Treanor Talks: Architecture, Planning & Design

How Buildings Can Affect Mental Health

• TreanorHL • Episode 10

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Mental health is one critical component of our overall wellness and ability to live a healthy and fulfilling life. According to the National Institute of Mental Health Disorders, 1 in 4 American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, and many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time.

From the hospital we’re born in, to the schools we attend, to the home we live in, the spaces we inhabit for most hours of the day affect our mental health. In this episode, principals from several of TreanorHL’s design studios take a deep dive into a few of these different building types and uncover how they can affect our mental health.

In this episode, we hear from:

Learn more about the projects referenced throughout:

TreanorHL is a national architecture, planning, and design firm located in the United States. The company holds a firm belief in sharing resources and insights with professionals, clients, and building users to shape the space we use to live and grow as people. For more information, visit treanorhl.com.

Megan Brock:

Welcome to TreanorHL Talks, a podcast about architecture, planning and design trends as well as current events and noteworthy topics in the field. I am your host, Megan Brock, introducing today's topic, mental health, and how the buildings we inhabit throughout our lives can have an influence. Mental health is one critical component to our overall wellness and ability to live a healthy and fulfilling life. According to the National Institute of Mental health disorders, one in four American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, and many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Some disorders can show symptoms as early as childhood or adolescence. The state of mental health in America was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with adult self-reporting of mental disorders increasing to as high as double the rates expected pre-pandemic. Resources such as state-funded long-term facilities and psychiatric beds have also declined nationally throughout the past decade, resulting in overwhelmed emergency rooms and even correctional institutions not designed for the type of care needed. Couple this with children affected by a lapse in regular school attendance and socialization, and the need for a holistic approach to mental healthcare in our communities becomes a clear need. From the hospital we're born in, to the schools we attend, to the home we live in, the spaces we inhabit for most hours out of the day affect our mental health. Let's take a deep dive into a few of these different building types and uncover how they really can affect our mental health. At TreanorHL, we provide specialty design for healthcare facilities, pre K through 12 schools, higher education facilities, and detention facilities with a specific focus on restorative justice. Our team designs for mental health in every single one of these facilities. Principals from each of these design teams have joined me today to talk more about it. Thank you all for being here. Go ahead and introduce yourselves and share a little bit more about your studio and the facilities you design.

Jeff Lane:

This is Jeff Lane, and I am with TreanorHL. I'm in the Justice studio. I'm a principal, and I've been working on justice work for over 23 years, and really, really enhancing and engaging in trauma informed design and normative design here over the last five to seven years as we've seen this evolve within our profession.

Stephanie Grose:

And this is Stephanie Grose. I am a principal within our Education studio. I, like Jeff, have been working on education projects for over 22 years. So have seen things kind of come and go along the way. And I'm really encouraged by the conversations that have been happening. Also within the last five to seven years within our school clients with a focus on how to better support students.

Steve Carr:

Hi, I'm Steve Carr. I'm a principal with TreanorHL. Like Stephanie and Jeff, I've been practicing architecture for a good deal longer, but I've been focused only in healthcare for about 30 years. It's my passion. And they became evident probably, I don't know, 15 years ago, of how the behavioral health mental health world was connecting, well always has been, tied at the hip with health care, but not an obvious thing that people were trying to cover until it started to put a lot of pressure on health systems.

Megan Brock:

So what is the importance of mental health awareness to you personally? And what is the importance to us at TreanorHL?

Stephanie Grose:

I think you know, as architects, our basic oath that we take is to preserve health, safety, welfare and the projects we do. And if we aren't talking about mental health, we're missing a big component of that. So to me, that's where it's important for us to really bring this to the forefront in all the different ways that the physical environment can support it. And when I think about it on a personal level, I have a lot of friends who have children who are coming into their teenage years, and a lot of our conversations center around their pressures and their anxiety and depression and the pressures that they face every day. And I think about, this is really wonderful that we can have these open conversations because I can also think about my grandmother and how in her time having these kinds of struggles are something that you kept quiet. And I saw and continue to see multi-generational impact of that. So it's there's a lot of pieces to this that I take to heart and I just think it's so important.

Steve Carr:

Yeah, Stephanie, I think it became so obvious a couple of decades ago, really, there are so many social and cultural issues that are happening globally. that behavioral health is a root cause of If, and if we're going to really be professionally, if we're if we're really going to be good problem solvers, we have to understand the root cause the problems that we're trying to solve. So I think that's, for me is important, both professionally and personally.

