The Roseland Mental Health Center will reopen and mental health services will be added to two other sites as the city takes steps to expand mental health services.
“Today, my administration is taking extraordinary steps to reverse the course and expand our city’s system of mental health,” Mayor Brandon Johnson told reporters and community members Thursday morning.
Johnson announced the reopening outside the Roseland Mental Health Center, one of the three added sites to offer mental health services by the end of the year. Services will also be added at the Chicago Department of Public Health vaccine clinic in Pilsen and the Legler Library in Garfield Park.
Johnson said his administration wants to hire “as many people as possible” for expanded mental health care services.
“There clearly is not just a need, but there is a desire for the workforce to have opportunities to work for public health,” Johnson said.
The announcement comes after the release of a report put together by the Mental Health System Expansion Working Group detailing a citywide plan for mental health expansion.
Aside from reopening city-run mental health centers, the report suggests opening new health centers in neighborhoods with the highest unmet needs and layering mental health services into existing CDPH clinics that don’t offer them.
Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd) said the city chose Roseland, Pilsen and Garfield Park for expanded mental health services based on the needs of those neighborhoods.
“It is highly documented that the South and West sides are spaces where there is way less access to mental health care,” said Rodriguez-Sanchez, who chairs the City Council Committee on Health and Human Relations. “All of the work we and the Mayor’s Office are doing right now are being informed by that need.”
Last July, mayoral allies laid the groundwork for reopening the clinics as part of an overarching plan to build a new network for mental health care dubbed “Treatment Not Trauma.”
“Whatever rationale or justification that a previous administration has made [as] of why families don’t deserve mental health treatment, I am not those mayors,” Johnson said. “We made a promise [and] I kept it because it’s gonna save lives.”
Seven city-run clinics — half of those open at the time — were shut down in 2012 due to budget cuts under Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
For Johnson, working to improve mental health access across the city is personal. Johnson said his brother Leon died addicted and homeless and struggled with mental health.
“My administration is working to create a Chicago where the people who are suffering from mental health crisis like my brother Leon can receive the treatment that they need,” Johnson said.