Crisis Over Santa Barbara County’s Crisis Beds

Eight years ago, on November 22, county movers and shakers — armed with ceremonial ribbon-cutting scissors — opened the county’s brand-new Crisis Stabilization Unit, a 23-hour mental-health treatment center with eight recliners and staffed by clinicians trained to treat people on the verge of a mental-health precipice. There were lots of balloons and optimistic speeches delivered that day. 

The CSU, as it was called, would offer a place for people who would otherwise find themselves in the county’s perpetually overwhelmed Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) — with its scant 16 beds — or sent to facilities out of the county. In the first three months of that year, the county had exported 1,111 people in acute psychiatric distress to such places.

“This is the most exciting day for the county,” exclaimed then-supervisor Janet Wolf. The CSU would lighten the load on the county’s PHF, reserved for patients determined to pose an imminent threat to themselves or others and placed on involuntary holds. At the CSU, people in crisis could voluntarily decompress and then obtain longer-term treatment closer to home.