What You Need to Know
HMH broke ground on Carrier Clinic’s $40 million, 43,000-square-foot modernization project for treating children and adolescents and providing support services to their families.
The project will include 52 inpatient rooms for youths, a family resource and support center, innovative treatment models such as multi-sensory rooms, and an academic teaching center and medical staff suite to expand the capacity to teach physicians and other mental health professionals.
The enhancement will allow Carrier Clinic, long a leader in the treatment of adolescents with psychiatric and co-occurring disorders, to help a greater number of children by lowering the age of patients it serves to 7 from the current minimum of 12. In doing so, it will better meet the demand for mental health care for youths who are experiencing ever-increasing rates of anxiety, depression, suicide ideation, and other psychiatric conditions.
State grants and private donations fund the project. State Senator Andrew Zwicker and Assemblyman Roy Freiman led the charge in securing a total of $10 million in funding, through two consecutive state budget processes. In March, the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, led by philanthropist Alex Cohen, bestowed a $10 million grant for the project.
Currently, Carrier’s youth-focused services include a 36-bed inpatient acute hospital unit, intensive residential services program, residential treatment center, psychiatric community homes, and the East Mountain School, a state-accredited school for 7th- through 12th-grade students classified as emotionally disturbed or as having behavioral disorders. Psychiatric care for the children and adolescents includes traditional treatment models as well as equine therapy, art therapy, music therapy and horticultural therapy. The facility isn’t enough to meet the growing need, especially from increasingly younger patients.
Additional renderings of the Carrier Clinic child and adolescent project are available here.