History of help

WASILLA -- What started as a small Wasilla satellite office of the Anchorage Community Mental Health Center in 1977 has grown into a 35-acre wellness campus that serves thousands of Mat-Su residents with mental illness each year.

"We've really been a reflection of how our community has grown," said Chas St. George, director of community development at Behavioral Health Services of Mat-Su. "We've really tried to hone in on the needs of the community."

Behavioral Health became its own community mental health center in 1984, using the name LifeQuest. With a seven-employee office in Palmer, LifeQuest offered services to adults with chronic mental illness and severely mentally disturbed children.

"It was your typical community mental-health center," St. George said.

LifeQuest faced challenges not unlike community mental-health centers throughout the U.S.; in 1981, mental health was defederalized and each state was responsible for setting up its own mental-health program.

"It created a huge challenge for states because we didn't have continuity," St. George said. "Instead we have 50 different flavors of mental health going on in the country."

LifeQuest, which moved into a series of different offices and finally ended up along the Parks Highway across from Fred Meyer, grew dramatically throughout the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. In 1995-1996, LifeQuest had 145 employees, compared to the seven-employee staff it had in 1984.

In 2003, LifeQuest changed its name to Behavioral Health Services of Mat-Su and moved to the 35-acre West Spruce Avenue location. Behavioral Health had more than 30,000 mental-health contacts in 2003, a "considerable amount" more than when the office first opened.

"You have to embrace change to be around to serve the community," St. George said. "Things are not always going to be the same."

Behavioral Health is trying for another change in the near future; management would like to change the center to a community health center, which would provide a sliding-scale-fee health clinic that could deal with all sorts of illnesses, taking away the stigma of walking into a mental-health center for help.

"People that come in here now need so many Band-Aids because of the (mental-health) stigma," St. George said. "It's really our job to treat the whole person, not just a sliver of that person's well-being."

Staff members at Behavioral Health work with many different agencies throughout the Mat-Su, from Nugen's Ranch to Kids are People, in order to reach all of the different people who may need mental-health help. One project St. George says is moving along nicely is the creation of a shared assessment tool for the different agencies.

"Seventy percent of people who go into a physician's office have some sort of mental-health illness," St. George said.

Behavioral Services also houses other agencies, such as the Co-Occurring Disorders Institute.

"We open our doors to other agencies, this is a community building," St. George said.

From humble beginnings, Behavioral Health is doing more and more outreach each year.

"When we started, we had minimal outreach in schools," St. George said. "Now we work with the schools and youth court . . . you don't want chronically mentally ill adults, you want to give kids enough in their toolboxes so they don't become chronically mentally ill adults."

Behavioral Health also reaches out to Mat-Su's homeless population.

"We have a large homeless population, more than people realize," St. George said. "Most mentally ill people want to live a sustainable life. Our job, our role, is to help them do that."

So what can one expect if they seek help at Behavioral Health?

"We literally wrap around the individual the kind of support system to get life started again," St. George said.

For more information, contact Behavioral Health at 376-2411.