(urgent music) (urgent music continues) - If you google mental health or youth mental health, the words crisis and epidemic often pop up.

The Centers for Disease Control says recent data shows the US is in a mental health crisis experienced by people of all ages and adolescent mental health continues to worsen.

Well, the Peoria Area has a new youth-focused behavioral health facility.

Mary Sparks Thompson is the president of Trillium Place and Barb Smith is a nurse manager there, and they are here today to talk about the Young Minds Center.

Ladies, thanks for coming in.

- Thank you.

- Appreciate it.

- Thanks.

- Let's talk first of all about Trillium and if you can give us some background on that, and then we'll talk about how that's evolved into the youth aspect.

- So Trillium Place is actually a holding or name for a holding company that incorporates two legacy community mental health centers and our inpatient programs.

So our Young Minds Center is one component of a very large entity, and we have near a hundred inpatient beds.

We have four different levels of care, 22 locations, and 45 different programs.

The Young Minds Center is one of our cornerstone programs, though, that really focuses on youth behavioral healthcare with our inpatient beds and then our outpatient offerings as well.

- [Mark] And this opened last fall.

People might be familiar with the old Heddington Oaks Nursing Home, which is where this facility is.

Let's talk a little bit about the need for this facility and why it was built.

- Prior to operating at the Young Minds facility, we had 23 beds in the Methodist Hospital campus here on the eighth floor.

And as Barb can probably describe better than I, even, that facility was really inadequate to meet the needs of our children.

Our rooms were crowded, the unit was not aesthetically pleasing, we had no options for outdoor activities and it just limited our ability to program.

Plus, beyond those needs really was the mental health crisis and the increasing demand that we were seeing for children to be served.

It breaks our heart when we have to send children away from their home community to receive these types of services, separating them from their families, which is a big part of their treatment.

So really both the need for the services and a growing crisis in our community really was the reason behind looking for a creative new way to meet those needs.

- Barb, it sounds like it's night and day compared to the old place to the new place.

- Yeah, and the hospital, I mean we made the hospital work.

The hospital didn't work for us 'cause they're set up for medical intervention, not psychiatric intervention.

And so it was making a regular hospital unit work for as psychiatry.

Where we go out to our new location in Young Minds that is set up for psychiatry and mainly for young people, for kids.

We have bright, cheerful.

You walk in it and it's beautiful, it's beautiful.

And it gives the message that, yes, our kids are worthwhile, yes, we think they're important, and yes, we think their mental health is important.

And then in fact, that makes them important to us and it makes them important to the community.

So it sends the right message to them and their parents that we value them and we want them to stay around with us.

- Let's talk a little bit about mental health because I mean it's obviously a huge issue, not only with kids, but adults too.

And there's a lot that encompasses that.

People may think depression, suicide.

I mean, there's all kinds of...

It's not really black and white.

So can you kind of tell us about some of the adolescents that you're treating and what kind of issues they may have in terms of their mental health?

- Yeah, and you're right.

I mean, everyone comes in with their own issues.

A lot of the people that we serve, the children that we serve come from a trauma background.

And then of course we all know that it's so difficult to be a teenager nowadays.

I mean, when we were all teenagers, there was bullying and there was those things, but now we have social media bullying, internet bullying.

We've had the pandemic, that interfered with their socialization.

And so everyone kind of retreated to the socialization on the internet, and it's just a hard world right now.

And so a lot of our kids just need that extra help to navigate it and then to be able to build those skills to be able to do that.

And that's what we do there is help them build the skills to navigate this whole new world that they're going to have to live in.

- I do think, if I could chime in here as well, I think the pandemic really accelerated what we were already seeing in our youth.

Of course what happened during the pandemic was that social isolation.

And a lot of what we see in our children is just a less ability to really interact in positive ways in social settings, just really a regression in social skills development.

And I think we just saw more anxiety and depression because of that.

Really, there's a lot of informal group therapy, so to speak, that occurs when you're interacting with your peers in a natural setting.

And when you don't have access to that and it's all through some kind of device, it really does impair or impact the quality of that interaction.

So I do think that was a large thing.

And then I also believe that the pandemic affected people emotionally.

There was a lot of stress in the world, if you lost a loved one, if you lost social rituals.

A lot of the things that our children look forward to, our adolescents look forward to, proms, homecomings, graduations, all of those things were disrupted.

