Becoming the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center
In 1972, the St. Lawrence State Hospital was renamed the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center, commonly abbreviated SLPC. By 1981, the Trinity Building was constructed as a new home for the institution due to legislative and financial reasons. The Trinity Building is still the location of the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center today.
Services
The St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center is the current institution that offers its programs and services to much of New York's north country. The institution not only serves St. Lawrence County, but also Jefferson, Franklin, Essex, Lewis, and Clifton Counties. Because of its remote location in rural northern New York, the psychiatric center provides a fresh location for individuals in need of the SLPC's services. Currently, there are three residential programs that are located on the grounds of the institution. These include Adult Services, a Sex Offender Treatment Program (SOTP), and Children/youth Services. Each of these three programs offers a huge array of services that can be tailored to match the needs of individual patients.As the SLPC website explains, "A comprehensive range of services are offered at the SLPC, including individual and group counseling, diagnostic evaluation, psychological testing, crisis intervention, psycho medical evaluation, vocational assessment, education, socialization, task and skill training, physical therapy, structured learning therapy, occupational therapy, and recreational therapy. In addition, community programs are available at the SLPC." Read more about the services here.
The SLPC also focuses on outpatient care, and as a result, many outpatient residential programs are available for those in need. A main focus of the SLPC is to continue treatment for those who need it. Because of this, many programs focus on integrating people suffering from mental illness back into society as functioning members of the community.
The Institution In The News
Today, the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center has run into its fair share of obstacles. Most of the old buildings that were once the St. Lawrence State Hospital have been closed and condemned, and the demolition of such buildings is continually on the forefront of the local news. Many of the services have been cut, and there have been threats to cut funding even more extensively, and even to close the institution completely due to financial problems. The North Country community has been fighting to protect the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center and the valuable services it provides to much of upstate New York. In April of 2014, Senator Patty Ritchie announced that New York State budget will include $44 million in new funding for mental health care. Read more about it here, or for more recent developments, here.
All sources for this information can be found under the "References and Works Cited" link of the "Acknowledgements" tab.