New Bellevue addiction treatment clinic opening soon

A new addiction treatment center is slated to open in Bellevue by the end of January, bringing a new style of treatment with it.

The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation is planning on opening an outpatient treatment center in the Overlake Medical Pavilion. Foundation president Mark Mishek said the center will be offering a variety of treatment options ranging in intensity from 12 to 25 hours a week. The center will have a specific focus on opioid addiction.

“We’ve been relentless about examining our clinical model in light of the opioid crisis,” Mishek said.

Central to this is the comprehensive opioid response 12 step process, known as COR-12. The treatment is similar to the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step process which has a goal of getting patients free from all drugs, including widely prescribed medications suboxone and methadone. Other treatments will be provided as well which utilize anti-craving drugs depending on individual cases.

“We have a specific program that could involve specific medication they may be on, and specific group therapy,” Mishek said.

Much of the center’s focus is on counseling and group therapy. The clinic will only be open on weekdays to start but may expand to weekend hours, too. Treatments span outpatient counseling to partial hospitalization, where patients live on their own or at a sober home and come in for up to 25 hours per week. Other services include mental health and therapy to support recovery as well as psychiatric services, staff psychologists and family therapists.

The clinic will additionally offer a program called Teen Intervene which focuses on teenagers. It is designed to be a place where parents who find their teenager drinking or doing drugs can bring them in and also involves educational classes for parents. Courses for middle and high school students will be available, as well as juvenile justice intervention.

The clinic itself will be located in 5,500-square-feet at the Overlake Medical Pavilion off 116th Avenue Northeast in Bellevue. The clinic will take up about a half of a floor.

The opioid epidemic in the U.S. has increased dramatically in recent years, with more than 49,000 people dying from overdoses involving the drugs in 2017. Opioids were involved in nearly 68 percent of overdose deaths.

In the same year, 258 people in King County died from opioid-involved overdoses and the percentage of opioid overdoses involving heroin increased from 23 percent in 2008 to 56 percent in 2017, according to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. The presence of fentanyl in heroin, a much stronger opioid, has caused major problems for health officials across the border in Vancouver, B.C.

While Mishek said Washington state has a proportional number of people using opioids and overdosing when compared to other major metros in the country, many Washingtonians have sought treatment at Hazelden Betty Ford centers in Oregon and California. At one point, their Portland site had more patients from Washington than Oregon. That prompted the clinic to look at expanding to Washington.

“We always felt, and have been planning for a number of years, you know — we really need to go where the patients are,” Mishek said.

The Hazelden Betty Ford in Bellevue will be located at 1231 116th Ave. NE. The foundation operates 16 clinics in the U.S. and is based out of Minnesota.