Head Inside Mental Health
Todd Weatherly, Therapeutic Consultant and mental health professional hosts #Head-Inside Mental Health formerly Mental Health Matters. Interviewing doctors and therapists, treatment professionals, organizational leaders, and other members of the mental health community about the importance of mental health awareness, treatment and the future of addressing mental health in the US. Discussing trends in the field and how to support mental health in our communities from hospitals to the dinner table.
Head Inside Mental Health
Mental Health Under Pressure: Lessons from a Hurricane with Dr. Eric Levine
What happens when a hurricane hits not just the physical landscape but also the heart and mind of a community? Join us on this compelling episode of Head Inside Mental Health, where we sit down with Dr. Eric Levine, President and CEO of CooperRiis, to discover the resiliency of community during a disaster. Eric shares his firsthand experiences, detailing the immense impact the storm had on the community in Asheville and the surrounding areas. His vivid recounting of the storm’s destruction and dedication of the staff at CooperRiis paints a powerful portrait of human endurance and compassion in the face of adversity.
Together, we explore Eric and his teams managed to maintain high-quality mental health services under such severe pressure, emphasizing the crucial role that dedicated staff and strong community support play during disasters. Eric opens up about the emotional toll on caregivers, highlighting the exhaustion and trauma that persist long after the storm has passed. We examine the challenges of sustaining compassionate care in an overwhelmed system, touching on complex issues like insurance reimbursement and resource allocation. This episode raises important questions about the sustainability of mental health support systems in crisis situations, urging listeners to consider the critical need for resources to support our most vulnerable populations.
Hello folks, thanks for joining us on Head Inside Mental Health, featuring conversations about mental health and substance use treatment with experts around the country sharing their thoughts and sights and practice perspectives on the world of behavioral health care. Broadcasting on WPVM 1037, the voice of Asheville, independent commercial free radio, I am Todd Weatherly, your host therapeutic consultant, behavioral health expert. Today, returning to the show, I have Dr Eric Levine. Eric is the president and CEO of Cooper Ease, a residential healing community serving adults affected by the challenges of mental illness and co-occurring conditions that want to move towards healthy and fulfilling lives. They have two locations here, west North Carolina, asheville, and the Healing Forum Campus in Mill Spring.
Speaker 1:Eric has his doctorate in education leadership, an ed s in career transition and assessment, a master's in special ed from George Washington University and a BA in psychology from the University of Maryland. But we won't hold that against him. Eric has more than 30 years of working in education, advocacy and mental health, having served as a consultant and in numerous leadership and executive roles in the field. Avid kayaker and golf ball hacker like myself, he joins us today to talk about the impact of Hurricane Helene and the resulting floods and damage to his campuses and to the mental health community in our area. Dr Levine, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks, todd, always a pleasure to spend time with you.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, I'm certain that you feel that way. You know, I feel like I have to give you a hard time as often as I possibly can because I just don't see you that much. You're too busy these days. We let off the conversation talking about the river conditions opposed to lean, but the recovery process in this town looks like one of the audio equalizers. You've got one area of town that barely got damaged and they're full on and everything's going just right. But if you drive through Biltmore, everything's still under recovery, everything's still being repaired and there are spots that still. You drive through swananoa and it still looks like a disaster.
Speaker 1:I got to drive by the ashville campus not too long what last week or so and it looks pretty good. You know from what it was because I, I saw it right after the storm and you, like so many others, just had. It was high enough not to get, not to have the river reach it, but there was trees down, the network was down. You know we couldn't call people, we couldn't, and your story just about like day after. Tell that story a little bit, because I think it's kind of it's incredible. You know not only one, what you had to deal with but two how you pivoted. So tell the story about. Let's start with day after helene.
Speaker 2:Tell me what I mean, let me actually start three days before helene, because I don't know that people, really, that the area got eight inches of rain, that the helene was on the friday and tuesday, wednesday and thursday down to the green river to check it out, you, you know, just because I wanted to see.