Jeff Lane:

What really drove for me, behavioral health was being a part of some processes that we went through in Douglas County over a 10-year period, to see a community that really captured the idea of helping not just incarcerated folks, but helping the whole entire community, and being able to be a part of a process that thought about a Crisis Recovery Center, a process that thought about the judiciary and pretrial services, the thinking about how do we engage mental health in a jail component and how all of those come together. I think, for me, that really brought to the forefront, the lack of agencies that were out there, the lack of help that was out there. And so that's really triggered an element in architecture that needed to happen.

Megan Brock:

And what about the clients we work with? What is the importance of mental health awareness to them? And what about the end users, those who are actually living and using and working within these facilities day in and day out?

Stephanie Grose:

I think, you know, a lot of our clients probably across the board have a universal struggle with staffing shortage, and how that impacts the services that they're able to deliver. And I think about obviously, schools in particular, and just how the ratio of school psychologist or school counselor to the number of students is completely out of proportion. So here we are having these these teachers and the staff that try to make up for that pandemic, not only the academics, but that social emotional learning, but they don't have the funding or the resources to do so. And I like to think how we can pull our brains together and tackle it through that kind of lens as well. And that's a little harder nut to crack.

Steve Carr:

Our firm is positioned well, to help, you know, we do work with university housing, in schools, justice and health. And if we can connect the dots, you know, in the in the projects that we're doing between clients, and gaining an understanding of you know, where their pressure points are, relative to behavioral health, mental health, we can really be an important player by helping them connect those dots.

Jeff Lane:

Well and Steve, I think it's the idea that we collaborate together as a group, too. So as a firm, we've actually been able to take elements within health or higher ed, or our K through 12 group and our justice group and have conversations about how are we addressing some of these things, whether it's both across the board, or bringing it to a project that we may have?

Stephanie Grose:

Yeah, we sure do. And especially in the smaller towns, those partnerships really make all the difference. And we've seen that connection between healthcare and schools happen with clinics being implemented within the school spaces so that it's easily accessible, which is probably the first and foremost important thing when it comes to supporting mental health and other health services. And it's all kind of right there.

Megan Brock:

So how do you design for each of these very specific facility types for positive mental health outcomes? What are some of those elements? And what do they look like? How are they used?

Steve Carr:

Our clients in healthcare, they recognized just from a business perspective, they needed to make some kind of change to survive, they started pushing care upstream. You know, it's kind of the analogy that they've used converting to more of a population health model. We have a huge aging population in the United States, that will create high acuity, health care, multiple morbidity issues, that will continue to put pressure on the hospital systems. But what they've been seeing with with it on the behavioral health side is they need to be able to take the time to manage those cases in a different way. And they need also their staff needs to be collaborating better, and literally back-to-back in space with each other, where someone can recognize that someone has a physical ailment that it could be tied directly to some other problem that they have, and they can refer them to their colleagues, you know, that can help them with that. We have a project in Colorado that we did and there's a lot of people there that really need help and they didn't have any primary care in in their town for over 15 years. And they were all forced to drive down to the front range they ended up putting together, it's actually the County Department of Human Services put together a project that we work with them on that combined clinical health, they partnered with a hospital system to provide a clinical help, and a behavioral health group with their social services all in one building. So that all of those professionals could be back-to-back in one facility and treating people, you know whether they were there for food stamps, or whether they were there because they just broke an arm. So that was a real fun project to be involved in. And it's been working very well for them.

Jeff Lane:

That's really neat. Steve, you talk about the smaller communities and you talk about how do you engage some of those in projects from the standpoint of they may be lacking in some of the agencies or other the continuum of care in facilities. And that's one of the things that I think we all see from an architectural perspective. But I also would say here over the last few years, or even even longer, there's more engagement with smaller communities with those agencies. Either they're coming into their own communities, and then engaging, whether it's county facility, the groups, the health groups, the schools, or they may be partnering with larger communities that have those same agencies and actually bringing those groups together to help support. And I think that's the other pieces we've lost, or we used to not have in the smaller communities, those pieces, how do we now capture that? And how do we bring those those elements to them? Both from an architecture perspective, as well as from, how do we educate them having some of those conversations?

Steve Carr:

There's a stigma, too, that people may have when they need help. And in the project I was talking about, it was actually in a main street location, we provided a front porch and a front living room. So people would be comfortable coming in the building. It's in a small town, everybody knows everybody. So they're like, oh, I saw you go into the building the other day, you know, what are you doing there, and it doesn't matter, you know, and they help break down that stigma by creating a facility there that is very welcoming, and open. And you can be there for many different reasons. And it's comfortable for someone even just to walk in from the street, that doesn't necessarily know if they need any help, right? They have a little giveaway place for clothing, and a fireplace. It's a very open facility that way.