And so those are stabilizing for children and adolescents and a lot of that structure was removed during that time.

And I do think there's that lingering effect.

I think on the positive side, I think what COVID did was really normalize the conversation around emotional distress because everyone experienced it in some way, shape or form.

Some people were depressed, some people were anxious, some people had anger.

There was just the normal range of human emotion kind of intensified.

So I think in some ways it normalized that conversation and helped with the stigma because people started talking.

I'm struggling, I'm home, I'm alone.

I don't like it.

I'm angry that I have to wear a mask or get a vaccination.

Whatever the response was, it really was a platform to really discuss and start dealing with what does it mean to have good mental health?

What does it mean to be not depressed and what does it mean to manage your anxiety well?

All of those things really were an outgrowth of that time.

- Barb, you mentioned some of these kids have been around trauma.

What kind of traumas are we talking about?

- Well, that's any of it.

There's the abuse issues.

There is just the bullying.

We have kids who come in who have a disrupted family that they come.

We have DCFS children who come in, they're minors in care and foster placements.

You know, there's physical abuse and mental abuse and all of those kind of things that they had trauma from, whether they come from parents who have addiction issues and they've had to not have food on the table.

It's things that we would think they would.

They don't have electricity in their homes.

They don't have clean clothes even to wear to school if they could go.

Just those things that makes it very difficult for them to even survive in the world.

- Some kids have therapy and that helps.

Some kids are medicated.

Some kids are medicated and have therapy.

Help me understand what Trillium does in terms of is a stop or being treated at Trillium something that is after maybe the medicine and the talking doesn't work?

- Those are great questions.

So a lot of times for mental health in general, but for children as well, if a child starts having mental health issues, a lot of times the first contact to address that concern would be a family doctor.

And a lot of family doctors in the area, pediatricians are willing to prescribe some psychoactive medications up to a point.

If those medications and that intervention does not help, then that's typically when people will seek help from us.

And there's several different entrances to our system of care.

Typically and ideally, we'd like to see people start with whoever they can get into the soonest to address the mental health issue.

We have fellowship-trained child adolescent psychiatrists at Young Minds who are very skilled, and they can help with medications to manage symptoms.

We also have psychotherapy which in combination works the best.

Over time research has shown that psychotherapy, so that's talking therapy where you're working with a counselor to uncover issues, develop coping skills, work with the family as a whole, in combination with medication treatment to help treat the symptoms.

So sometimes someone's so anxious that they have a hard time engaging in therapy or other types of support.

So the medication can then address the symptoms and create a situation where the child and the family can participate in treatment.

One important element that's unique to child and adolescent psychiatry is having the family involvement.

So you're working with the family, helping the parents know how to cope with behaviors as they arise, helping to educate them about the treatment for their child and then when to assess better care.

So if medication and psychotherapy, one or the two in combination is not working and the child is still not able to function well at school or at home, then we look at do they need to be hospitalized for care?

We try to, we want to be there when a child needs that level of care, but we also want to avoid that if possible for a child because of the disruption that can occur in a family's life with a hospitalization.

So typically, the school or the parents identify an issue, reach out to their family medical provider, and then can be referred to care with us for that specialized treatment if that treatment is not working.

Of course, they can enter into the system with us to receive that psychotherapy and psychiatric care immediately, but typically most people work with their family doctors, honestly.

And a lot of family doctors and pediatricians do have some ability to provide that treatment in their setting.

- Sure.

I was going to ask you about the whole referral process.

So typically, a child and adolescent would go to the general family practitioner.

And then they kind of take it from there and refer if they need to.

- Correct.

Yes.

Our outpatient clinic can take calls and referrals.

We also have an assessment and referral center at Young Minds that operates, that we can be there for those more urgent behavioral issues.

We are working on recruiting additional psychiatrists and really focusing on building up our ability to treat both on the inpatient setting and the outpatient setting.

And so we hope to, our goal would be that if someone calls us for care, we can get them in as soon as possible.

So we're setting goals and work towards making our clinic run as efficiently as possible so we can meet that need.

And really trying to meet that child and family where they are and provide that service, whether that's presenting at our assessment center, whether that's calling the clinic that we get them in quickly, or whether that's if they need inpatient care at Young Minds that we can quickly assess and get them into care.

That's one of the biggest challenges we've had is wait lists for, and this is across the country and it's not unique to Peoria.

But one of the things we're obsessed with at Trillium is reducing wait lists, making that service available.

