A Brighter Future for Teenagers’ Behavioral Health in the Sunshine State

By Jay Reeve, Ph.D., President & CEO, Apalachee Center

The Apalachee Center’s approach to mental health in Florida.

Dealing with the crisis in adolescent mental health can be challenging. At Apalachee Center, the largest community mental health center in Florida’s Big Bend region, we have served adolescents’ behavioral health needs for years through a treatment continuum ranging from acute inpatient through intensive in-home to outpatient treatment. For many of our clients and families, there has been a missing step – the need for much more intensive care delivered in a community setting. This is one of many reasons we are so excited to partner with Bradley REACH to bring virtual partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs delivered by world-class clinicians to Florida!

A partnership built to serve as many as we can.

In Leon County, Florida, where our main campus is based (we serve eight counties, over 5,500 sq. miles), just four child and adolescent psychiatrists serve over 54,000 children. Knowing that one in five children experience behavioral health issues, the need for more treating clinicians in this region is evident. That’s where our partnership with Bradley Hospital and its child and adolescent psychiatrists comes in. The Bradley team provides intensive community-based, virtually delivered services to teens in our region and across Florida with behavioral health issues. This team also includes staff who are among the most highly trained child psychiatrists in the country.

Combining telehealth with partial hospitalization and outpatient programs.

Providing care in rural areas makes our task of treating adolescents even more challenging. Apalachee Center has used telehealth extensively since well before the pandemic, recognizing that some of our patients in rural counties had to drive several hours to receive care, and our familiarity with telehealth practice at Apalachee has formed one of the cornerstones of this partnership. Another part was personal: earlier in my career, I spent years at Bradley Hospital working as a child psychologist. I saw first-hand the high-quality, evidence-based treatment that the staff at Bradley provides. I also saw the enormous benefits of Bradley’s unique continuum of care and the role that partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs play. Since coming to Florida nearly two decades ago, I have often considered the enormous positive impact that a program like Bradley’s could have in this region and this state. When Bradley Hospital leadership reached out to me in 2021 to describe the Bradley REACH program, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity for the teenagers we serve to get this care without leaving their homes. Over recent months we have worked closely with the Bradley team to promote understanding of the program. We’ve spoken with school districts, social service agencies, insurance companies, and other healthcare providers to show how life-changing this can be for struggling teenagers.

As our first patients enter the program, we are excited to see what bringing this level of care to Florida can do for families in need and the power of technology to connect our kids with behavioral health providers across the country. In the Sunshine State, Bradley REACH at Apalachee Center is making the future of children’s behavioral health much brighter!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jay Reeve

PRESIDENT & CEO,
APALACHEE CENTER