Speaker 2:You know, I go down there all the time and at that point on Thursday the water was out of the banks and onto the road and it was a problem and Helene hadn't gotten here. In fact I was lucky to get out of there. That was kind of a stupid thing I did, but I got out. And then Helene happened on Friday the 29th and then over the course of that storm, With the water already being over the banks, like water already there, we're already at flood stage, and then we got 20 inches of rain and 70, 75 mile an hour winds, and it absolutely devastated the entire region.
Speaker 2:Down where we are in Mill Spring, we are nine miles from the Lake Lure Dam and four miles from the Lake Adger Dam, and we were getting notifications of imminent, catastrophic failure of those dams was coming, and so we were all making plans to evacuate our farm property and what to do. And we're getting these local announcements, text messages with circles of impact on them, and so it was pretty wild. But then it happened, and Asheville and the surrounding areas.
Speaker 2:You know, just go look on a map around Asheville, you know you've got Chimney Rock and Lake Lure and Burnsville and Spruce Pine and of course, asheville itself just got hit, swannanoa, I mean. The rivers blew up 20 or 30 feet over flood stage and so everything washed down you know the canyons, if you will and into Asheville and to Swannanoa and just wiped out everything in its path. I mean, the amount of devastation was remarkable. Now, fortunately, our campuses did not have major structural damage. So I'm not going to in any way suggest that I had it bad.
Speaker 2:You know it was a little bit of different type of bad, but I have staff who lost everything. I have staff who lost their homes. I have staff who had to abandon their positions and move out of the area because they didn't have a place to go anymore. You know, at the time we had 60 some residents and multiple residences and treatment programs that we needed to take care of. And I'll tell you, well, before I tell you so the storm happens on Friday. Asheville is completely cut off from the world. There was no way into Ashevilleville, there was no way out of asheville. The french broad river was at an epically high level and there and it was washing out bridges and roads and trees and trees, and I mean yards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really hard to even imagine, you know, downstream um, the rocky broad river blew out of its banks and wiped the town of Chimney Rock off the map.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it didn't exist Like a town. Never sat there before.
Speaker 2:Right, I mean one side of it there are buildings, but the side that was on the river got destroyed and to this day there's still no road between Chimney Rock and Batcave. I mean you have to go all the way around, but it's very devastated. So, you know, thousands of people lost everything. But we've got, you know, programs in Asheville and we can't talk to them, we can't email them, we have absolutely no communication.
Speaker 1:There's no cell signal, there's no Wi-Fi. I mean, even the providers that are sourcing Wi-Fi are out.
Speaker 2:Out. We couldn't even get people through a two-way radio system to the EMS, completely cut off. And about two or three days later Jim, my director of maintenance, showed up in my house I guess it was a Sunday night and he said I found it like 1030. And his wife showed up.
Speaker 2:Because we were coming up with some creative ways to get into town, because we have. We knew that we had residents that needed emergency medication, so we were trying to figure out some ways to get in, but he said I got a way in. We went in, I guess Monday morning and made our way to our Cooper recent Asheason-Ashville Treatment Center in the Montford area and I was greeted by Dana, our managing director, who had been there for three days straight, and she looked at me and said we got to do something.
Speaker 2:So we loaded everybody up in the vans we had there and evacuated the entire facility down to the farm.
Speaker 1:Loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Right we had to.
Speaker 2:They had nothing. They had no water. I mean that turned out to be probably one of the biggest challenges was the need for potable water. Gasoline is one thing. It wasn't super cold yet but you needed gasoline to run whatever generators we had. But not having water is what brought out a vicious side in human nature. I saw some wild stuff going on in town.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at the grocery stores and at the gas stations. It was, I mean, for a week. It was rough.
Speaker 2:There was looting going on. I mean I won't go into some of the crap.
