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On Our Minds is the name of KERA's mental health news initiative. The station began focusing on the issue in 2013, after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Coverage is funded in part by the Donna Wilhelm Family Fund and Cigna.

Texas Health Arlington Opens Large Mental Health Wing

A new wing at Texas Health Arlington will take adolescents, adults, and the elderly battling mental health problems like substance abuse, stress, anxiety and severe depression.

About one in four adults has a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. In North Texas, more than 258,000 residents 18 and older experience a serious episode of depression each year.

Ramona Osburn, senior vice president of behavioral health for Texas Health Resources, says the new 35-bed facility in Arlington will take a comprehensive approach to mental health care.

“One of the things we’re looking at,” she says, “is integrating physical medicine with behavioral medicine. And to do that you really need to have a behavioral health facility that’s close to a medical facility because more often than not you have so many behavioral health patients that come in with co-morbid medical disorders that you need to treat the whole patient.”

The behavioral health facility at Texas Health Arlington will accept individuals with a behavioral health diagnosis for any of the center’s inpatient and outpatient programs.

To schedule a free behavioral health assessment at Texas Health Behavioral Health Center Arlington, please call the 24-hour Texas health Behavioral Health Help Line at 682-236-6023. Visit TexasHealth.org/behavioral-health to learn more about the program.

Lauren Silverman was the Health, Science & Technology reporter/blogger at KERA News. She was also the primary backup host for KERA’s Think and the statewide newsmagazine  Texas Standard. In 2016, Lauren was recognized as Texas Health Journalist of the Year by the Texas Medical Association. She was part of the Peabody Award-winning team that covered Ebola for NPR in 2014. She also hosted "Surviving Ebola," a special that won Best Long Documentary honors from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI). And she's won a number of regional awards, including an honorable mention for Edward R. Murrow award (for her project “The Broken Hip”), as well as the Texas Veterans Commission’s Excellence in Media Awards in the radio category.