(Spencer)– Officials with Seasons Center for Behavioral Health say they’re seeing an increased demand for their services as the COVID-19 crisis continues. CEO/President Kim Scorza says one of those is their internal food bank. Scorza says they were recently awarded a $10,000 grant from Delta Dental to assist with those operations…
“We currently operate a food bank that we have clients, several families that need services, over 30 families a month, that come in and get some food bank supplies and goods, and one of the things we know is that food insecurity has always been an issue in our area and so we applied for funding to be able to help to continue to do that. And so we are using the funds to be able to get our staff to go out and do basically drop off food packages and care packages on the door steps of clients in need to make sure they have the supplies and resources that they need during this time.”
Scorza says they’re also seeing a big increase in demand for psychiatric services, saying they’ve transitioned to telehealth therapy…
“We transitioned pretty much all of our employees to home based and we’re doing teletherapy and telepsychiatry. We’re also talking to people over the phone. Once we got approval from the state to be able to bill for those services, we made that transition that day. We’d been taking steps over the last probably three and-a-half weeks when we saw the potential of this coming and, yeah, it’s working really well so far. Even some of the people who initially thought that they wouldn’t necessarily like telehealth are appreciative. And so our staff just really pulled together. They’re doing an excellent job in caring for people. We still have our mobile crisis team that is going out. Our crisis calls have increased, we’ve noticed that. And so if we need to deploy people to be on site we can still do that and we are doing that.”
Scorza adds this is especially a troubling time for those suffering from anxiety…
“If you struggle with coping strategies to begin with like how to cope with just kind of day-to-day life and you know, the things that come up, so then you add something like this where it’s a national and a global issue and it causes people, their anxiety, to increase. It also, we’ve been seeing, is we’ve been seeing an increase in abuse of substances. We’re seeing more of our clients start to relapse already this last week in particular. So we want to make sure people know that to call our 800 number and, you know, if you’re in a crisis you hit eight and you can go ahead and get a crisis worker and get people sent out should we have to do that. We are anticipating kind of a lull. Typically what happens in crisis situations is there will be a lull and then all of a sudden you’ll see a spike. And so we’re anticipating that there’s going to be a spike in the number of and volumes of calls. We’re starting to slowly see that, but we are watching for people for substance abuse relapse; we’re looking at potentially a higher number of cases of child abuse, and reports of child abuse kind of after, when we’re on the back side of this, as well as we’re looking at suicide and rape in people who are really, really struggling. So those are three kind of big areas that we’re really, really keying and focusing on.”
The number for the crisis line is 844-345-4569. Scorza says the line is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
She adds the month of April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month.