There's no wrong door to come to through our services.

So that's really something that we're really making strides in and really quite frankly obsessed with every day in our work.

- When Mary was talking about that, we know there is a healthcare nursing crisis.

We hear that every day.

There is also a mental health worker crisis from psychiatry.

The psychiatrists, child and adolescent psychiatrists are a rare thing and they're difficult to get.

We've got wonderful ones right now.

We're still recruiting those.

Social workers, psychiatric nurses, all of those people.

There's a shortage.

- What do you attribute that to?

- I don't know.

Because it's a difficult work.

We found there was a shortage of nurses during the pandemic.

Some of us knew that before the pandemic that there was a shortage, but it's only gotten worse.

It's been a really hard time.

A lot of nurses have left and so have a lot of mental health workers because it's a hard job, but a rewarding one when we do that.

Like I've been doing it my whole entire career, but it's hard.

And so we've got to figure out how we take care of the caregivers as well.

And I think that's one of the things that we look at at Trillium, at Young Minds, that we make sure that we're also taking care of our caregivers.

- We've talked about trauma, we've talked about bullying.

What are some of the other things that kids are facing these days that can cause mental health issues?

- Depression and anxiety are our two drivers.

I think anxiety really has become more of an issue more than I've seen.

I think Barb and I would agree.

There's always been a little bit of that with children, but I do attribute a lot of that to our phone usage.

I mean, children are on their phones, we see it in adults too.

On the phone doomscrolling and interacting in that way just really creates anxiety.

I think also there's a lot of information overload.

There's always something you can be looking at.

There's always something you can be learning about.

There's always something you can be reacting to online and otherwise.

And I think that's really driving a lot of the anxiety, and then depression.

There's just a lot of depression I think both in adults and children.

I think there's some sense of hopelessness in some certain areas of our society that persist.

The good news is both of those disorders are highly treatable and with good care have really good outcomes for treatment.

- Some people think that with phones and everything that mental health issues with adolescents is something new.

And I know when we were kids we didn't have phones, but we had bullying, we had things like that.

I mean, do you think these mental health issues have gotten worse or have they just always been around and back in our days people didn't pay that much attention to it?

- Well, there was a bigger stigma.

I think the stigma has gotten better, that we're working to overcome it.

It's not gone, but we're working to.

And you know, like I said, I've been doing child and adolescent.

I started doing child and adolescent back in 1990, and there was kids who were depressed in that and who were anxious.

And is it worse?

I don't know, I don't know if it's worse or are we recognizing it and treating it and saying it's okay, not just to pull yourself up from your bootstraps, you know?

- Yeah.

- That it's a real illness just as if they had broken a bone and we're getting them treatment.

So I'm thinking that that's some of it.

That we're not just letting them survive, we're wanting them to thrive.

And so we're going to recognize it and get them the help that they need.

- I think it's kind of a both/and question.

I mean, I think there's a little bit of an increase in just the occurrence and the acuity.

But I do think the hopeful thing is people are talking about it more.

I love to listen to podcasts and this has been before the pandemic even, but there was one of the contributors on the podcast saying, "Yeah, I have anxiety and I take my medication.

I go to a therapist."

Well, back in the day, you would never have had someone in a public communications setting saying, yeah, I've got anxiety and this is what I do to take care of it.

And normalizing that conversation I think has increased awareness.

And I think our children, interesting thing to me is our children are demanding that of us as adults.

We are struggling.

We want these services, we want the help.

So I think that's been a trend that's really hopeful to me because kids are asking for the service.

They want to understand how they can manage their mental health.

I see that as a real positive thing.

- Well, and I think we also need to give the parents credit.

- Yes, absolutely.

- The parents are now not...

They are making sure their kids get the treatment that they need.

And I think that we talk about the millenniums or whatever they're called and those kind of things.

But they want to make sure that their children are taken care of and their mental health is there, and they're willing to break the stigma and bring their child in for care.

So I think that we need to recognize the parents that are bringing their kids to treatment.

- Yeah, it's not easy.

I know the advice my dad gave to me when I was younger, I would never give to my kids.

(Mary and Barb laughing) Let's talk a little bit about if a parent, grandparent's watching this and says, "You know, my teenager has been acting differently."

What are some signs, you know, because all teenagers can get moody, but what are some signs that parents should look for in terms of, well, this may be a bad day or this may be something a lot worse?