Speaker 2:Well, I was going to not say that, but yeah, I had a staff member observe a shooting when someone tried to cut the gas line. You know there were gas lines of you know miles long and some dude decided he was going to cut the line like that. So it was wild. But we uh, we managed to get everybody from Asheville in our Asheville community program houses and our Cooper recent Asheville treatment center, loaded up and brought down here to the farm and we just we found space here on the farm for over 45 people and, and you know, we, and every day for the next couple of weeks, all of my, my managers and leaders and and community members, we would all meet and say, okay, what do we got to do? Today? We'd meet right up here in this house that I'm sitting in right now.
Speaker 2:It was like a command center and it was, you know. We would look up and it'd be one o'clock, you know, and we, we would spend the day sending people out go find gas, go find gasoline, go find water. You know how are we doing on food, because we've got a walk-in fridge and a walk-in freezer that didn't have generator backup. So we had a limited amount of time before. We were going to be in trouble there, but fortunately-.
Speaker 1:You lost power at the farm as well. Is that right?
Speaker 2:We lost power to the farm as well. Is that right? We lost power to the farm, but I still had water at the farm right and I have a generator that runs the lodges but doesn't run the kitchen, though I do have a, an alumni, who's made a donation to help us get a whole house generator. So the next in a thousand years when this happens again, I'll have generator power I don't know if it's going to be a thousand.
Speaker 1:We may be maybe a little sooner than that.
Speaker 2:Maybe. So I don't know God, I hope not, but you know so. So the the immediacy of this thing was what do we do? What do we do in the middle of the storm? What do we do? Trees were falling and you know, and you know. We have policies, and procedure manuals and disaster preparedness stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's generic stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I've written it, I've seen it Back when I was with you guys and it was like you get the sheriff or you get the fire department and they've got you know, they've got their blanket, kind of rubric stuff. It doesn't tell you how to actually act.
Speaker 2:It didn't.
Speaker 1:It didn't.
Speaker 2:And so where we went with it in the moment when it was really hitting the fan is I just started thinking Maslow, you know.
Speaker 1:Hierarchy of needs baby, that's right.
Speaker 2:And it really was about food and shelter, yeah, so we made sure that everybody had food, we made sure that everybody had a dry place, and we just went with that and lived in 12-hour increments for a while, and then things got better at the farm. First, um, ashville remained a mess. They didn't have water for six weeks, um, and that was terrible.
Speaker 1:I mean it was not potable water. They ended up with flushable water somewhere in there, but they didn't have potable. I mean, I was running water back and forth into town because we had access to water, living a little further out in the country and just taking jugs to families and to my wife's work and to my mom and that kind of thing, and you'd ride into town and just see what was kind of going on. It was wild. But you know and that brings me to this point, and you mentioned it when the when everything happened initially, which is, I don't think people really understand we think about, we think about maslow, you know shelter, food safety and that's your baseline level. But you're talking about a disaster like this and you're talking about people who suffer from mental health challenges and maybe they're on a very critical medication. I mean, you and I both know individuals who are on medications. Maybe they're on an antipsychotic and they're receiving a shot, and we know that their symptoms start to crop up even right before they get their shot.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then to miss that shot or to miss that med dose that they need next can be, I mean, devastating for them. Yeah, devastating for them. Yeah, and you know, fortunately you guys I mean fortunately you guys had another campus that you could go to. Fortunately we're very lucky.
Speaker 2:We're very lucky. Our campuses did okay.
Speaker 2:It's the people all around us that you know, were really crushed and my staff I mean so many of them were crushed. I've got a couple of people close to me I will call them out by name. They probably wouldn't want that but lost everything. I mean lost their homes. I've got I've got one gentleman, very important guy here, who when the flood was happening and the water was rising through his house, he put on his life jacket to get into his house to get some supplies. He had to walk through moving water to get some essential supplies out of his home which he ended up losing.
