'People Are Really Traumatized': Mental Health Center Opens In Skokie

SKOKIE, IL — In response to an unmet demand for intensive outpatient mental health care amid the coronavirus pandemic, a pair of North Shore natives teamed up to open a new treatment center in Skokie.

Skyway Behavioral Health opened last week in the seventh floor of the medical office building at 4709 Golf Road. The 12,000-square-foot space includes about 15 therapy offices, five group rooms, a large experiential kitchen, a staff lounge and yoga therapy room.

Julie Friedman and Laura Lange, co-founders and executive clinical directors of the center, told Patch that Skyway offers comprehensive dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT.

Friedman said the skills-based therapy is designed for patients with multiple problems related to unregulated behavior and emotions.

"Somebody who feels like their emotions are all over the place, somebody who might be frequently suicidal or self-harming, somebody who's engaging, maybe, in eating disorder behaviors that they want to stop," Friedman said. "So DBT is all about both symptoms' stabilization in stage one, and then, in stage two, creating a life worth living — with the assumption that most of the clients that will come in here really feel like they're living in hell and want to get out of hell."

Compared to cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy focuses more on changing behaviors than thoughts.

"Let's act your way into feeling and thinking differently, so it's a little bit of a different framework in terms of: We are intensively changing behavior with the idea that thoughts and feelings don't really change all that much until the behavior changes," Friedman said.

DBT also focuses on the dialectic — combining strategies focused on how to change the things one can change and accept the things one cannot.

"And the idea of holding two opposing views at the same time," Lange said. "There's a mindfulness focus in DBT, which is a very, very important concept of focusing and bringing back to the present moment in order to notice thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, which really helps and is really integral with trauma treatment, and any type of behavioral or emotional change."

Friedman, a Glenview native and clinical psychologist, and Lange, a licensed clinical social worker who grew up in Deerfield, previously worked together at the Eating Recovery Center in Chicago.

"Julie actually was my boss and recruited me, and then we actually ended up building a partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient and a residential program together, focused on binge eating disorder and comorbid mood and anxiety disorders and comorbid trauma," said Lange, an Evanston resident who went into counseling after spending time in the Peace Corps in Peru.

During the pandemic, the business and clinical partners shifted to outpatient care.

"And then really got hit with a lot of referrals, a lot of referrals for trauma, and long waitlists, and we really had no place to refer patients to," Lange said. "There's a high demand and limited resources."

Skyway offers an intermediate level of care that is less than inpatient psychiatric hospitalization but more intensive than one-a-week outpatient therapy sessions.

Friedman said the center aims to offer intensive treatment while allowing clients to still live at home, since patients are not always able to generalize their treatment gains from full-time residential care to a home environment.

"It was too contained. They didn't get to practice any of the skills that they were learning," she said. "So really, we thought that this was a much better option, because people who are trauma survivors particularly, we don't want them to leave their support networks and home environments in which they feel safe and secure."

Available treatment plans include an intensive outpatient program of either three days a week for three hours a day or five days a week for half-days. Or, for patients who need a higher level of care, the new center offers a partial hospitalization program for six hours a day, five hours a week.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had varying effects on people struggling with mental health. Friedman said she began to see a lot more trauma in patients, some of which was reignited by the collective trauma of the pandemic.

"People are really traumatized," the clinical psychologist said. "I saw a lot of eating orders that had been in remission that were now having a recurrence. Mood disorders tended to get worse. Anxiety disorders — some got better, because the whole world was kind of anxious, and so it was normalizing. Many got worse. In general, I would say most of my patients got worse and needed more help."

So in the summer of 2021, after Friedman and Lange decided to open their own center, they identified an office building near Gold and Gross Point roads as a suitable site.

"It was conveniently located for our city clients, our North Shore clients and right off the expressway for our western suburb clients and southern suburbs as well," Friedman said. "And we live close by, and we wanted to help our community, without having to go down to the city anymore. We were finding clients didn't want to go to the city, for a lot of reasons."

Skyway has hired about 35 of a planned 40 employees, about half of whom are therapy staff. It is in the process of getting credentialed with all major commercial health insurance companies as well as the student insurance programs for Northwestern, Loyola and other local colleges and universities.

The center has capacity to treat about 75 patients in its partial hospitalization program and another 75 in intensive outpatient treatment, Freidman said. For new clients, the center offers free, 90-minute assessments with a master's level clinician.

"If people think that this might be helpful for them, they can call, do the evaluation, get our recommendations and kind of leave it at that, if they decide not to pursue programming," she said. "But just getting something in the door is usually the hardest part. Once they're on phone with us, or on screen with us, they are pretty excited about it."

This article originally appeared on the Skokie Patch