By Cris Villalonga-Vivoni
The Hour
STAMFORD, Conn. — As part of an effort to expand its services, Stamford Health is opening its first adult outpatient behavioral health office to offer a myriad of mental health programs and services.
The new program, based out of the Tully Health Center off Strawberry Hill Court, aims to provide adults age 18 or older who live in lower Fairfield County access to behavioral services, such as psychiatric evaluations, medication management and individual or group therapy. It comes after a 2022 Stamford Health community needs assessment study that identified behavioral health — which encompasses both mental and substance use disorders — as a top concern among Stamford and Darien residents.
“For far too long, the many patients seen in our primary care offices suffering with mental illness were left with the harrowing task of finding their own outpatient mental health care. Thankfully, those days are now over,” said Dr. Raviv Berlin, Stamford Health Chair of Psychiatry.
Stamford Health is a nonprofit independent healthcare system in lower Fairfield County. According to the needs assessment study conducted between 2021 and 2022, most of its patients reside in either Stamford or Darien.
Berlin said there is an ongoing mental health crisis both nationally and locally with increasing rates of anxiety, depression and suicide. Although behavioral health issues have long been present, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly exacerbated conditions by prompting social isolation during quarantine periods and limiting access to care among children and adults, experts have said.
Emergency responders in both towns said they’ve seen an uptick in emotional disturbance-related calls. The percentage of people in both municipalities who reported feeling down or depressed rose during that time, the study showed, while the number of people using substances like alcohol and cannabis as a form of self-treatment increased.
School administrators in Darien and Stamford reported seeing more aggressive behaviors among young students, like kicking and biting classmates, according to the study. The area also saw several deaths by suicide, some of them students, during the period the needs assessment was conducted.
As the number of people needing services rose, the report found there was insufficient behavioral health services, creating access barriers across all acuity levels and all age groups. The services that are available have limited space and long waiting times, which is particularly hard for patients in crisis who need higher levels of care immediately, the needs assessment concluded.
The new office and behavioral program with Stamford Health is part of the multiyear plan to expand its services. Inpatient services now include access to psychiatrists, social workers, registered nurses, art therapists, case managers and other behavioral health and social supports, according to the Stamford Health website. For higher levels of care, Stamford Health refers to partial hospitalizations or other outpatient treatment programs.
In 2021, Stamford Health developed a pilot to offer co-location of primary health care and behavioral health providers at clinics in Stamford and Greenwich in collaboration with Liberation Programs, Inc., a private, nonprofit substance abuse prevention and treatment organization serving Fairfield County. The new office space will be their latest step towards further expansions, however.
The new outpatient health office accepts appointments only by referral from Stamford Health medical providers. Berlin said Stamford Health medical providers and clinicians can treat conditions such as anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, bipolar disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, personality disorders, trauma and stressor-related disorders, and schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.
Berlin said they will be ramping up services as we continue to grow and recruit additional mental health clinicians. Over the next five years, Berlin said Stamford Health hopes to expand and modernize the acute care psychiatric services by creating new inpatient units, a partial hospitalization program, interventional psychiatric services and a youth-in-crisis program. He said the health system expects the outpatient clinic to have approximately 30,000 behavioral health visits per year over the next several years.
“We expect to quickly outgrow our current outpatient clinic space at the Tully Health Center and eventually move to a new location with twice as many offices and twice as many clinicians. We also expect to increase the number of telehealth visits to meet the preferences of our patients,” Berlin said.
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