Speaker 1:Then you've got people who are out in the community. I've got a couple of clients that are like this. I had one that got dislocated right before the storm and then two weeks was just gone. We couldn't find it. We didn't know what. You know I'm happy to say that he re-emerged, you know, with like several layers of clothes on and, you know, dirty and muddy in the boots and everything else. But, you know, ended up at one of the places.
Speaker 1:Uh, we have 12 baskets here in the community. It's a gathering place for a lot of folks who just need a meal or need a place to be finally showed up there and we were able to get services and care and a place for him to live and all those kinds of things set up. But it was. I can't imagine, you know, being somebody who didn't have a campus that wasn't impacted or didn't have care providers like at Cooper East, which are very dialed into you know med management, caring for people's needs and having compassion for individuals who are suffering from conditions. You know mental health conditions and the needs that that requires, which is special being out in community and not having that as a resource. Did you guys get to see any of that kind of anybody trying to seek out help from you, or did you see any of that coming in and out as you were trying to make preparations for the Asheville campus or trying to get people in and out?
Speaker 2:People outside of the community looking for help. We saw a lot of that. At one point my maintenance director had hundreds of gallons of water that he was delivering to our community houses in Asheville and he got surrounded by people thinking he was, you know, giving out stuff to the community. It got a little scary there for a minute. It almost felt like civilization was breaking down there within the first couple of days. People were rightfully so just completely panicked about what was happening and we helped out wherever we could.
Speaker 1:You know, our first priority was to take care of our community.
Speaker 2:Like you said, we have very vulnerable adults here and I could not be more proud of how this community came together and took care of itself and took care of each other. It was pretty amazing, actually, itself and took care of each other.
Speaker 2:It was pretty pretty amazing, actually, and but you know, the message I wanted to send today, though, is, um, while in the moment, I feel like my staff did an incredible job and took care of our residents really well, most of those residents have moved on back into their lives and we've got new residents uh, the storm is not over for my staff. I was talking to Lisa Shackman today.
Speaker 1:Lisa is my chief uh program officer he's been on the show as well, yeah.
Speaker 2:I said I, I I'm talking to Todd today and about Helene and I said what you know because I was so, we're so in it, it's to, it's hard to reflect on it without you know. And I said what, what jumps out at you? And she said the longer, the, the, the unending impact on staff today to this day. You know, during the storm and in the aftermath of the storm day. You know, during the storm and in the aftermath of the storm, we are really great as a community of coming together and linking arms and taking on a crisis. We're in the crisis business. This is what we do and I feel so proud of how this group came together. But what she reminded me of is that you know, you, when you put all that energy into, into dealing with what we dealt with as a community, you, you're able to have the emotional energy in the moment to deal with it.
Speaker 1:You know you got the endorphins going right, right, it's like the firefighters in california now yeah you know what've been unbelievable.
Speaker 2:They've been such amazing heroes, you know. But at some point, when the fires are out, the fires are not out. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we're seeing that here with our staff.
Speaker 2:We're seeing staff that are just exhausted, emotionally exhausted, you know it's like there's this he used all these endorphins to get through the moment, but then that stuff dissipates and what are you left with? And so we're. We're trying as best we can to take care of people, but we've seen a lot of people leave. We've had a lot of residential staff, a lot of staff who said I'm just too tired to keep doing this yeah, I mean it's a trauma response really.
Speaker 1:I mean that's it's true for human beings across the board, kind of no matter what you're doing, um, but you know, if you, especially in something that's been a topic in in this show before, which is, you know, there's a certain kind of person that can work in in this kind of work, and we know that, um, and and not everybody who comes to it is built to do it long term, I think that if you have something that is your own trauma, that kind of takes from this well, that you have the amount that you the compassionate care, the being able to approach people who are having a difficult moment or are symptomatic, that need just a little bit of extra, which is something that kind of Caprice is known for, you know, giving people this very compassionate space to live and be and find community.
