Stemming Santa Barbara’s Mental Health Crisis

Mariela Marin gets anxious any time they look at the waitlist of people seeking mental health services. On a typical day, their team of 19 therapists at the Community Counseling and Education Center will provide critical counseling, support groups, workshops, and classes to as many as 45 people. 

But Marin, the center’s executive director, also knows that another 80 people won’t get served.  

“It’s so disappointing,” they say. “When folks reach out for support and you put them on the waiting list, you miss an opportunity because they were brave enough to come for support.”

It wasn’t always this way. In 2017, when Marin joined the venerable organization founded 37 years ago by Patricia Cooper and Jaclyn Henretig, the Center could steadily move people into therapy. So what changed? Santa Barbara is now grappling with skyrocketing rates of mental illness that so many communities are experiencing.

The Center has tried to catch up, redoubling its efforts as a vital safety net for the community’s most vulnerable. Some are people who have fallen into precarious situations like homelessness or suffered the loss of a job or of a loved one. Some are coping with substance abuse. Others suffer from serious neurological disorders like severe depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. The pandemic and its long-lasting fallout has only magnified the scale of the problem.

“For some folks the pandemic put them into real, practical places of insecurity, including the loss of support networks that they thought were steady but ended up not being steady,” Marin says.

Today, the Center is focused on expanding its counseling services so that no one who needs mental health support gets turned away. The typical counseling session costs $95 for 50 minutes. Marin says that 98 percent of the Center’s clients are paying $30 or less. That means grants and donations are crucial to keep alive a counseling program that supports people who are already struggling with other issues.

“Everybody deserves support and deserves to have a space to be seen and heard,” Marin says. “Folks already have enough difficult decisions to make, they shouldn’t have to make a decision between, ‘Do I eat today, do I buy my kids those shoes for school, or do I actually work on this anger that could cause more harm to my kids?’”