A community center designed to provide immediate mental health services and case management held a grand opening Monday afternoon.
Hub 107, at 107 Gibbs Drive, is an initiative of the Oklahoma Department of Health and Substance Abuse Services to provide real-time services to anyone seeking help. Services range from morning coffee or a place to rest to connecting with a mental health provider and job application assistance, said program director Gordon “JR” Holaday-Herrington.
“It’s an expansion of an old model into a more comprehensive connected model, like the service hub, and we’re going to create relationships with other agencies to provide services that we don’t have, so we have this working relationship, Holaday-Herrington said.
Agency spokesman Jeffrey Dismukes said the program is part of a push to see mental health address “the whole person.”
“What they’re doing is a CCBHC (Comprehensive Community Behavioral Health Center), a different model that adds additional types of services,” Dismukes said. “We relate to physical health care needs, dentistry also because it’s about treating people as a whole person.”
Located between a residential neighborhood and the Griffin Memorial Hospital campus, it is called Hub 107 because it will connect people primarily to the various services offered in the community and will also host services at the center such as group therapy, social workers and more. .
Hub Project Manager Eryn Tribble said the program transitions from a clinic placement model to a community center model, an impetus for funding for such programs from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
“We plan to get some MDs (medical doctors) here,” she said. “It’s more than therapy and behavioral therapy. You are not just given medicine and then [we] send you out the door.”
One of those therapies will include recreational therapy, Holaday-Herrington said.
“Most people think it’s just like coloring and markers, but it’s really taking concepts of art, literature and creativity and focusing it into a therapeutic model,” he said.
While the facility is not a day shelter or overnight shelter for the homeless, Herrington expects to see many clients in need of housing and mental health services.
Some have already come in for half an hour to rest on one of the donated plasma beds in the back of the house. Herrington said a similar home in Tulsa offered a small rec room.
“We went up to visit the Denver House in Tulsa, and they said sometimes people come in and don’t rest,” Herrington recalled. “They come in, spend an hour and relax, and then they’re much more apt to manage the case and connect with us.”
Lisa Krieg, the city’s Community Development Block Grant coordinator and grant application writer for federal housing projects, attended the grand opening. She ran the city’s shelter before it closed and regularly saw the need for mental health services among guests staying there.
“This (program) being a lot more informal than going to COCMHC (Central Oklahoma Community Mental Health Center) and making an appointment, that’s a little more attractive and I think it’s going to increase people’s willingness to understand that treatment mental health is not the stigma that many people think it is,” she said.
The home-like setting is less intimidating to potential clients than a mental hospital where some fear they will be hospitalized if they seek help, Herrington said.
“People when they go to that campus are like, ‘Are you going to make me go into medicine, are you going to lock me up?’ We will not be like this at all”, he said. “This will be a place where they can just come in and hang out with us and maybe get something they need. Something they need to avoid being hospitalized.”
The Hub is adjacent to the agency’s PACT program — also a home, which is a community-based intensive treatment center. Clinicians visit patients at home and administer medications and therapeutic services.
“Hub 107 is just a drop in the hub,” Herrington explained. “There you have to be accepted into the program, and then it’s really intensive treatment.”