Stephanie Grose:

That's pretty interesting. It follows a similar path as the schools, you know, the counseling services used to be something that was a little bit remote and had a backdoor entrance to keep everything real secretive. And we've seen this trend of pulling it out and centralizing it within the school again, going back to accessibility, but it's destigmatizing. And then it's also centered in the information commons or the library. So nobody knows why you're there. But you pop in to say hi to your counselor, or maybe there's a meeting that you know, your parents come in to have with somebody just really makes it, you know, part of the everyday and not so secretive.

Jeff Lane:

Yeah, at the Crisis Recovery Center, we did something very similar, we actually created two entrances. So we have the public entrance and, and a drop off location that you and I could come to if we brought somebody in our own community. But if you wanted to be a little bit more discreet, we had the side entrance, so that you can still walk into a really well lit lobby space that's inviting non-obtrusive, and having a conversation with reception as to where I need to go. And those are things that I also think as we look at architecture and how we design, those are things to bring that anxiety down. Those individuals that are coming there many times they either don't want to come or they're afraid to come. So how do we help within our architecture to do some of those things. And I think capturing natural daylighting and thinking about acoustics within those spaces has just been very engaging.

Steve Carr:

One of the things that's been happening in Colorado is Mental Health First Aid. There's a program where you can get training, they focused on teachers, law enforcement, EMT, etc. I've actually taken the course myself, but it helps people recognize first aid when someone may have an issue. I think what's helped a lot in the last couple of decades. Our emergency departments who had this huge problem, because police officers were dropping people off that belonged somewhere else. And I had one of my clients say, hey, they brought a person in so we're going to leave them here and he said, well, are they under arrest? Are they not under arrest? That's not how it works. And so that's what the crisis center that Jeff is referring to is another option instead of just dropping them in an emergency department where they're going to go into a black hole for the next six hours. Our Community Care Center in Idaho Springs is the the project I was referring to in Colorado and that project. Literally what happened was a former mayor of the town died on the way to the hospital. And that was the catalyst for the whole community to come together. We worked with them for about eight years before they ever even started anything, identifying sites and trying to find out how to get funding, they ended up working out their partnership with Centura Health, specifically St. Anthony Hospital, which is right down the valley. And the big reason that St. Anthony Hospital was concerned, is people without insurance, were being put in ambulances and sent to St. Anthony, it was the closest hospital. So they were getting these patients that had a very expensive ambulance ride that they couldn't pay for, didn't have insurance. And so it was piling onto the St. Anthony Hospital. So they were very motivated to help Idaho Springs get a clinic in place. So they could, as I mentioned earlier, move upstream and provide preventive care. They also started a program with their ambulance drivers, providing them with a list of addresses of people that they could check in on once in a while, you know, elderly people in town families that had had issues. So that was also a really smart thing they could do for a small town, they really put together an awesome holistic healthcare program.

Jeff Lane:

So on the Crisis Recovery Center, there are a multitude of groups that brought this project together. It really started years ago, as we looked at the justice system, and the community. And so there was a need to look at medical mental health beds at the jail. And there was also the need to think about alternative courts, mental health court, drug abuse court that the county currently didn't have. And in that conversation, the discussion of what came out of that was the Crisis Recovery and Treatment Center. So we recognize that there was these three elements that needed to be woven together and engaged in some fashion. The county partnered with Bert Nash Mental Health Group, an agency in the community, and then LMH, as well, the hospital there, and the community, and then the county. Now, other agencies have been a part of the process and partnered as well throughout the community. But those were the main three. And they came together and said, Let's let's To Steve's point, it was, there were individuals that were being go do this. picked up by law enforcement and taken to the hospital, or taken to the jail, those became the places so they booked them in, but they really didn't need to be booked in or they take him to the to the hospital. And when they went to the hospital, they go to the emergency room, and then they go sit there for six hours. But that, that wasn't what they needed. They needed some help, they needed maybe a detox component, it may be that that I need to come in and and have some folks talk to me and get back on track to where I'm trying to go. And so Crisis Recovery Center became that building, and they were able to capture and create a 72-hour component that allows for individuals to come, whether that's through the law enforcement now being able to bring them directly to that facility, or somebody like you and I that have a spouse or a family member that needs some care. But it became a continuum of care, too, because part of what this facility is going to do is those folks that are currently in the county jail that are receiving mental health help from Bert Nash or other groups, if they are leaving the jail and back out into the community now have a place to go and can have consultations in lieu of having to go maybe to Bert Nash. So it allowed for some continuum of care to happen in that community.