- So I'll start with that and let Barb supplement my comments.

But what you're looking for is a change from their typical behavior that sustains itself over a period of, we generally say around two weeks or more if you're seeing a significant change in behavior.

So in children it shows up in a lot of different ways.

Sometimes for our younger kiddos, it'll be what we call psychosomatic.

So they will have physical complaints, like tummy aches is a common one and wanting to be home from school.

Adolescents you may see acting out in various ways, so disruptive in school, maybe engaging in some substance abuse.

But if those patterns persist and are not corrected, then that's when you should be talking with your healthcare provider and starting that conversation with your child.

What we look for is impairment in functioning.

So are they able to get to school?

Are they able to do their work?

Are they able to engage in their hobbies?

And then how long that impairment lasts to kind of guide people's thinking.

A lot of times when you have a child that's having a change in their behavior, their health, I know for me it's very hard to be objective because you immediately want to offer help.

And of course we want to encourage that, but I think if you can think about it in an objective way, you should be observing for behavior, kind of noticing when those changes occur and the length of time that it sustains.

- Well, the other thing is that ask them.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Because you're not going to put ideas in their head if you ask them.

A lot of times we try to guess.

And a lot of times our kids will just tell us if we ask them, are you feeling depressed?

Are you having struggles?

Are you suicidal?

If you ask them if they think about suicide, you're not going to put that thought in their head if they're not already thinking that.

But I think that directly asking them, having already formed that kind of relationship with your child to make that normalized conversation.

What's going on at school?

Why are you not wanting to go?

Is there something happening there?

I mean, we can observe and I think we should because they may not realize that they've had a change.

And you say, "Well, you're not calling Susie anymore.

Is there something wrong with that?"

Or you don't seem to want to hang with your friends?

Is there a problem there?

I think that we just flat out ask them as well.

And most of the time the kids are pretty honest about what's going on with them.

- When it comes to interacting with teachers, counselors at school, if you suspect there's something going on with your child, is that a good route to go to have them talk to their teachers and counselors and then you talk to them and kind of team up?

- That's absolutely, I mean they're your partners in your child's wellbeing.

And I'm thinking now of a conversation.

I've had a neighbor who is a track coach, and my son was in track.

And we were talking about this issue and he said, "Mary, I get calls every week about a child who's suffering some kind of mental health issue or I see it and I'm interacting with it."

And that's always kind of stayed in my mind because I knew that to be true, been hearing that from my friend and neighbor across the street of the impact that on him.

And the amount of attention that's being placed on supporting our children is really exemplary.

We've got great resources in our schools, but they're really your partners in understanding how your child's doing in that environment for sure.

And they'll be the ones that see those changes occurring and may have more observation time actually sometimes than parents just because of the way our lives are these days.

- Right, and that's what I was going to say.

Our kids spend a lot of time at school, and so the teachers, the counselors can really help with those kind of things.

And to make sure that you have a good relationship with your school, the parents have a good relationship with the school.

So that you can call up a teacher or you can call up the counselor and say, "I'm seeing this change, are you?

Is there something going on there?"

Because those teachers and counselors, they know what's happening in all different kinds of relationships with other students.

So they hear that, what's going on.

- Anything else before we go that you'd like folks to know about the center that you've opened, the youth-focused behavioral health facility?

- I would say that we're so proud of the new facility.

It's been a benefit to all the citizens of Peoria County.

To take a nursing home that was not operating and create a facility specifically designed for children is amazing.

We put so much thought into the design, the use of color, the use of the environment.

We're just really, really proud of it, and we're glad to be able to extend our reach to support more children.

And we also owe a debt of gratitude to the citizens of Peoria County for all the support that we've had.

Everything from philanthropy, people have been so supportive.

It makes me feel a little emotional because there's been not one person that I've heard say not in my backyard and we don't want this.

It's been anything but how can we help?

We're so excited and we're cheering for you.

So thank you for the opportunity to express that.

- How can people find out more about the facility?

- We have our website, trilliumplace.org, and that gives the information about our child and youth program and also our full continuum of care for adults and seniors as well.

- All right, Barb Smith, nurse manager, and Mary Sparks Thompson, the president of Trillium Place.

Thanks for coming on and thanks for providing this service to our kids.

- Happy to do it.

Thank you.

- Thanks friend for having us.

- And thank you for joining us.

We appreciate it.

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