Speaker 1:But it takes patience and it takes time and it takes, at times, a lot of energy. If you've got somebody in crisis, you know they may need support for hours and hours or even days on end, and so you know, I think that people get, if they have their own tax that they're dealing with, they find that that well is diminished.
Speaker 2:And I think we're seeing that.
Speaker 2:I think we're seeing that for sure, yeah, you know, we met every day I mean, my team and I met and, just like I said, we lived in 12 hour increments in terms of what do we have to do next? We need I mean I said I had staff that would spend literally three or four hours a day trying to find five gallons of gasoline. And I know one day I drove over 200 miles looking for gasoline. I practically had to go to Gastonia to fill up, you know, a five gallon jug of gasoline Because we needed to. You know, we had generators in some of our houses and we needed to try to keep those fridges cool.
Speaker 1:How did you navigate the med situation Like how did that look?
Speaker 2:That actually, you know that was one of those things that was. We're really lucky. Our head nurse, Betsy, here at the farm, has a great connection with our bulk med provider and they were able to stay open, so we were able to. We were able to stay OK with medications campus.
Speaker 1:You guys have, you know, psychiatrists that are involved in the program and connected to you guys. Were they able to do like you couldn't do? Virtuals, you couldn't. You know, maybe they couldn't get there we had.
Speaker 2:Wi-Fi, which we didn't have for the longest time. But we, what we did with our clinical team in Asheville is we set up a shuttle service and every day at 630, they met in Asheville and got on our vans and drove to the farm, and so we were able to keep providing service.
Speaker 1:Wow, I mean, talk about, you know, just being resourced. It's like, well, let's do what we got to do. You know, let's figure out. I mean, live in every live in 12 hour increments is is hard on a person, no matter what, but adding the complicating features of caring for others while in the middle of a disaster, it's just such a big, it's such a tall order man, it's a tall order, but I, I don't.
Speaker 2:I want to be careful. You know, I also spent some time volunteering up in chimney rock or in weaverville, where there was legit devastation, where you know I've got video. I drove up to, uh, um, what's the place up on the green river?
Speaker 2:Um you know, yeah, yeah, um and seeing the river had been out of its banks by a hundred yards and knocked down mature trees for as far as you can see, and there were parts of homes along the river that were whole homes washed away and trucks and tractors rolled up in debris, and I mean Like folded around things yeah.
Speaker 2:I've got video of all of that. It's just incredible, just incredible. So in that regard regard from a physical damage standpoint we did okay and I'm not going to complain at all. I mean, what good would that do?
Speaker 1:um, but well, I think the thing that we can speak to like this is that he and this is something a big topic for me, and you know me well enough to know it's just a big topic, not just for me but for you, who's been an advocate as well you know there's this great divide. We know that there's a divide between public mental health and private mental health and there's this kind of narrow bandwidth in between where insurance is involved and actually paying for stuff, but it's narrow, very narrow, very narrow. Involved and actually paying for stuff, but it's narrow, very narrow, very narrow. Now we're trying to widen that gap, but it's slow and insurance companies keep fighting. For you know, I got a great insurance story. If you have time, well, let's get into it here in a minute.
Speaker 1:But the thing I want to I want to point at is, even in a disaster and some of it was luck, some of it was being high enough to be away from the river, or in a location that was a little buffered two campuses, those kinds of things there's some features to the reason why Cooper East was able to do well, but more than any of that is just the fact that you've got appropriate staffing processes, the ability to draw on resources, activate, you know, sending people out and getting things that you're going to need and money, honestly, like you know, and we've got a budget that we can work with and we've got people that can go and respond and we can do the things that we need to do to care for the people that we've that we're committed to serving.
Speaker 1:We can do the things that we need to do to care for the people that we're committed to serving. And the divide that exists between the public side and this private side. It's like here you've got an example of a therapeutic community residential treatment program that was actually able to forward this disaster successfully was actually able to forward this disaster successfully. It's like if you were to take out key points of what you would pass off to public mental health, what would you say they are?
