<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/strawberry-hill-mental-health-kansas-city/>
"In the fall of 2019, Lauren Lucht was walking to the ribbon-cutting ceremony
of the new Strawberry Hill mental and behavioral health center in Kansas City,
Kansas, when a passing driver rolled down his window. “He started honking and
then screamed, ‘Thank you for bringing the grocery store!’” she remembers with
a laugh.
It’s not every day that Lucht, a mental health care professional, gets thanked
for providing a new local food shop. But the project she shepherded into
existence just over two years ago isn’t typical, either. As the executive
director of mental and behavioral health for the University of Kansas Health
System, Lucht oversaw the opening of the Strawberry Hill center, and has since
witnessed the gradual reawakening of the long-neglected surrounding
neighborhood.
The decision to locate the center in this particular spot was intentional. “It
would have been less expensive to purchase land in a more rural area and build
a psychiatric hospital there,” Lucht says, “but the partnership with the
community was really the driving force here.”
This approach represents an emerging school of thought in mental health
facility design. Until recently, many such facilities purposefully removed
their patients from public life, sending them out into serene rural
environments, or walling them off in fortress-like psychiatric hospitals. This
arrangement, though isolating, was long thought to be best for both patients
and society.
But new facilities like Strawberry Hill exhibit a new way of thinking, one in
which mental health facilities are seen not as a risk or a burden to the
surrounding community, but a potential boon, bringing with them the same social
and economic benefits that any medical hospital would — while helping to
destigmatize mental health care in the process.
For a long time, the neighborhood of Strawberry Hill has struggled with vacant
lots, derelict buildings and street crime. The very building the new mental
health facility is housed in, in fact, had been abandoned for years. Now, it’s
bustling with hundreds of workers, and the neighborhood around it is slowly
coming back to life. The new grocery store, opened in what was once a food
desert, is a prime example."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
