Six months after closing due to a mold outbreak followed by severe roof leaks, Sonoma County’s emergency psychiatric facility, the Crisis Stabilization Unit, reopened on Saturday.

The reopening comes after extensive remediation and construction, said Jennifer Solito, the interim director of Sonoma County Department of Health Services. 

“This has been a long road, much longer than any of us expected, and I deeply appreciate the support and patience from our local service partners and our community throughout this process,” Solito said Monday.

Operated by the behavioral health division of Sonoma County’s Department of Health Services, the unit is set up to provide intervention, assessment, medication support and up to 23 hours of care for people suffering from acute mental health crises. For those requiring longer-term support, referrals are then made to crisis residential units or inpatient mental health facilities.

“The idea is to have a place for people in crisis to come where there are actually people trained to deal with a psychiatric crisis and stabilize them, hopefully within 24 hours, to keep them out of the hospital,” said Sonoma DHS spokesperson Sheri Cardo. “The mobile unit is designed so that law enforcement doesn’t have to go out with them because that can be a barrier for somebody to get care.”

Cardo said people come in from hospital emergency rooms, which are not equipped to deal with mental health crises, or they come in from the county’s Mobile Support Team. That team includes mental health clinicians, alcohol and other drug counselors, and client support specialists. 

“The Crisis Stabilization Unit plays a vital role in providing members of our community in crisis with a local pathway to receiving psychiatric services and potentially avoiding a lengthy psychiatric hospitalization,” said David Evans, acute and forensics section manager in the behavioral health division of DHS. 

Unlike hospital emergency departments, the CSU has staff with specific expertise in managing mental health crises and can allow the time to manage psychiatric crises and serve individuals in the least restrictive setting.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.