Q: What is Eastside Psychiatric Hospital?
A: Eastside Psychiatric Hospital is an acute care psychiatric hospital, which means that folks come to us when they need acute services. These could be folks with depression; these could be folks with anxiety disorders; these could be folks who are suffering from schizophrenia or bipolar disorders. We’ll treat the most severe clients, but we’ll also treat those who are running into situations where they are at wit’s end about how to proceed and have become a risk to themselves or others. – Jay Reeve of Apalachee Center
Q: What is Eastside’s history?
A: Eastside Psychiatric Hospital has been in business since 1987, and, for most of those years, it was a 24 bed unit on Capital Circle. After doing this business for a long time, the physical plant that we were operating out of had some wear and tear. Another issue was that some things changed in terms of best practice for programming for folks in psychiatric hospitals. About four or five years ago we decided to really try and reformat what we were doing, so we completely rebuilt Eastside Psychiatric Hospital. We tore the structure down to the studs and rebuilt it along the state-of-the-art lines so that now we have a facility that is the best at making our patients feel relaxed and comfortable. – Jay Reeve of Apalachee Center
Q: What changes has Eastside seen through the renovation?
A: Through our remodeling, we are able to provide broad hallways, large, comfortable lounge areas, a lot of space, a lot of light, and comfortable furniture so that folks can feel safe and at home. A lot of the time, folks feel too boxed in because they’re in a locked unit, but not at Eastside. Additionally, we started working on our treatment regimen and our treatment programming and about 3 months ago; we were able to unveil an entirely new kind of treatment programming which really represents a culmination of a lot of things I’ve thought about, seen and worked on for 27 years of my career. – Jay Reeve of Apalachee Center
Q: What sets Eastside apart from other psychiatric hospitals?
A: This is a unit that’s really focused on anxiety reduction. Most symptoms of ongoing psychiatric problems that people experience, such as feeling like hurting themselves or others, suicidal thoughts and auditory and visual hallucinations, are all made worse by anxiety. – Jay Reeve of Apalachee Center
One of the problems with psychiatric hospitalization is that when people become hospitalized, they naturally become more anxious. They’re in a locked facility that they haven’t been in before; their time is no longer their own. It’s a scary experience for a lot of people. Our goal with Eastside Psychiatric Hospital is to make this experience as not scary, as safe, as comfortable as we possibly can within the constraints of what we do.
Q: How does Eastside accomplish its goal of reducing anxiety and providing patients with a safe, comfortable environment?
A: To complement our broad hallways, large, comfortable lounge areas, a lot of space, a lot of light and comfortable furniture, we’ve created new positions called Patient Care Specialists whose whole job is to run groups and sit with clients and talk to them and provide what the clients need. We’ve also got a new organizational structure which guarantees a lot of oversight and a lot of support of clinical and administrative on every shift. Another great benefit of Eastside is because Apalachee has a full system of care, when someone is discharged, we’re not just sending them out into the street with no further follow-up. We can actually provide outpatient care in any of our eight clinics in any of the eight counties or they can move to our new Capital Therapy service where they can receive a lot of these services, from psychiatric care to psychological counseling to psychological assessment all under one roof.- Jay Reeve of Apalachee Center
Q: How does Eastside interact with its community?
A: We have created relationships with the local universities, with their departments of psychology and social work so we always have interns coming through the hospital pretty much every month of the year, bringing us information of the newest techniques that we have incorporated into our treatment regimens. Much of our root program in the hospital was created based on the work of some psychologists at Florida State University called Behavioral activation; we incorporated that into the groups that we do.- Jay Reeve of Apalachee Center
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Jay Reeve, PhD, is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Apalachee Center, Inc., a large community mental health center in Tallahassee, Florida, serving approximately 6,000 clients annually. Dr. Reeve holds degrees from Tufts, Harvard, and Adelphi Universities. He has been a licensed clinical psychologist since 1993. He has published on topics ranging from the psychotherapeutic treatment of HIV+ children to clinical supervision of interns, and has been a frequent commentator for the ABC News Medical News Group. He is currently on faculty at the FSU Department of Psychology.
For over half a century, Apalachee Center has been dedicated to helping the individuals and families of North Florida succeed in recovering from emotional, psychiatric, and substance abuse crises. These crises are often painful and frightening, and leave families and individuals feeling as if they are all alone and have nowhere to turn. The Apalachee team is here to help.