Behavioral Health

Chesapeake Regional Medical Center's campus, has round the clock coverage providing access to clinicians who can help with many mental health conditions including depression, suicidal ideas, anxiety, psychosis, addictions, and many other mental health challenges. We will collaborate with the patient and interdisciplinary team to fully understand the patient’s crisis and create the best possible treatment plan for the circumstance.

Patients may be referred to community based mental health providers, including counselors, psychiatrists, or in more severe cases, transferred to an in-patient treatment center. The patient is the center of the process, with safety and appropriate treatment as the primary focus.

Where can I call for help in a mental health crisis?

There are three major emergencies in mental health:

1. Thoughts and/or urges of taking one’s own life and having a plan to do so.
2. Thoughts and/or urges of taking another person’s life or committing harm to others, such as being violent and aggressive.
3. When mental health symptoms have worsened and a person is unable to care for themselves. This is evident when a person is no longer performing daily tasks such as eating, showering, brushing teeth or doing hair care or taking efforts to be clothed, sheltered, or obtaining needed medical care. They might also be unable to protect themselves from harm, such as making decisions that put their health or safety at risk (e.g., walking down the middle of a busy street). The inability to care for oneself often happens when a person cannot tell what is real from what is not real, a condition called psychosis.
    

If this describes your loved one, please bring them to a local emergency department. 

Ideally we want our loved ones to want help and to seek it on their own. However, some mental illnesses can impact a person’s ability to make sound health care decisions. In these situations, loved ones often need to help make the connection to treatment. In Chesapeake, Virginia, if your loved one is having a mental health emergency, but refuses to come willingly to an emergency department, consider going to your local magistrate’s office to petition for an Emergency Custody Order (ECO). The order, if granted, will initiate local police to bring the individual to an emergency department for an evaluation. For more information about the process, please see the NAMI guide: Guide-to-Psychiatric-Crisis-and-Civil-Commitment-Process.pdf .

Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder

Because traditional detox and recovery methods do not work for most people who try to overcome Opioid Use Disorder, Chesapeake Regional Healthcare has created the PROUD (Prevention and Recovery from Opioid Use Disorder) program practicing a protocol for more effective recovery. We are the first hospital in the Hampton Roads region and the second in the state to begin managing patients with OUD using the “Yale model” using Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) to help users stay clean longer and break the cycle of addition.

When people arrive at the Emergency Department with Opioid Use Disorder, an unhealthy dependence on opioids to include heroin, fentanyl, and prescription pain killers, the PROUD program helps by treating them with Buprenorphine and offering a short-term prescription of Naloxone (Suboxone). Prior to discharge, information about our community partners is provided. To best serve patients, our community partners strive to schedule an appointment within 72 hours of the initial emergency room visit.

Chesapeake Regional Healthcare uses innovative telemedicine technology to provide prompt psychiatric consultation on the medical units, and on an as-needed basis, in the Emergency Department. The telepsychiatry service utilizes state of the art and secure web-based video conferencing services to assist with diagnosis, recommend treatment during a stay and to help determine a patient’s decision-making capacity. If deemed necessary, the service is provided the same day of request and usually within a couple of hours.

Old Dominion University Graduate Counseling Program

Chesapeake Regional offers no-cost counseling services to patients throughout many service areas. This is possible because on-site graduate and doctoral counseling students from the fully-accredited Old Dominion University (ODU) Graduate Counseling Program are able to see patients while they complete their clinical training requirements. The goal of this collaborative is to meet individuals where they are and to provide a higher level of holistic care that treats the individual. This includes identifying and addressing mental health issues in a compassionate manner that reduces stigma.

We selected ODU as a partner because of its consistent reputation as a top-tier counselor training program. Counseling interns engage in evidence-based, therapeutic counseling sessions with patients on medical units, in the Transitional Care Clinic, the out-patient Cardio-Pulmonary Rehab Program and Comfort Care Home Health. The interns provide therapeutic interventions to patients, their families and in various group settings. Those receiving counseling services are provided with community based mental health services as appropriate upon discharge.

Since the beginning of the partnership with ODU began in 2015, over 3,500 direct hours of counseling have been provided to Chesapeake Regional Healthcare patients at no charge.

Crisis Intervention Team Assessment Center

Chesapeake Regional has formally partnered with the City of Chesapeake Police and Sheriff departments and Chesapeake Integrated Behavioral Healthcare (CIBH) to create a 24/7 Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Assessment Center. Our goal is to help individuals in crisis and improve how law enforcement responds to mental health issues they encounter in the community.

The Chesapeake CIT collaborative was awarded a grant to substantially expand the program. With that, the “Bridges” CIT assessment center was built inside of Chesapeake Regional Medical Center. The grant provides specially trained law enforcement officers and CIBH clinicians who are on-site 24/7. The center has appropriately treated patients who would have otherwise used the Emergency Department for services and had prevented many patients from being wrongly jailed.