Speaker 2:Key points. Well, regardless, I'll try to answer this, todd, that's a tough question. Well, regardless, I'll try to answer this, todd, that's a tough question, regardless of resources and keep and yeah, we're fortunate in that my alumni community saw that we were struggling and needed this or needed that. We had a family donate a Wi-Fi system to us, we had another one, you know, dedicate or donate a couple of generators to us, and we had people just send us money to go buy what you needed. So that helped a lot for sure. But the one thing I think that we have in common more in common than not is the concept that programs are people and you can't have a good program, whether it be public or private, and be effective, unless you have really fantastic people.
Speaker 2:And I have fantastic people who really put their needs. Second to taking care of our staff, they did amazing. I've got wonderful and amazing founders in don cooper, elizabeth reese, cooper, they, they, they suffered tremendous damage on their property in batcave I think. They were without services for almost, I think, 23 days. They had nothing. They were running out of water and propane and everything and and their road washed away and they had a neighbor killed in a landslide. But those two have been unwavering in their love and support for Cooperese. So what could I tell the public?
Speaker 1:system Program is people.
Speaker 2:I'm not really answering your question, because I think we both have great people that choose to work because I've worked in public and I've worked in private and what they both have in common is the people that stick are really excellent, selfless people. I know I was talking with some of the public agency folks and they were completely overwhelmed by this. You know there's a lot of people that just lost all services because their systems went down yeah.
Speaker 2:So I don't know. I think sometimes I I sometimes wonder that the secret to bridging that divide between public and private is figuring out a way to do this in a smaller set of communities instead of this gigantic institutional model where everybody is kind of lost, you know. I think, that public education. Our school systems are way too big. You know we've lost the ability to have relationships with kids, and I think the same is true when it comes to public and private services like what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't box store it.
Speaker 2:No, and what holds us together at Cooper Reese and a lot of the really excellent programs that I'm connected to collegially is our size. We're small, so therefore we have relationships with each other. I mean, we get mad at each other plenty, but that's okay.
Speaker 1:Right you know, I mean you have the capacity to serve 60 people.
Speaker 2:No, we can serve 80 or 90 people.
Speaker 1:Well, I was going to say at the residential level and then transitional levels of care. Yeah, and that's. I mean that's not a small number of people in my view. But when you look at community needs it does become small because they're staring in the face at hundreds. But I think you're right getting it down to manageable sizes, manageable caseloads. Program is people. I mean, we can get to the nitty-gritty of that, but that's kind of the over, that's the. That's the overarching theme. It's a good way to kind of summarize it. It's like well, program is people. You know, whether that's peer support or whether it's your staffing or whether it's, you know, your, your clinically privileged psychologist or nurse practitioners, that's out there making sure med management's done right. There are all kinds of ways where that principle can apply and I think it would kind of shrink it down to become something that's actually manageable. Because I would say that on the public side you'd probably get the very common and real answer that what they face is unmanageable. Right, it's like well, it's not.
Speaker 2:But you have to be resourced. That's the issue is, you've got to have resources. You have to have dedicated resources to support the most vulnerable people in our community, and I worry about that today a lot more than I did yesterday.
Speaker 1:Well, that brings us to this insurance thing. Tell your insurance story. Insurance plays a huge role in how this is playing out today.
Speaker 2:Well insurance in terms of reimbursement for services insurance.
Speaker 1:That's correct.
Speaker 2:yes, Okay, so my program in Asheville, our Cooper Rees at Asheville program, is an in-network provider and that's a relatively new thing for Cooper Rees, but we went in-network with some of the major providers. My program here at the farm is not we do some out-of-network reimbursement, but one of the big challenges Right right.
Speaker 1:Courtesy billing right.
