A year after its doors opened on South Broadway in Lorain, the Lorain County Crisis Recovery Center has served more than 1,600 clients and logged more than 2,900 visits, according to leaders tracking the facility's first twelve months. The $19 million center, built to give people in behavioral health and addiction crises somewhere other than an emergency room or jail cell, opened October 1, 2025, and has operated around the clock ever since.
The center at 6130 South Broadway supports individuals and families working through mental health and addiction crises, according to MHARS Lorain County. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and is open to any adult 18 or older in Lorain County. Riveon Mental Health and Recovery operates the facility, and its CEO, Don Schiffbauer, has overseen the center's first year of operations.
As reported by News 5 Cleveland, the facility also houses the regional call center for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline, meaning anyone who dials 988 can be referred there or simply walk in without an appointment. Access hinges on what the person themselves defines as a crisis rather than any formal checklist — the station's report describes it plainly: it's a self-defined crisis, and nobody has to check a box to get help.
A Gap That Left People Without Consistent Care
Before the center existed, people in crisis often ended up in emergency rooms or in jail after encounters with law enforcement, and those released from jail frequently had no connection to the mental health and recovery system afterward. Michael Doud, CEO of the Lorain County Mental Health Addiction and Recovery Services Board, has pointed to that disconnect as the gap the center was built to close, addressing a hole that previously left people in crisis without consistent follow-up care.
The facility offers 32 treatment beds — 16 for adults needing short-term mental health stabilization and 16 for adults in substance-use crisis — according to a blog post from MHARS Lorain County. The model centers on a 23-hour observation window meant to assess and triage each person before routing them to the right level of ongoing care, per the same organization's earlier account of the center's design. Riveon's own services page notes that no one is turned away due to an inability to pay.
Drawing Clients From Beyond County Lines
The center has drawn clients not just from Lorain County but from Sandusky, Erie County, Ashtabula, Ashland and another state, per the first-year review. That reach beyond county borders reflects a broader pattern playing out statewide: federal data shows 75 of Ohio's 88 counties have a shortage of mental health care providers, according to a report from WOUB, and the state has leaned on roughly $90 million in COVID-relief funds to help seed crisis facilities like Lorain's across Ohio.
Leaders running the Lorain center have also acknowledged a shortfall of their own: there should have been more outreach to faith-based communities in the early stages, and the center is now working to close that gap through training and education efforts, per the earlier News 5 account.
Part of a Wider Statewide Build-Out
Lorain's facility is one of several new crisis centers that have opened or are opening across Ohio. The Glick Recovery Campus in Cleveland was scheduled to begin accepting patients Sept. 28, offering around-the-clock walk-in care with 16 psychiatric stabilization beds; 12 withdrawal-management beds were to be added in January 2027, and its operator expects it to serve roughly 12,000 people a year, according to cleveland.com.
Further south, the James Hagen Crisis Care Center in Chillicothe opened in July with an eight-bed crisis stabilization unit and a receiving area where police can bring people in crisis instead of taking them to jail or the emergency room, the WOUB report notes. Not every rollout has gone as smoothly — Coleman Health Services' Behavioral Health Urgent Care in St. Clairsville had yet to admit any patients four months after opening, the same report states, as it awaited state licensure and worked through hiring difficulties. Ohio has also announced an $18 million scholarship and internship program for graduate students pursuing behavioral health degrees, aimed at easing the workforce shortage behind some of those delays.
