CenterPointe structure reached a construction milestone today

Mental health is on everyone’s radar, especially the mental health of young people.

CenterPointe, a new mental health facility, will serve all ages when it opens in Columbia later this year.

Today, they topped off to a construction milestone, they put the last piece of the structure in place.

ABC 17 spoke to Mayor Brian Treece, who was there today, he said the facility provides a safety net among the Columbia healthcare community.

“All across the country, there are kids facing mental health challenges and we’ve trained our first responders, our police officers, our fire fighters to respond to these issues, but there’s no place to take them for safe 24-hour assessment,” said Mayor Treece.

Mayor Treece told us the problem is that without facilities like this, these kids land themselves in the criminal court system.

“There’s always been a shortage of residential and adolescent treatment beds and this is going to fulfill a very important need,” said Mayor Treece.

CenterPointe is a 72-bed mental health facility which will serve both adolescents and adult patients. Twenty of those beds will be dedicated to teens.

CEO Buddy Turner said they have seen promising results in their other facilities.

“We have great treatment outcomes. We think we’ll be able to take what is currently a real difficult situation for Columbia, not having beds, and remedy that,” said Turner.

Turners said CenterPointe is a private facility, but they will serve anyone, no matter the financial situation.

They still have a long way to go before complete, but they expect to open in October.