By Joyce Chu
For years, children in need of acute psychiatric care in Santa Clara County were being shipped hours away to get treatment. That is about to change as the county opens a new inpatient behavioral health facility for youth.
The Behavioral Health Pavilion, located on the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Campus (VMC), will give 35 children and teenagers a safe place to recover from a mental health crisis. The 207,000-square-foot behavioral health facility will have a separate acute inpatient section with 42 beds for adults. The adult section will replace the existing adult facility.
The 77-bed three-story building cost $470 million to construct. It features colorful designs, large windows, and generous outdoor space that includes a basketball court. The children’s and teens’ section of the hospital will provide inpatient and outpatient psychiatric and medical care, emergency psychiatric services, and urgent care. A skywalk is being integrated into the design to enable easy access to comprehensive medical services throughout the VMC campus. It is set to open for service on Nov. 3.
“It’s an extraordinary facility, and the vision that I had back in the day has now been realized,” former District 5 County Supervisor Joe Simitian, who spearheaded the project with former Supervisor Cindy Chavez, told San José Spotlight. “We can do so much good for so many kids and their families.”
Simitian first learned of the county having no beds for youth or teenagers in 2015, when a constituent approached him. He was shocked to discover that a county with so much need wasn’t taking care of its own. While the county had psychiatric beds for adults, children and adolescents were required to be treated in separate facilities for safety measures.
That kickstarted his yearslong effort to establish the Behavioral Health Pavilion, which faced numerous delays and mounting costs. Supervisors initially approved the new facility back in 2017, with a goal to be online by 2023. But construction setbacks halted the project and some policymakers argued it was too costly.
About 375 children are in need of acute care each year, but due to the lack of beds, 65% had to be transported to facilities outside the county for care —including Sacramento, Vallejo, and Santa Rosa, according to statistics provided by the county.
Aside from the 35 beds at the Behavioral Health Pavilion — 14 beds for children aged 12 and under and 21 beds for teens — San Jose Behavioral Health also has 34 beds for teenagers.
“The need is great, and the need is still not being met by the level or the availability of services in our county,” Dr. Kristoffer Strauss, medical director of acute psychiatric services at VMC, told San José Spotlight.
County Supervisors Susan Ellenberg and Otto Lee declared that Santa Clara County had a mental health crisis in 2022, due to a severe shortage of acute care inpatient psychiatric beds and services.
“For too long, young people facing both psychiatric and medical challenges often experienced fragmented care, navigating separate systems that were not designed to serve the whole person,” Ellenberg said on Monday at the grand opening of the Behavioral Health Pavilion. “This building stands as one of the strongest signs of hope for our county. It is a visible indicator of what can be accomplished through long-term commitment, shared vision, and sustained public investment in the health and well-being of our community.”
Strauss said that there’s been an increase of adult patients coming to seek psychiatric services year over year. Their mental health needs are more severe than before, with more acute levels of psychosis. Because VMC is also a receiving center, there’s also been a significant increase of youth coming to the facility over the past year, even though they didn’t have a dedicated unit to treat children.
“We have to put them in a separate unit that, frankly, is not therapeutic,” Strauss said. “So, we are already seeing and treating kids even though we’re not in a dedicated unit for kids.”
Terry Downing, a mother whose daughter became psychotic overnight due to an autoimmune disease that affected her brain, said the Pavilion will be life changing for families.
Back in 2011 when her daughter started developing mental health conditions, a psychiatrist misdiagnosed the 13-year-old with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. It wasn’t until 10 months later that a specialist identified Downing’s daughter as having Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome, a form of autoimmune encephalitis of the brain, and by then it was too late for antibiotics to work.
“I couldn’t get her the medical help that she needed, because no children’s psych facilities were attached to medical institutions,” Downing told San José Spotlight. “I just hope this [model] is duplicated across the nation.”
This story was originally published in San José Spotlight.
