CLEVELAND – The May Dugan Center is expanding its behavioral health services with an aggressive three-year plan already underway. Not only is the center able to increase the number of people it helps, but it now has a plan to provide resources never before provided for people of all ages and backgrounds.

People often know the May Dugan Center for their trauma recovery program, which works with victims of crime over a 16-week course. Well, since most trauma and issues stemming from traumatic experiences don’t just go away in 16 weeks, May Dugan’s expanded behavioral health facility will now be able to help those beyond that timeline.

Made possible by a $300,000 grant, May Dugan’s three-year extension project for behavioral health is officially underway. There is a multi-step plan to get the unit where it needs to be in that timeline. Steps include building a plan to help clients transition from high-intensity care to lower-intensity care and recovery, developing culturally specific services for specialty groups, hiring more clinical staff for continuing education, and increasing medical billing and revenue. so that the program can become self-sufficient.

“We will increase our services to possibly include peer support for substance abuse and mental health and add a child and adolescent therapist,” said Ann Spelic, Director of Behavioral Health at the May Dugan Center. “We just recently hired an LGBTQ therapist who can serve teens and adults so we can reach that transition age of young people who are really struggling. We have an older adult therapist that we just added and a Spanish speaking therapist.”

Spelic said that since 2020, the growth in demand for services has not slowed down. The May Dugan Center Behavioral Health team consists of seven people who help around 250 people each year. At the end of the three-year expansion plan, the team will grow to 13 employees.

Assistant Director Andy Traeas said if it weren’t for the recent $8 million renovation, none of the behavioral health expansion plans would have been possible.

The May Dugan Center marks the inauguration of a completely renovated building

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“With the renovation, we were able to add more offices, which means we can add more staff, which means we can add more people,” Traeas said. “We managed to double the number of group therapy rooms. We’ve actually been able to physically expand our space so we can grow our programming to meet it.”

Eventually, the May Dugan Center will also look to add a pharmacy and pharmacist to help patients have easy access to medications needed for treatment. The program should be fully operational by 2027.