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The meeting that sparked her passion for change took place in 2010, said Sigrid Pinsky, a Palo Alto resident who previously served on the Santa Clara County Adolescent Counseling Services Advisory Board. It was just another day, another presentation, but she still remembers the staff report that made her pause and raise her hand. Local children, she learned, were being sent outside of the county to Marin, Bakersfield and across the East Bay Area for psychiatric care.
But why? Pinsky asked.
The answer was simple – there just aren’t enough county psychiatric beds and even today not one is dedicated for youth, according to Santa Clara Valley Healthcare officials.
Pinsky couldn’t stop thinking about the local need and parents who had to travel miles to provide care for their children.
“So I called Joe Simitian and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this. This can’t stand,’” she said, referring to the longtime Palo Alto lawmaker who at the time was serving as a Santa Clara County supervisor.
What followed was more than 15 years of advocacy and work to finally address the lack of county psychiatric beds.
Now, those efforts are bearing fruit. The first county-operated mental health care facility for youth – called the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Facility, Behavioral Health Services Center – is set to open this spring in San Jose following multiple-year delays.
Soon after Pinsky learned that there were minimal behavioral healthcare options for local youth in 2010, she became more involved in her children’s Palo Alto schools, serving as the Parent Teacher Association president, when the city was in the midst of its first youth suicide cluster – a short time frame when multiple deaths by suicide occur.
Once Pinsky spoke to Simitian, county supervisors began the yearslong process to study and construct a new psychiatric facility.
“I knew many families whose children have been in terrible crises and they couldn’t get help, they couldn’t find anybody,” Pinsky said.
Former Palo Alto City Council member Gail Price wrote to the county on several occasions beginning in 2012, expressing the need for an inpatient youth facility, according to board documents.
“Psychiatric crises can be disturbing,” Price wrote. “It grows worse when amplified by a sense of urgency and despair when open beds in a psychiatric unit are not available for stabilization and treatment within the County.”
The county began conducting research on a new facility in 2015 and approved a center in 2017, a year when nearly 700 Santa Clara County youth were admitted to psychiatric hospitals outside of the county, staying for an average of six days, “often far away from home,” according to Santa Clara Valley Healthcare.
Adult behavioral health facilities were also outdated, reflecting a time when psychiatric patients were often confined without appropriate treatment.
In an effort to replace adult resources and create new ones for youth, the county envisioned a brand new $222-million facility at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center on 751 S. Bascom Ave. in San Jose.
Early plans depicted a multi-story building that would offer 66 beds total, 30 for youth and 36 for adults, according to a 2018 feasibility study. While the county was still debating the exact campus location of the center, it expressed interest in placing children and adolescents, adults and administration on separate floors to create a safer environment.
Each floor would also offer separate outdoor and balcony spaces for therapeutic services in an attempt to make the facilities more “welcoming and friendly,” according to the study. After demolishing existing facilities, creating a new building and transferring services, the county initially anticipated opening the comprehensive center in October 2023.
County supervisors officially approved the project in May 2021, fine-tuning facility proposals and the current facility layout.
The bed count was increased to 77 with 14 for children, 21 for adolescents and the remainder for adults, Santa Clara Valley Healthcare officials wrote in a message to this publication.
Current facilities offer 48 beds located across three separate campus buildings.
The new behavioral health facility will consolidate all psychiatric services into one, three-story building with an underground pedestrian tunnel to the main hospital, a skybridge to the emergency department and a new 714-car parking structure. Adult services will be completely separate from youth ones, and all units will include outdoor recreation areas, group rooms and dining halls. There will also be a pharmacy and the rooftop will offer a basketball half-court for inpatient use, according to board documents.
Supervisors expressed optimism about the state-of-the-art facility. But after they approved it in 2021, the project faced significant delays because of labor shortages and cost increases.
Frustrated county supervisors unanimously voted in 2022 to hire an auditor who could keep a closer eye on the hospital’s development after the facility’s opening date was tentatively pushed back by a year to December 2024.
“We were given repeated assurances about a timeline and those repeated assurances proved not to be consistent with the facts on the ground,” Simitian said at a county meeting in January 2022. “I have spent three years getting information that has not been accurate about the completion date.”
On top of the delays, the general contractor for the project, XL Construction, estimated higher operational and material costs due to COVID-19 related changes. The company said it was uncertain about the project timeline, indefinitely pushing back the opening date.
At a February 2023 groundbreaking event, the county commenced construction of a new center that almost doubled in price to $422 million, according to a county statement.
At the time, the 207,000-square-foot facility was expected to be completed by fall 2025, but county officials now say that date has been moved to spring 2026, Santa Clara Valley Healthcare officials wrote in a statement to this publication.
The problem remains as urgent as ever. Palo Alto is in the midst of a third suicide cluster according to Stanford Health professionals, underscoring the constant need for mental health care. Today, “patient demand for beds remains high and illustrates the need for the new Behavioral Health Pavilion,” according to the statement from Santa Clara Valley Healthcare.
The facility, which Simitian called a “sanctuary for healing,” will finally bring to a close more than a decade-worth of advocacy for urgent psychiatric care. County officials plan to announce an opening ceremony in the coming months.
Pinsky said the new center is the product of dozens of people, including Simitian and Philippe Rey, the recently retired executive director of nonprofit Adolescent Counseling Services, who worked for years to improve youth health care.
“We’re not done, but we’ve made a lot of progress on so many levels,” she said.
Any person who is feeling depressed, troubled or suicidal can call 988, the mental health crisis hotline, to speak with a crisis counselor. In Santa Clara County, interpretation is available in 200 languages. Spanish speakers can also call 888-628-9454. People can reach trained counselors at Crisis Text Line by texting RENEW to 741741.
