A mental health facility in Minnesota closed the doors of its six locations in the state for good on Monday, but patients of Riverwood Centers say they were only given one week’s notice that their mental health provider would be closing.
Riverwood Centers, one of the largest mental health providers in the state, served about 3,000 clients in five counties in east-central Minnesota. Their services included outpatient treatment, adult and children’s mental health rehabilitative programs, adult day treatment, community support services, children’s and adult mobile mental health crisis services and adult residential crisis stabilization services.
Rochelle Domino, a patient of Riverwood Centers’ Pine City, Minn., location, who began routinely going to the center for counseling after she lost her job last year, said the only notice she received was an email.
“They just cut us off — no bumper,” she said.
Now Domino and other patients want answers to questions like where their health records are being sent, why the center is shutting down and if they will be able to see their counselors again.
Bruce Echelberry, another Riverwood client who is manic depressive, said he didn’t know how to describe how he felt about the sudden closure.
“Astounded? Angry? They decided that money was bigger than our mental health,” said Echelberry.
Echelberry was referring to Riverwood’s Executive Director Kevin Wojahn’s reasoning that the clinic had to close due to financial factors largely stemming from cuts to county funding.
Wojahn told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that public subsidies have not increased for the facility in the past 15 years and clients were receiving smaller payments from their private insurance providers. Those two financial factors, plus Mille Lacs County’s decision to not sign another contract with the center, “was the death knell,” Wojahn said.
“This is a true tragedy for our region,” he said.
According to local media reports, the Minnesota Department of Human Services responded to the sudden closure by asking other state mental health agencies to step in and help the patients of Riverwood Centers. In doing so, it hopes to reduce the impact of the sting on the state’s already overstressed psychiatric care programs.
A regional mental health agency has also been tasked with answering Riverwood’s emergency phone line for those who are feeling suicidal or having a mental health crisis.
“We’re so tight in [psychiatric] beds that any change in the delivery system impacts the whole system,” said Assistant Human Services Commissioner David Hartford. “The agencies need to reorganize to get people the care they need.”
The closure of the Riverwood Centers came about one month after the state Legislature released a report that found that hundreds of mentally ill patients were being admitted in and out of hospital emergency rooms and county jails due to a lack of psychiatric beds and mental health professionals in the state, particularly in rural counties like those that Riverwood served.
Mary Fehring, a member of the mental health advisory council in Mille Lacs County, said she and others are concerned about how this closure will affect the patients.
“It’s hard enough for these people to reach out and get help, and now we’ve just created another barrier,” she said. “It’s scary.”
Echelberry agreed, saying he knew that if he failed to show up for a therapy session he would get a phone call asking him if he was alright.
“Sometimes I was in such bad shape that I couldn’t even talk a straight sentence,” he said. “I would get very suicidal. They were always there to help me through.”
Bruce Messelt, administrator for Chisago County, said an added challenge the counties are dealing with is the fact that Riverwood was an outside provider, meaning the county doesn’t have access to private client information and therefore can’t contact clients.
“It’s not like a nuclear concern, where everything will collapse,” Messelt said. “But we are expecting there will be a lot of people who may be disrupted by this.”