Last updated on May 8, 2019
For nearly 200 years, the Institute of Living has been a vital part of the community that we serve. That community has expanded over time from our humble beginnings as Connecticut’s first hospital to encompass our city, state and nation – along with the international community of behavioral health providers, researchers and patients.
Never has this been more evident than in the past two years as we mourned in the aftermath of a tragedy of historic proportions: the Dec. 2012 shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School that took the lives of 27 children and adults in Newtown, Connecticut.
As terrible as it was, the shooting was a turning point, serving as an opportunity to foster the integration of behavioral health into mainstream health care and to work towards eliminating the stigma of mental illness. The IOL played a lead role in this initiative through the National Dialogue on Mental Health, an Obama-administration initiative born in the wake of the Newtown tragedy to raise community awareness about behavioral health.
With the National Dialogue now it its second year, the IOL has been actively involved in influencing and facilitating discussions large and small that we hope will bring real and lasting social change. These efforts included a standing-room-only forum at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, PTA meetings, discussions at high schools across Connecticut, media outreach, and training through our Mental Health First Aid courses. The IOL has listened, presented, and proudly carried the mantle of mental health to the community and back again to improve the public’s perception of those with mental illness and, hopefully, reduce the risk of future tragedy.
Despite the continued focus on mental health, behavioral health services everywhere have struggled to meet the needs of their communities and enable people to access care. This issue is particularly acute in Connecticut, where the health care delivery system experienced an overwhelming increase in demand for child and adolescent psychiatric services for patients with serious mental illness, difficulties in accessing psychiatric beds, and inadequate alternative placements, resulting in delayed treatment as children
languished in emergency departments.
At the IOL, we continually seek new and innovative ways to meet the behavioral health needs of children and adolescents before they reach our emergency rooms. We’ve established Access Mental Health-CT, expanded our young adult (ages 18-25) outreach program, and celebrated the first anniversary of our LGBTQ/The Right Track program. All the while our research efforts and training programs continue to focus on preparing the next generation with the manpower and knowledge to deliver state-of-the-art behavioral health care.
Though time can never completely erase the sense of loss brought on by the events of that cold December day two years ago, time has given our community the opportunity to talk openly about the issues we face when it comes to continuing to deliver high quality behavioral health services. To that end, the IOL continues to reach out well beyond our campus to listen, learn, innovate, teach, and heal – all for the benefit of the patients we treat and the community we serve.