http://goo.gl/IVrpel
Community Access is not a bed-and-breakfast, although it feels like one when you walk through its unmarked door off Second Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Also known as Parachute NYC, this quiet, seven-bedroom facility is one of four publicly funded mental health centers in the city for people on the verge of a mental health crisis.
These respite centers have no medical staff, no medications, no locks or curfews and no mandatory activities. They are secure, welcoming places where people go to escape pressure in their lives and talk to trained “peer professionals” who are recovering from mental illness themselves.
Aside from places like this, New Yorkers battling serious mental illness have little choice but to check in to a hospital or a hospital-like crisis center when their lives spin out of control. Some need to be hospitalized for severe psychosis and depression, but many others end up in the hospital because they have no other options.