ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) —
Some formal presentations were halted for a big, hearty hug Monday morning, as CooperRiis Healing Community marked its place in Mental Health Awareness Month.
Alumni of the residential treatment center on Zillicoa Street in Asheville were invited to say a few words, and 33-year-old Melanie Thompson quietly stepped up to tell the crowd, “CooperRiis basically saved my life.”
“I came here and this was the first place that didn’t give up on me,” Thompson said. “This was the first place that treated me like a whole person and not a number.”
Standing nearby, co-founder Lisbeth Riis Cooper stepped in for an embrace, as her husband, co-founder Don Cooper looked on with a smile.
Since her days in the program, Thompson has moved out on her own, earned a culinary degree, gotten a job and is living an independent life. It’s exactly the kind of outcome the founders were hoping for 21 years ago, when a decade of dealing with a loved one’s struggles through the frustrating mental health maze inspired them to start a holistic therapeutic program that treats each person as an individual.
“Our message is a mental health diagnosis is not the end of the world,” Riis Cooper told 828newsNOW.com. “Recovery happens…and it happens on a very individual level.”
Since June 2003, CooperRiis has grown from a start-up non-profit serving four residents with 25 staff at The Farm in Mill Spring, North Carolina, to short- and long-term residential mental health programs at four sites that have helped more than 2,200 people over the years.
The latest addition is a Partial Hospitalization Program, or PHP, that offers stabilization after hospitalizations or therapy that helps people avoid hospitalization when they are experiencing mental health challenges.
One big change greatly expands access to CooperRiis programs, since the PHP now is considered in-network with insurance providers Aetna, United Healthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Cigna, president and CEO Eric Levine said.
“People are people and they have needs,” Levine told 828newsNOW. “We want to serve anyone that has needs.”
At a courtyard event Monday outside Brower Hall, Levine presented the founders with a proclamation signed by Asheville Mayor Esther E. Manheimer declaring Monday, May 20, 2024, to be CooperRiis Mental Health Awareness Day.
It also was a chance for people who had been served by the programs in the past to step up and make impromptu remarks about their lives then and their lives now.
Paige Lieberman talked about how the programs taught her life skills on top of assisting with recovery. “I learned how to make sauerkraut as part of my mental health recovery,” she said with a laugh “Who else can say that?”
She said in the programs she wasn’t treated like a sick person or as just a number. She was treated as a person, she said.
One woman brought her new baby to introduce to the gathering and said her family had a bright future because of what CooperRiis did for her.
Cooper, the co-founder, said, “We like to think at CooperRiis, this is where respect meets recovery. That’s what we’re all about.”