A New Vision for Behavioral Health in San Diego Coming to the Midway District?

By Lawrynce Cecio

A new grant proposal, approved by the County Board of Supervisors, seeks a $100 million state grant to construct a “behavioral health wellness campus.” The facility would be built on county-owned land in Point Loma next to the San Diego County Psychiatric Hospital, replacing a vacant complex on Rosecrans Street, with the capacity to serve approximately 20,000 people per year.

This proposal addresses an extreme and growing need. In the San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos Metro area, 323,000 people (11.6 percent of those aged 12 or older) were classified as having a substance use disorder in the past year; a rate higher than both California (9.6%) and the national average (9%).

The campus is designed to alleviate intense strain on local systems, where psychiatric units are consistently full and emergency departments are overcrowded. By offering integrated care for mental health and substance abuse, the facility aims to reduce hospital bed usage and dependence on law enforcement for crisis response.

County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer framed the campus as a critical shift from a fragmented system to a unified one.

“The kind of framework where you get substance abuse treatment in one location and mental health treatment somewhere else, we know, makes no sense, because these are so often co-occurring conditions,” Lawson-Remer said. “They kind of reinforce each other clinically, and I believe that this wellness campus will allow us to engage in both.” She expressed strong confidence in the proposal, adding, “We think this is an incredibly important investment for San Diego, and we think it is a very competitive project, and it’s a very visionary project.”

This model of providing a steady continuum of care is a direct response to a severe systemic failure. A recent survey found 40% of San Diego County arrestees report having a mental health diagnosis, often placing individuals in situations where law enforcement, which lacks specialized mental health training, becomes the de facto first responder. The campus aims to relieve this pressure by handling crises through dedicated healthcare services.

Patients would have access to a seamless system where they can move between inpatient and outpatient programs, maintaining contact with specialized counselors, doctors, and nurses for withdrawal management and relapse-prevention therapy. The goal is a future where law enforcement is less frequently needed to address mental health crises, and there are less re-offenders due to their access to appropriate care.

The need for this investment is perhaps most urgent for San Diego’s youth. According to 2023 statistics from Mental Health America, 15 percent of California teens had at least one major depressive episode in the last year, and perhaps most pertinent, 70 percent of those adolescents received no mental health services.

A survey by the California Health Care Foundation found that “1 in every 14 children in the state has an emotional disturbance that limits functioning in family, school, or community activities” and “the number of teens admitted to children’s hospitals as a result of suicidal thoughts or self-harm has more than doubled during the last decade.”

This has become an immediate crisis that needs handling, especially for those in protected communities, “half of LGBTQ teens considered suicide in the past year, and 18 percent made a suicide attempt,” according to Mental Health America.

Confronted by these stark statistics, the project took a significant step forward this week. After receiving initial approval in August, more detailed plans were passed without debate, revealing a total budget that has increased from $150 million to $210 million; a figure that now includes the estimated $27 million value of the county-owned land.

Securing the county’s $100 million request will be highly competitive, as it comes from the second round of Proposition 1, which distributes more than $800 million of the $4.4 billion behavioral health bond passed in March 2024. While the grant would not fully fund the project, a successful award would trigger the county to work with private partners to develop a financial plan to secure the remaining funds.

There is certainly a lot more work to be done on the project, however those involved continue to speak to the importance of this project and the enormous positive effect it would have on all of San Diego County.

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