Johnson County opens a facility for kids in mental health crises

1. The beds are for short-term use. The goal is to cool kids off and prevent incidents from escalating.
2. Youth depression is on the rise, yet Kansas has a limited number of crisis stabilization beds.
3. The new facility could serve as a blueprint for other counties

Pulling children out of a mental health crisis is tricky.

Some have just run away from home while others are coming off a violent attack on a sibling or parent. They’re thinking impulsively, acting desperately and sometimes doing irrational things to change their situations.

That can land them at the Johnson County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center. Staff there now need to determine if the child’s crime — if there was one — warrants detention, if a mental health crisis demands hospitalization or if they are safe to return home. But children fall into a gray area that makes it difficult to see what’s best.

One Johnson County mother told county officials her son didn’t have the right kind of facility to go to. The child ended up in a hospital, which was far too institutionalized. The youth jail was not appropriate, either.

Now comes another option.

A new Johnson County facility is opening with promises of a more sympathetic approach to helping kids in crisis. It has video games, basketball courts and weekly yoga. It offers couches and a TV — an improvement from the steel bars or hospital gowns at other locations.

And it can’t come soon enough.

“We have gotten some inquiries like, ‘Hey, are you guys open yet? Because I have a kid already who I think would be a good fit,’” said Molly Graves, program manager at Johnson County’s Youth Crisis Stabilization Center. “That’s come from the corrections side, from law enforcement (and) even our own community mental health.”

The center will only take Johnson County kids. But the new facility could serve as a blueprint for other counties to copy.

Johnson County officials said other facilities are asking how the program can be brought to other parts of Kansas. The apparent success of the Johnson County facility doesn’t just mean Johnson County kids get help, but it could mean a more complete mental health system for the state.

Kansas, in all its 105 counties, only has six facilities that offer youth crisis stabilization beds. And the Johnson County center would do things slightly differently than the rest.

“We just haven’t really run into another facility in the state that is trying to kind of do those all-encompassing services like we’re hoping to do,” Graves said.

Johnson County will have 11 crisis beds that serve kids between 10 and 17 years old .

Children come in angry, riled up or on edge. The hope is that they leave calmer and with a case plan that will connect them to other services. Ideally, that will take three to five days.

Kevin Kufeldt, director of addiction and residential services at Johnson County Mental Health, said that a short break gives parent and child space. The parents get a night of sleep and know the kids are safe. By the next day, clinical staff help lay out ground rules for the kids to return home safely.

Daily routines at the facility would include setting goals, group motivation and teaching self care. The children can meet with an anger management facilitator and licensed clinicians.

“This will give a parent some space to recalibrate (so) cooler heads will prevail,” Kufeldt said.

The center is staffed 24/7 and locks from the outside but not the inside. Nobody can enter the facility without permission but children are not stuck inside.

“It’s very clear that this is not a punishment,” Graves said. “It’s not corrections, it’s not anything like that.”

Kids who commit serious crimes end up in detention. Youth with intense suicidal thoughts are better suited for an inpatient facility.

Carl Chambless, Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center supervisor of Johnson County, said higher-need children require stabilization at more secure facilities. That doesn’t mean they can’t get crisis stabilization beds, but those beds are better for children below that high-needs threshold.

He said that’s “a nice percentage of our youth” who could qualify.

The program will have a soft launch whenever state regulators give it the final approval. That means the Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center will be the only way kids are referred to the facility. Chambless is already training staff how to identify kids who fit the criteria, and when in doubt, he said, JIAC employees should ask staff in the crisis unit.

County officials hope the facility will eventually take children from wherever in the county — including parents who show up to the facility unannounced.

Kimberly O’Connor-Soule is the senior inpatient officer for Kansas City metro-based Camber Children’s Mental Health. Camber has both short- and long-term inpatient facilities that also take kids in crisis.

O’Connor-Soule said the hospital saw just under 4,800 kids in the last fiscal year — a historic number of patients.

About 38% of Kansas high schoolers were sad or hopeless for two weeks or longer in 2021, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention said. That number was just under 22% in 2011.

O’Connor-Soule said short-term crisis stabilization facilities are important because juvenile brains aren’t fully developed. “They’re impulsive just by biological age” and struggle to see how things will improve in the future, she said.

Kansas has other youth crisis beds, but Kufeldt said this program is slightly different. For starters, the center doesn’t have scheduled appointments like other locations might.

He said he hasn’t talked to lawmakers about amending state law to better define this facility, but the state is aware of the program’s distinctions.

Graves, the program director, said working with youth in crisis is taxing, but being on the cutting edge of the solution is worth it.

“It is always a little bit fun,” she said, “to blaze a trail.”

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