Vets Recover, sometimes known as Veterans Recovery Resources, is a mental health nonprofit that focuses primarily on providing treatment to veterans, first responders and their families. Founded in 2015, the nonprofit provides primary care, outpatient mental health services and community integration programs such as volunteer outreach and support groups.
Vets Recover is also in the process of expanding into inpatient treatment and is currently renovating a historic school on Springhill Avenue in Mobile’s Campground neighborhood.
John Kilpatrick, a veteran of the U.S. Military with experience in the Medical Service Corps in the U.S. Army, founded Vets Recover after growing frustrated with trying to get veterans in the area help. Here, he discusses VRR’s new inpatient programs and how south Alabama’s mental health system isn’t set up to meet the needs of the community.
Questions and answers have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Talk about the facility you’re renovating, the big building on Springhill Avenue.
It’s a historic school, it used to be called the Raphael Semmes School. And then for a long time, it was the Continuous Learning Center. But the building was built around 1920. We’re not just renovating it, but we’re doing historic preservation. So it’s now on the historic register with the National Parks [Service]. And we’re receiving some historic tax credits and new market tax credits. All told in that renovation, the budget was $8.4 million. And we’re about $500,000 over budget. So we’re in the process of trying to raise the money to get this thing finished by the end of the year, and we plan to open first of the year.
So, in that new facility, you’ll have inpatient care?
It’s a 34-bed facility. We’ve got eight beds for medically monitored detox. Then we’ve got 16 beds for inpatient residential treatment, that’s your typical 28-day inpatient treatment. It can be longer or shorter, the program is kind of tailored to each individual. And then we’ve also got 10 beds that we’ve set up for, we’re calling it respite care. But say we’ve got a homeless veteran, we can get them off the street and into a bed, and three meals, in kind of a limited clinical capability, until we can get them into a program.
Could you really expand and explain why it’s so important to have these wraparound services, the community integration, all of that?
Take homelessness, for instance. If you look at a person who’s homeless, and you say, “Well, if we just get them a house, get them a place to live, everything’s going to be fine.” Well, there’s a reason they’re homeless. We’re root cause folks. If you’re struggling with an addiction, or you’re struggling with post-traumatic stress, or you’ve got some sort of mental health issue, that’s not the only thing wrong. If we try to solve one problem or one symptom of a problem in isolation, it’s not going to work not for very long.
What we try to do is really evaluate the whole person. Our intake process is a physical exam, a mental health assessment, a spiritual assessment, a psychological, social, financial, employment, occupational, we’re looking at the whole picture. I’m a veteran, I’ve been in the military for 37 years, I’ve got four deployments, I’ve done the whole combat trauma, all that mess. That service, and the things that come along with that, affect every aspect of my life. If I’m not addressing every aspect of my life, then you kind of start playing whack-a-mole. It shows up as addiction over here, you beat that down, and then it shows up as road rage or something, a physical ailment, or marital problems or employment issues or whatever…
A lot of what we see with folks in our typical health care system is, every ailment or every symptom gets treated in a silo. We’ve seen veterans that come from the V.A., and they’ve got five different doctors at the V.A. and they’re on 15 medications, all perfectly appropriately prescribed by specialists. But nobody’s de-conflicting all of them. And so those doctors are not talking to each other about what this veteran needs. So, you’re working against each other a little bit. What we do is, we get all the doctors together, all the mental health providers, physicians, P.A.s, nurses, social workers, counselors, therapists, and more importantly, veteran peers, who know what that veteran is going through day-to-day. And then we develop a treatment program specifically for that veteran and their family to get everything addressed.
What are some of the biggest mental health needs that you see in Mobile?
Well, you don’t have to ask me. We have a mental health authority, and we have a 310 board, and they publish a strategic plan every year. We’ve also done, in cooperation with USA Health and Infirmary Health, we conducted a community health needs assessment. You can just look at those reports, and you can see exactly what the needs are. This is not my opinion; this is from a study that we conducted as a community health needs assessment.
Mental health care services are the number one most difficult health care service to access in Mobile and Baldwin County. Access to care is a huge problem. And that’s probably the number one problem. At Vets Recover, our mission is to remove barriers to care. So, access to care is the number one barrier. Other problems that people have in our community is they can’t afford it, they don’t have transportation, their provider doesn’t take their insurance.
Most often, especially with veterans, and especially in the V.A. health care system, [the issue] is timely appointments. There’s a law, we have the MISSION Act. Veterans are entitled, by law, to a mental health appointment, a behavioral health appointment and a primary care appointment, within an hour drive from their home and within 20 days. The V.A. grades themselves, and it’s published on their website, and the average wait time for an appointment for mental health or for primary care in Mobile and Baldwin County is 45 to 65 days. Almost twice what the law says veterans should get. That to me, are the [three] most pressing issues: access to care, and timely appointments, and a way to pay.
What we’ve done at Vets Recover as we’ve tried to address all of those barriers that our community health needs assessment identified. Access to mental health care means we can you usually get you an appointment, we’ll get you up here the same day. And we can usually get a mental health appointment within about 48 hours. with a licensed provider.
We don’t have a [medically monitored] detox facility within a four-hour drive of Mobile. We’ve addressed that. We’ll have a medically monitored detox facility, and there’s not one south of Birmingham in our state. So that’s huge. We have very limited access for drug and alcohol treatment. Treatment for women is almost nonexistent. The program we’re building now, we’re not set up to treat women. So that’s probably the next most urgent need is, residential treatment for women, and especially for pregnant women. We will take them in our detox facility, but our residential program is men only. So that’s another urgent, unmet need in our community.
You all treat everybody. But your emphasis is on veterans, first responders and their families. Can you talk a little bit about why? What the need is and why focus on veterans, why focus on first responders?
One, we are them. Two, you can look at just about any study, and there’s a lot of different numbers out there. But in general, up to 64,000 veterans in Mobile and Baldwin County, half of them report having some sort of mental health issue. We have these conditions that we’re treating at much higher rates than the civilian population. First responders experience those things too. We have a much higher rate of addiction; we have a much higher rate of opioid overdose. And we have two to one, or maybe even higher than that, [rate] in suicides.
The mental health crisis that we’re in the midst of, everybody’s in it, but it’s affecting veterans and first responders and their families at a much, much higher rate. And in south Alabama, we have the perfect storm that creates an urgent need for what we’re doing. Mobile and Baldwin County are the only counties in Alabama that are aligned to the V.A. out of Mississippi, [Veterans Integrated Services Network] 16, the rest of the state is aligned to VISN seven. VISN 16 is the poorest-performing VISN in the V.A. Health Care System. We have the worst VA health care in Mobile and Baldwin County. Alabama has the worst mental health care system in the country. Nobody argues it, we’re the worst, on many different fronts.
So we have the worst mental health care system, then in Mobile and Baldwin County, we have the worst VA health care system, but we have one of the highest concentrations of veterans in the country along the Gulf Coast. You’ve got a high concentration of folks who experience mental health issues, addiction, opioids and suicide, at a much higher rate than the rest of the country. But you don’t have any systems in place to address it.
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