NATCHEZ, Miss. – Plans are underway for placing a psychiatric facility in the old doctors’ offices near the now-closed Natchez Community Hospital.
Southwest Mississippi’s mental health agency is working to lease the Jeff Davis Boulevard building and convert it into an eight-patient crisis stabilization unit for treating mentally ill people, said Adams County board attorney Scott Slover.
This has not been finalized, but Sheriff Travis Patten said the facility is much-needed and would be an alternative to having to jail people deranged or in psychiatric distress who have nowhere else to go.
At a meeting Thursday of the county Board of Supervisors, Slover and Patten discussed plans being championed by Southwest Mississippi Behavioral Health, a nonprofit, public service agency. It receives government and private funds to extend a variety of services for people with mental illnesses.
A federal judge last year ruled that Mississippi provides inadequate community-based services for people with mental problems. This has resulted in many emotionally disturbed people to be warehoused in psychiatric hospitals or unnecessarily jailed due to lack of space elsewhere for them to be treated.
Southwest Mississippi Behavioral Health has been striving for months to bring a crisis stabilization unit to Natchez. It tried last year to get the city’s permission to convert the old Elks Club building on Lower Woodville Road into a CSU, but Natchez aldermen in October blocked that. Nearby residents objected to having a psychiatric unit near them. The site required a city rezoning change to allow such a facility.
Slover said the Jeff Davis Boulevard property is already zoned for such a facility since it was a health-care complex. The hospital closed in 2015. The property is adjacent to a residential neighborhood.
Real estate developer Jody Foster owns the property, Slover said, and is to lease the old doctors building to the mental heath agency. Converting it to an eight-bed psychiatric facility is contingent on receiving the necessary funds, Slover said.
Slover represented Southwest Mississippi Behavioral Health in asking the city last year to rezone the Lower Woodville Road property.
Officially named A Clear Path of Southwest Mississippi Behavioral Health, the public-private agency relies on government grants, Medicaid and private dollars. The Adams County Board of Supervisors does annually give the agency about $77,000. Based in McComb, it provides nine Mississippi counties with various mental-health services ranging from stress counseling to drug rehabilitation. It has three facilities in Natchez.
