Mental health professionals, organizations, and individuals with experience in the mental health system pushed for Connecticut to establish eight peer-run respite homes in Connecticut to offer an alternative to hospitalization for those experiencing mental health crises during a public hearing before the Public Health Committee.
Peer-run respite homes are utilized in 15 other states and are staffed and managed by those with lived experience in dealing with mental health issues. The homes, which appear like any other house, are not locked facilities, allowing individuals to come and go freely during their stay. Guests are not required to take medication or engage in therapeutic groups, although they are offered.
The model allows the individual a break from potential stressors in their lives under the guidance of trained peer-support specialists who have personal experience in navigating mental health problems, and studies have found that peer-run respite houses decrease the need for expensive in-patient hospital stays and lowers suicide risk.
The bill would establish eight peer-run respite homes in Connecticut, one in each of the five mental health districts established by DMAS, and then three additional homes for people of color, transgender or other gender identities, and a Spanish-speaking home.
The bill had ample support from mental health advocates in Connecticut, who have been pushing for the state to establish such homes in Connecticut, particularly following an increase in mental health needs following the COVID-19 pandemic that overwhelmed Connecticut’s hospitals and depleted mental health resources.
“The outcomes associated with wholistic approaches to mental health and peer recovery services are undeniably far more beneficial in the short and long term,” said Michaela Fissel, executive director of Advocacy Unlimited, a peer-run nonprofit organization that focuses on mental health. “People within these spaces and places can recalibrate their internal experience, find meaning and purpose, and create a life worth living. Peer respites must be part of our approach as a state mental health system.”
Kathy Flaherty, executive director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, which offers legal help to individuals who may have been harmed by the mental health system, said in written testimony that Connecticut is “falling behind when it comes to implementation of this cost-effective, voluntary alternative.”
“The typical crisis response relies too much on coercion and control,” Flaherty wrote. “People are statistically about 100x more likely than average to die by suicide following discharge from hospitalization for a mental health crisis. In contrast, people leaving peer respites report improvements in their emotional help and satisfaction with their coping skills.”
“This keeps people out of the hospital and reduces crises long-term, while saving costs by preventing recurrent hospitalizations,” Jordan Fairchild, executive director of Keep the Promise CT, an organization established following Connecticut’s closure of mental health facilities, wrote in testimony. “By providing compassionate, mutual services, peer respites can save lives and reach people who would normally avoid clinical mental health services.”
Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, a physician and chair of the Public Health Committee, said people who go to the emergency room for a mental health crisis, are often put in a room to be kept safe, but don’t get the one-on-one attention they might be seeking.
“Nobody is giving them the attention with the empathy and the pain the person is enduring, and the emergency rooms are so overcrowded it is getting difficult to get the first-hand, one-to-one conversation in a meaningful manner people are hoping to get in that difficult time,” Anwar said. “Collaboration with existing mental health departments and peers is something that we will have to brainstorm as well. This bill doesn’t do it, but it’s something worthy of a conversation.”
Lawmakers on the committee also had questions about the training for peer-support specialists who would be tasked with staffing the peer-respite homes and the possibility of the respite homes getting overwhelmed with demand.
“I just feel like we may be setting ourselves up for another situation where we’re trying to provide care but in a manner that cannot be sustained,” said Rep. Keith Denning, D-Wilton.
Representatives Peter Tercyack, D-New Britain, and Jason Perillo, R-Shelton, questioned whether Connecticut could “piggy-back” on existing peer supports and homes in the field of substance use disorder, rather than create a new system specifically for mental health, which could create confusion.
“With the best intentions, I would hate to create a new system that, while offering a wonderful service, can also make it more complex for the individual in need,” Perillo said. “I think we need to have a bigger conversation about how to, in a more wholistic way, a coherent way within existing systems meet the need that you’ve identified and clearly exists.”
The General Assembly has passed several large bills in the past two years related to mental health, largely focusing on youth, and both the state and hospitals have been moving to expand psychiatric services in the state. Connecticut Children’s in Hartford recently opened a new psychiatric and medical wing in 2024 with an additional 12 beds.
The Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) had issued a request for proposals to open and operate a single peer-respite home in Connecticut in 2023, but there were few, if any, takers. Advocates in the mental health community believed the budget of $500,000 was not enough to pay staff, and that the proposal was not in line with the philosophy and studies of the peer-run respite home model, namely that it appeared too clinical and coercive. Instead, advocates wanted something more in line with the Afiya House in Massachusetts.
Both the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Advocacy Unlimited, Inc., indicated in testimony that the typical 7-day psychiatric stay in a hospital costs more than $40,000, whereas a 7-day stay in a peer-respite house costs between three and four thousand.
The Connecticut Hospital Association also supported the peer respite bill, saying that in 2023 they had, on average, 163 people per day in emergency rooms seeking mental health treatment, and 53 people per day waiting for an inpatient bed.
Connecticut had 388 suicides in 2022, according to statistics from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, down from a high of 426 in 2019.
“It is often said that the people closest to the problem are most likely to come up with solutions that work,” Flaherty wrote. “Peer-run respites were developed by us, for us.”
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