Chippewa Falls treatment center marks 45 years of helping people overcome addiction

Jun. 29—CHIPPEWA FALLS — When L.E. Phillips-Libertas Treatment Center admitted its first patient on July 5, 1977, it offered treatment primarily to people with alcoholism.

Forty-five years later, the chemicals have changed, with opioids and methamphetamine now joining alcohol as the main sources of addiction.

Through it all, executive director Toni Simonson said, the focus has remained the same: Staff seek to provide compassionate care to help patients move past their addictions.

L.E. Phillips-Libertas has provided treatment for an estimated 80,000 people since it opened on the east side of Chippewa Falls, Simonson said. While the bulk of those patients came from the Chippewa Valley, the facility serves patients from across Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa and continues to be the largest of its kind in the state.

The center, which has 22 beds available for withdrawal management and 16 for residential treatment, serves an annual average of 1,375 individuals going through withdrawal and 170 needing medically monitored residential treatment.

"Without this facility, I don't know where people would go for the care they need," Simonson said. "I know we have saved lives."

That's a message staff members hear regularly from patients.

"We have patients who write letters, call and email all the time thanking us for basically saving their lives," Simonson said. "The staff bulletin boards are filled with those notes from patients."

With the potential for that kind of impact, the center can be a rewarding place to work.

Just ask Dave Peterson, a 63-year-old registered nurse who has worked at L.E. Phillips-Libertas, a service of HSHS St. Joseph's Hospital in Chippewa Falls, for the past six years. He insists it is his dream job to be helping others overcome their addictions.

As a recovering alcoholic and drug addict himself, Peterson understands the challenging journey patients face and seeks to share his firsthand knowledge and experience to help others avoid the depths to which he sunk.

"I hit rock bottom, I was lost, I became a hollow shell of a man and I had nowhere else to turn," said Peterson, who had tried treatment and relapsed before finally getting help through a support group.

Though Peterson said he has maintained sobriety for 23 years, he is careful to remind his patients that he is recovering, not recovered, when they ask why he still attends support group meetings. Alcoholism is a disease, he said, echoing the determination made in 1956 by the American Medical Association and the approach followed by Hospital Sisters of St. Francis since the late 1800s.

"I explain I have alcoholism, not alcoholwasm," Peterson said.

Patients seem to appreciate his ability to relate to what they are going through.

"I hear it every day: 'You get us. We get you,' " Peterson said. "It's all about developing that rapport, that trust."

Peterson returned to school at age 49 to pursue his dream of becoming a detox nurse and has never looked back.

"I absolutely love it. I found my purpose in life," he said, calling the center "an absolute pearl" that offers the best chance patients have of reaching recovery.

The concept of having staff members who have experience with addiction dates back to a forerunner of L.E. Phillips-Libertas. The Chippewa Valley Bureau of Alcoholism, an autonomous unit at St. Joseph's Hospital, opened in 1948 with a director and three assistants, all of whom were recovering alcoholics, according to an article at the time by the St. Paul Dispatch.

The newspaper described the joint effort by Chippewa County and the state of Wisconsin as the "first of its kind in the world" to act upon the growing recognition that alcoholism is a disease and "not just a bad habit to be scoffed at and derided."

A key difference, Simonson said, is that today even employees with lived experience also have professional training.

"Those people are hugely valuable to the organization and to the field," Simonson said. "Somebody who has walked in the shoes of the people we're delivering services to can bring a different perspective. They've gone through the loss, the heartaches and the trials of withdrawal and relapses. They can give hope and encouragement. They are an example of 'this is what recovery looks like.' "

While treatment at L.E. Phillips-Libertas used to depend mostly on the 12-step philosophy based on spiritual principles, facility staff now recognize that approach doesn't work for everyone, so they also incorporate evidence-based and medication-assisted methods.

Medication-assisted treatment can be especially effective for people struggling with addiction to opioids, a group that now makes up close to half of the center's patients, said Simonson, who also serves as executive director of behavioral health for Prevea Health and HSHS Sacred Heart and St. Joseph's hospitals.

That shift, a reflection of the national opioid epidemic, is particularly frightening because of the increasing presence of fentanyl and other synthetic substances in opioids, she said. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Part of the threat comes from the risk of people buying drugs secretly laced with fentanyl and then taking their regular dose of heroin or other opioids without accounting for the increased potency.

"We see fentanyl a lot, and typically people we find it in didn't even know they were consuming it," Simonson said. That is why it's so deadly and why there's been such a huge increase in overdose deaths."

An estimated 107,622 people died from drug overdoses last year in the United States, an increase of 15% from 2020, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About two-thirds of those 2021 deaths involved fentanyl or another synthetic opioid.

In 2020, the latest full year with data available, there were 1,227 overdose deaths in Wisconsin related to opioids, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services has reported.

More than ever, the patients seeking help today tend to have developed dependency on multiple chemicals — often some combination of alcohol, opioids or methamphetamine — which makes their treatment more complex, Simonson said.

One thing that hasn't changed over the years is the basic ingredient necessary for patients to enjoy a successful recovery.

"The basic key," Simonson said, "is for them to be at a place where they recognize their illness as a disease and they want to get the help they need to live a life in recovery."