Help for Mental Health & Substance Abuse in Western North Carolina

One day this June, Wilkes County Sheriff Chris Shew found 22 patients with mental health and substance abuse problems crowding the local hospital’s emergency department, waiting for treatment, transportation or other help.  For Shew, the pileup required his department to provide a deputy around the clock due to the presence of people under voluntary or involuntary commitment at the Wilkes Regional Medical Center. All too often, patients in need of psychiatric services end up in local hospital emergency departments, because there’s no where else to get services. Image courtesy KOMU News, flickr creative commons. This situation has played out frequently across North Carolina in recent years, but a partial solution is coming within the next year for people in mostly rural Wilkes, Ashe, Alleghany, Watauga and Avery counties. Daymark Enterprises, a service provider contracting with the Smoky Mountain LME-MCO, will open a 16-bed facility-based crisis center in North Wilkesboro.  “Here’s the beauty of these things,” said Billy West, CEO of Daymark, which already operates a 8 a.m.-5 p.m. crisis center in North Wilkesboro. “In our other facilities, the sheriff has to take someone to Broughton [state psychiatric hospital], and when they are released, the sheriff has to come back and get them.”  West said Kannapolis-based Daymark has similar facility-based crisis centers in Monroe, Concord and Statesville and plans one in Lexington in addition to the North Wilkesboro site. In counties without this capacity, law enforcement bears much of the burden of dealing with behavioral health clients when residential and community placements are maxed out.