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The Roanoke Times

Construction will soon begin on a 40-bed residential facility to treat the growing number of Roanoke Valley residents who suffer from alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness.

The facility, planned for a wooded slope off Hollins Road in Northeast Roanoke, will be the first of three buildings in a "treatment campus" on the 9-acre site, mental health officials said this week.

Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare, an agency that offers public assistance in the areas of mental health, mental retardation and substance abuse, will operate the facility.

The project's first phase, at 3003 Hollins Road, will replace the Shenandoah Recovery Center, which for 34 years has offered short-term inpatient care for up to 30 people with mental health or substance abuse needs.

A groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for Nov. 30; construction should be completed by early 2009.

"We're getting a lot more people seeking services from us," said Gail Burruss, director of adult clinical services at Blue Ridge. The agency is forced to set high thresholds for accepting people into intensive treatment because of limited resources.

Even then, it's not unusual for someone who needs inpatient treatment to have to wait for a bed to become available, said Jim Phipps, director of the valley's Court-Community Corrections program, which monitors probation for misdemeanor offenses involving drugs and alcohol.

"They just don't have the appropriate capacity to respond to the increasing demand," Phipps said.

Fatal drug overdoses in Western Virginia have nearly tripled over the past 10 years, and Blue Ridge has also seen an increase in serious mental health cases.

The number of people seeking emergency psychiatric care in the Roanoke Valley has increased by 27 percent in recent years, from 2,339 in 2002 to 2,971 last year.

"I think there are people who end up going to the emergency room who, if they had regular ongoing outpatient services, perhaps would never have escalated to that point of need," Burruss said.

With that in mind, long-term plans call for two more buildings for outpatient services on the Hollins Road campus.

By gaining an additional 10 beds for short-term residential care, Blue Ridge hopes to reduce the occasional backlog of mental health patients who accumulate in the emergency room of Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

As many as 12 mental patients at a time have been forced to wait in the emergency room -- some for as long as three days -- before a psychiatric bed became available.

The new Hollins Road facility will also provide more room for a recently opened crisis stabilization center, which offers short-term mental health care for up to six people at a time whose symptoms are not bad enough for them to be committed to an institution.

Demand for such facilities has received increased attention in the wake of the April 16 mass shootings at Virginia Tech by a mentally disturbed student.

Diane Kelly, executive director of Mental Health America of the Roanoke Valley, said the crisis stabilization center has done a "wonderful job" of treating the symptoms of mental illness before they escalate to a crisis.

"We don't expect people to have a stroke before we treat their high blood pressure, but we often treat people with mental illness that way," Kelly said.

Kelly's organization operates a free clinic with a growing caseload, which she attributed in part to heightened awareness of mental health issues and increases in the number of uninsured.

Roanoke's crisis stabilization program shares space with the Shenandoah Recovery Center, adding more clients to an already overcrowded facility.

Since it opened in January 2006, the crisis stabilization center has had 342 admissions, with clients usually staying for less than a week. The center takes patients from the Alleghany Highlands in addition to those from Blue Ridge's regular service area -- the cities of Roanoke and Salem and the counties of Botetourt, Craig and Roanoke.

Dealing with crisis mental health cases puts additional demands on the Shenandoah Recovery Center. Located at 801 Shenandoah Ave. S.W., the center also provides medically supervised detoxification from drugs and alcohol, and short-term residential treatment for addicts.

The Hollins Road campus will incorporate a brick building that was constructed in the 1860s. Known as Fellers House when it was a group home for the mentally retarded, the building has been listed as a endangered site by the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation.

Now vacant and boarded up, the home will be preserved and used for office space.

Blue Ridge serves about 10,000 people a year. The $5.5 million construction project is the most ambitious expansion in the agency's 38-year history.

Earlier this year, Blue Ridge obtained a special-use permit and rezoning for the Hollins Road site, which is in a mixed industrial and residential area.