district the new Crisis Stabilization Unit (CSU) is located. “It is critical.” The idea is that the CSU — located at the county’s mental- health campus off Calle Real — will provide a temporary cooling-off space for individuals who find themselves in severe mental-health- meltdown mode. On hand will be a team of psychiatric nurses, peer counselors, and social workers, as well as a psychiatrist on call 24 hours a day.