Model to bring empathy to kids in crisis comes to CT hospitals. Here’s how it helps

Hartford Courant – Tuesday, August 18, 2026
By Livi Stanford

Since the pandemic, the number of youth visiting emergency rooms for anxiety, suicidal ideation and depression has skyrocketed. Increasingly, that means children in emotional distress spend hours, days or weeks under fluorescent lights in austere environments as they wait for care. The loud noises, bright lights and empty rooms themselves can add to families’ fear.

Some hospitals in the state are trying to improve the places where children, teens and parents find themselves in crisis and looking for help.

Stamford Health on Aug. 31 is opening the Bennett Child & Adolescent EmPATH Unit and PATHways Program to provide stabilization and rapid evaluation for patients experiencing a behavioral health emergency.

The national model, which stands for Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment and Healing, provides “empathetic recovery-orientated care for children and adolescents in crisis,” according to Stamford Health. There are just 60 such units in the country.

Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital is expecting this week to open a new crisis intervention center that combines the therapeutic space of an EmPATH unit with a traditional emergency room.

Dr. Raviv Berlin, chair of psychiatry at Stamford Health, said data shows the EmPATH model, which stresses compassionate care and reduced use of interventions such as restraints, has been successful in other communities.

“Over 75% of kids can be discharged safely home within 24 hours,” he said of the model. “We are decreasing hospitalization rates by 50%.”

Stamford Health’s EmPATH unit includes five separate rooms where youth can stay, with most patients being treated within 24 to 48 hours. When released, they are sent to a PATHways program, a 12-week outpatient program providing patients with continuity of care.

“Patients are admitted swiftly, including those under involuntary psychiatric detention, and receive comprehensive psychiatric evaluation, active treatment, and time to stabilize before discharge decisions are made, typically within 24 to 48 hours,” Berlin said.

The unit features a soft color scheme and a large mural in a common area depicts trees, animals and mountains. Each room includes a drawing of an animal and nature, in keeping with the theme.

In a patient room there is a digital kiosk that allows patients to draw, upload pictures of family and play music and games.

An adjoining sensory room features “soothing lights and gentle sounds to assist patients in calming their nervous system without the need for physical restraints,” Berlin said.

“Our goal is to keep patients out of the room because we want them here,” Berlin said, pointing to the chairs and common area.

“We want them to play cards and board games with each other,” he added. “So, this ends up being a real therapeutic environment, a healing environment rather than just boarding them and keeping them in their room until they get to the next step.”

Berlin said patients also participate in mindfulness, which is integral for healing.

“I mean the whole idea of mindfulness is tuning out from outside distractions and being present with yourself, free of judgment and learning ways to appropriately and healthily self-soothe and calm yourself,” he said.

Berlin said the unit will provide “acute crisis stabilization and therapeutic interventions after a psychiatric evaluation such as medication initiation and/or management, crisis counseling and individual, group and recreational therapy.”

State Rep. Corey Paris, a Stamford Democrat who helped advocate for state funding for the new EmPATH unit, said the “unit is bringing a lot of dignity and discretion to an already stigmatized and traumatic experience for families and children.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, who along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, helped secure federal funding for the new EmPATH unit, said at a tour of the facility Thursday that one of the things that he hears most often is from parents who have nowhere to turn because “increasingly providers don’t accept insurance.”

Murphy said he was interested in seeing how the facility fared.

“When you treat kids compassionately, when you treat kids as kids, they respond,” he said. “When they walk into this facility, they’re going to know immediately that they’re being taken care of. I think the environment they’ve created here is going to be really transformational.”

Causes

Psychiatrists said the youth mental health crisis can not be attributed to a single cause, but several, including the prevalence of social media, trauma, bullying and racial violence.

The World Health Organization reported that “depression, anxiety and behavioral disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents” and that suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15- to 29-year-olds.

Prevention measures are key to addressing the issue, including screening children and working with families, psychiatrists said.

“If we need a psychiatric inpatient or residential or long-term state hospital bed (for children), we have already failed these kids,” said Dr. Pamela Hoffman, associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center.

Prevention through reaching out to help identify children who may have trauma and depression in the early grades is key, she said.

But child advocates and lawmakers say the crisis is exacerbated by a shortage of mental health resources for children. Meeting their needs requires addressing stagnant Medicaid rates for behavioral health and ensuring health insurance covers behavioral needs, advocates said.

“What will it take to move the needle on having families and children not coming in and out of the emergency departments?” said Sarah Eagan, the executive director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy. “Because part of the problem is we have not invested adequately in infrastructure of support for children. Every part of our system is largely uncoordinated and underfunded. And when you don’t have a well-funded, coordinated system of care for children and families, then kids bubble up when they’re in crisis.”

Murphy, who has teens of his own, said it is fundamentally different to be a kid today than it was 20 years ago.

“The things kids have to deal with, between online bullying and the chemical changes that happen to your brain when you are spending four or five hours a day on the screen, is cataclysmic,” he said.

Berlin said social media and bullying have negatively impacted children and adolescents.

“Historically you would come home at 3 o’clock, and home would be a safe place,” Berlin said. “But now there’s texting. There are social media posts. You’re still being gossiped about online. And so, there is no way to remove yourself in a way that’s safe and peaceful.”

Berlin said racial violence, gun violence, global and climate change, also impact children and adolescents’ mental health.

Along the tour Murphy asked, “What is the most common reason that a kid shows up here? Is it generally self-harm? Suicide attempts, or is it an episode of violence?”

In response, Berlin said, “It’s more suicidality than violence in the teens.”

“So what percentage of the kids who show up here are based upon suicidal ideation?” Murphy asked.

“A majority,” Berlin said.

Warnings for parents

Reflecting on the mental health challenges of youth, Kate Dias, president of the Connecticut Education Association, said, “We have a generation of kids who missed out on some of those social, emotional interactions in the early years.

“Those things that we really emphasize through play-based learning,” she said. “That idea of collaboration and cooperation. Some of these key attributes that you learn in places on the playground or during gym class. We have this whole group of kids that didn’t really have those experiences that way.”

Dias said it is integral to make services more widely available to every community and family.

“And I am a firm believer that the earlier we intervene, the better,” she said.

Hoffman said as the youth mental health crisis continues to worsen, she is seeing younger children who are having suicidal ideation.

“And so the lethality is much more concerning now than I think it was earlier,” she said.

Hoffman said the stressors that parents are enduring in a challenging world have also impacted children.

“I think we are in a place where a lot of parents are burnt out and feeling very uncertain,” she said. “And I don’t think that kids are protected from that uncertainty because of their age.”

Dr. Asima Zehgeer, associate professor of psychiatry at UConn Health, said, “Children are highly sensitive to the emotional environment around them, and when parents are struggling with chronic stress, it can become more difficult for families to provide the time, stability and emotional availability the children need.”

But Zehgeer said this is not a failure of parents but an issue of broader social and economic pressures.

Murphy said EmPATH units are a tool but not a solution.

“In the short term, we’ve got to build more facilities for kids that are in crisis,” he said. “But in the long run, our strategy cannot be built around simply treating. It’s got to be built on prevention. The biggest challenge is trying to understand what’s happening environmentally to kids that is causing them to be in much higher rates of crisis. I think a lot of that has to do with technology that is poisoning our kids, and if we don’t get a handle on that technology, I think we are going to need more and more of these facilities.”

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