Speaker 2:But one of the big challenges Right, Sorry, Courtesy billing, right, Right. So one of the big challenges during the storm was that I had all these people in our Cooper Reese at Asheville program who were receiving in-network benefits and and it's a really challenging experience to do that, because my clinicians have to see people a certain number of times a week and then they have to write a note that says certain things and the doc has to see them and the nurse has to see them, and it all goes into an electronic health record which the insurance company will look at every so many days and then they decide how many more days of funding they're going to provide and there are a lot of rules around and never is the number of days they're going to provide actually the number of days that the person probably needs, or very rarely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely true. But in order to become credentialed as a in-network provider, I had to. Organizationally, we had to jump through a lot of hoops and a lot of them, frankly, are bureaucratic derivative. I have to be careful because, you know, whatever my reps might see this, so anyway. So on the day that we evacuated Cooper Reese at Asheville, we moved these folks who are in network down to my farm, which is not in network, and so you would think that in a national emergency disaster like this, that the insurance companies would be no problem. We will continue to reimburse and forgive and you take care of our members. God love you. You would think.
Speaker 1:Negative.
Speaker 2:Wasn't that easy and I won't call out one provider, but one provider in particular. I had to have a Zoom meeting with all their who's and whoville and explain what we were doing and beg them to continue to honor their in-network relationship with their members who are now 40 miles away, safe, getting the same exact services. Because I moved all the nurses, I moved their doc down here. They were getting the same exact level of service, but I still had to beg and borrow to get them to continue. And they did, and they did. But that was huge Because imagine if they had said I'm sorry, dude, you moved and that location is not accredited, so you're just going to have to send them home. Well, I can't send them home because there's nowhere for them to go. They can't leave.
Speaker 1:Well, you know you're talking about something here, because I've been asking about this a lot. You're really back to this. Program is people scenario.
Speaker 1:That addresses the issue that we're referring to and I've talked about it with wilderness folks who are, you know, facing closures and things like that, or people who do different kinds of therapies, some of which Cooper East even has, but, like you know, experiential therapies like equine therapy or even horticulture therapy, like equine therapy or even horticulture therapy.
Speaker 1:If we stop telling people where we're doing it and it's like, look, this person's going to get all those basics, they're going to get a doc and they're going to get a therapist and they're going to get groups and they're going to get all of this care, and we are qualified to provide that, whether I'm at this campus or this campus or I'm in a barn, I'm capable of delivering good therapeutic care and providing good therapeutic outcomes. And if we stop fighting over where you are, say that facilities don't have to be checked off and things like that, but the exercise of trying to prove that what you're doing is being done in the right location or in the right environment is is ridiculous to me, um, and way beside the point. So program is people.
Speaker 2:yeah, not necessarily your campus it worked out and everybody did what I feel was right the process of getting to right in the middle of trying to find gasoline and water and Wi-Fi service.
Speaker 1:You were not appreciative of.
Speaker 2:I did not appreciate that. But at the end of the day everybody was cared for and they reimbursed for more days than they probably would have. But we had to jump through a few hoops to make that happen.
Speaker 1:And again.
Speaker 2:You know I had caravans of clinicians coming down, 26 every day for four weeks to make sure that continued to happen. So really my undying appreciation to my folks who were getting up two hours earlier than they normally would, leaving their homes that had no water, no power, no nothing, and coming down here and we, we made sure everybody was fed.
Speaker 1:But that's awesome. Well, I mean it's. It was quite the thing to endure, eric. Thanks for you know just running us through what the experience was like for you guys at Cooper East. Thanks for caring for people so well. I appreciate that you guys were able to contain community and provide in the ways that you did. I wish everybody had the chance to experience that level of care and compassion, but we'll figure it out before long. We're just going to keep talking about it.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that. If anyone's listening and needs care, call us. We've got availability. We'd love to serve you.
Speaker 1:And Asheville program is in network.
Speaker 2:In network Yep.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, Eric. Thanks for coming on the show today. This has been Head Inside Mental Health with Todd Weatherly on WPBM 1037, the Voice of Asheville. We'll look forward to being with you next time.