A NEW VISION for Crisis Care Huntsman Mental Health Institute Crisis Care Center “We aren’t designing this for someone else. We are designing this for us, our families and our friends.” — Michael Dolan, AIA, Principal, FFKR Everyone knows someone who has been in an emotional or psychological crisis. Mental health ailments do not discriminate; in fact, it’s likely that at some point in your life, you, a family member or a friend has needed the aid of a mental health professional for diagnosis or treatment. For those experiencing mental health crises, the Huntsman Mental Health Institute (HMHI) Kem and Carolyn Gardner Crisis Care Center is the first line of care. Designed by FFKR Architects and architecture+ (a Troy, New York, firm specializing in behavioral health care settings), the HMHI Crisis Care Center was completed in 2025. Michael Dolan, AIA, principal architect at FFKR, said, “It was quite humbling to work with Huntsman Mental Health Care Institute; they are so invested in helping people in crisis.” Crisis centers offer an alternative to overcrowded emergency rooms that are ill-suited for mental health treatments. Emergency rooms provide medical/surgical spaces for professionals to attend to a human body in distress; they specialize in “blood and guts,” focusing first on medical stabilization before mental health evaluations. As ERs address a wide variety of medical problems, they often have only one psychiatric clinician, an on-call psychiatrist or a telepsychiatry service. For someone experiencing psychological distress, the waits in an ER can be long, noisy and stressful. People in crisis can also end up in jail, which can exacerbate suffering. Certainly, correctional facilities are the appropriate destination for a person who has committed a serious crime or poses an ongoing danger, but jails are built for containment and consequences. To a person whose actions are driven by severe depression, psychosis, mania, panic attacks or suicidal thoughts, jails can be frightening or traumatic. The HMHI Crisis Care Center is a very different environment from an emergency room or jail. It is a clinical center with specialized treatment programs to address a wide range of acuity levels among mental health patients. It provides law enforcement personnel and ambulances with a place to bring individuals in crisis, avoiding the emergency department and diverting people from jail. It accommodates walk-ins, transfers and drop-offs. To address such far-ranging and diverse populations and the associated design challenges, the project team engaged representatives from key user groups to form a Core Stakeholder Team. The Core Team informed the project team how providers could best deliver services to a wide range of patients. “They helped us through programming and conceptual design by focusing on care models. We were able to formulate how the space would be used on a refined level: how to receive patients, who would be received, where, and what they would need. They were very precise in terms of their processes, as well as identifying the unique qualities of populations they serve in our geographic location,” Dolan said. The overall goal was to match the response to individual needs, which can differ radically, while protecting both the individual and the public. Complicating the design of the Crisis Center was the building site: 900 West and 3300 South. It is located near several Salt Lake County facilities and sandwiched between the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, the County Jail and the South Salt Lake Men’s Shelter. Although convenient in some ways, one of the project team’s initial concerns was how to dispel the notion that the center is just an extension of the shelter and not welcoming to all. The Advisory Council worried that walk-ins, or “everyday people,” would not come to the center for needed care because the stigma of mental health would be compounded by the location of the facility. 20 REFLEXION
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