Two years ago, Hackensack Meridian Health CEO Bob Garrett stood at a groundbreaking ceremony in Montgomery and said something that brought a hush to the crowd.
In his nearly 40 years in health care — in which he worked through a historic merger and a once-in-a-century pandemic — only one thing caught him off-guard: The explosion of mental health services for young children, he said.
Garrett said then that he never imagined there would be a need for inpatient psychiatric beds for 7-year-olds.
On Friday, those beds opened.
Hackensack Meridian Health officially opened a $40 million, 43,000-square-foot expansion at Carrier Clinic in Montgomery, adding 52 inpatient beds and lowering the minimum age of treatment from 12 to 7.
The need is there.
“Even though the number of children and adolescents with mental health issues is increasing significantly, more than half do not receive adequate treatment,” Garrett said. “This project underscores our commitment to prioritizing child and adolescent mental health as a cornerstone of transforming health care.”
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Garrett has been working to change the approach to mental health — and the willingness to address it — for years.
It has not been easy.
When Hackensack Meridian Health merged with Carrier Clinic seven years ago, it was not a popular decision. It required, Garrett said, courage and vision from a board willing to make a long-term commitment to behavioral health.
That commitment has aged well. The crisis Garrett saw coming has arrived, and it is bigger than most people imagined:
· One-third of all emergency department visits at children’s hospitals nationwide are for suicide attempts;
· Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for children ages 10-14;
· Thirty percent of girls in that age category have seriously considered attempting suicide;
· Carrier alone has seen a nearly 30% increase in admissions over the past two years.
The $40 million, 52-bed expansion that opened Friday is not a solution, Garrett will say. It is a start.
It is why HMH has been expanding telehealth options — more than 9,000 sessions for children and adolescents in the past two and a half years.
It is why HMH helped build the New Jersey Pediatric Psychiatric Collaborative, which has placed behavioral specialists in pediatricians’ offices and made more than 30,000 referrals to mental health experts since its inception.
It is why the Hackensack Meridian School of Health is building residency programs in psychiatry, chipping away at a shortage of child psychiatrists that Garrett has called acute for years.
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At a national health forum earlier this year, Garrett called for a “Mental Health Moonshot” — a coordinated, fully funded national effort modeled on the campaign that reduced cancer death rates by 30% in a generation.
It is a great idea. It has not yet happened.
What has happened is a $10 million gift from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, a $10 million state commitment steered through by Sen. Andrew Zwicker and Assemblyman Roy Freiman, and a facility that can now treat a child in psychiatric crisis who is 7 years old — something Carrier Clinic could not do before Friday.
Dr. Catherine Cunningham, Carrier Clinic’s Chief Medical Officer, offered the line that best captures what Friday’s opening means.
“We are not just treating the crisis,” she said. “We are investing in a lifetime of well-being for this patient population.”
That is what Garrett has been arguing for years — that behavioral health is not a crisis-management problem but a lifetime investment, one that pays off in ways that are hard to quantify and easy to ignore until a 7-year-old ends up in an emergency room.
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Garrett is grateful for the progress that has been made. On Friday, he thanked some of the people who have joined him and HMH on the journey.
“Thanks to the grants we received from our legislators, along with private donations and the generosity of the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, today’s opening of the Carrier Clinic expansion shows the power of partnership in turning vision into reality and creating new pathways to hope for young people and their families,” he said.
It’s all part of pivoting to a crisis he never thought would come.
“I never thought in those 40-plus years that we would ever think about 7-year-old children attempting suicide,” Garrett said Friday. “I don’t know about all of you, but when I was 7 years old, that wasn’t even something that crossed people’s minds.”