Stephanie Grose:

And I hear you guys talk about this holistic approach with the different agencies coming together. With school, sometimes it's more of a micro holistic approach, if that makes sense. There's a discussion around the whole child. And it's, you know, the social well being emotional, physical, intellectual, all of those sorts of things. And it's pretty interesting to think about because, you know, for some of the students, school is their safest place. Home isn't secure. And so making sure that we're reaching out beyond just the academics is just another way to approach all of this. I listened to a presentation not that long ago on the science behind the whole child approach. And they talked about, you know, the brain chemicals and things that happen when students experience connection, and have a sense of belonging, and how the chemicals that the brain release actually counteracts the effects of cortisol or the stress that they have. So that kind of like what you were talking about, Jeff, the trauma informed design, creating environments that facilitate the sense of belonging is such a powerful way to do that.

Megan Brock:

So how can we as designers, working on all of these different facility types, work together to better anticipate mental health needs?

Steve Carr:

I think we're pretty good at empathy for the people that we're designing our buildings for, and going back to the root cause, you know, of what's happening with the, with the users of the facilities that we designed. The other thing, Stephanie, that I was going to ask you is a champion is really critical, right, on the client side, and having a client that's empathetic, and a client that is a champion. Schools are constantly hammered for budget, I know that Denver Public Schools did a zip code hotspotting thing. And they kind of figured out where a lot of their cases were coming from for the hospital for the Denver Health Hospital. And then they put clinics into those neighborhoods, in schools, in elementary schools, or they partnered with them in some way. I'm not sure if it's literally a clinic, but they partnered with them, to help them staff, the school nurse, or even if they can afford to have a school nurse anymore, you know, that's just rotating around between different schools. But that also was a huge issue. Right? It's been able to put together something that can get funded.

Stephanie Grose:

Right. Absolutely. I mean, they the school districts are hammered for funding in every which way. And this often kind of drops to the bottom, especially rural communities that they would never be able to support a full-time nurse or a full-time psychologist, you've got one person that's traveling around to all the schools, I think what you described with the clinics being put into the schools that they've figured out had the most need is pretty intriguing. I'd love to learn more about that.

Steve Carr:

Yeah, I think that's been going pretty well for them. The other thing, I think that there is cross-training people so that if I'm a security person, they're not saying, you know, I see that going on over there but that's not my job. They're willing to go out and pick something up in the parking lot or partner with somebody, you know, in our case, at a hospital, they, they're partnering a lot with the greeters the front door, where they can actually see out, you know, the front of the building, and they can see, did somebody fall down, out there. But getting rid of that it's not my job mentality, and getting more with less, right, which is what they all have to do, because they're cross-trained to identify problems, and help if they're in a position to do that.

Stephanie Grose:

This kind of leads into a little bit of the discussion around, you know, safety and security in those schools, I read some interesting statistics that I think it was up to 70% of school shootings, the root can be tied back to bullying that the shooter experienced. And so, you know, you see a movement to do all of these hardening type activities in schools kind of going more toward the prison effect rather than the learning environment that we're striving for. And it makes me wonder, and it makes our whole studio wonder, about the different ways in which we can provide security without necessarily making it feel hard like that. And I know that the Justice studio is doing quite a bit of work probably coming more toward the school direction and lessening that feel. So it seems like there's some sort of in the middle part that we're both arriving at.

Jeff Lane:

I think that's a great point. Because I'm right with you. I was just as you were talking through this idea of schools hardening, and I'm not going to date myself at all, but when I was going to school, we didn't have that conversation, right. But there is that safety security element in the justice world. In the past, there's this idea that we want to make it as hard as we can. But I think to your point, Stephanie, we're now going hey, wait a minute, bring the anxiety down, create an environment that is a little bit softer. And thinking about color a little bit more. How do we bring natural daylighting in? I know we need to do a scanner and a magnetometer, I get all those things. How do we engage the officer that's going to rove around? They're there, they're part of the environment, but they're not here with the big stick. I think those are things that as we continue, and I know that our groups are currently working on a couple projects together to think about that, collectively.

Stephanie Grose:

I'm thinking about a particular project that we worked on recently, it's a kindergarten through 12th grade school. And that particular client was really about making sure students felt like they belonged there. And so while there are the secure elements at the front door, they're not as noticeable. And then, you know, security happened more naturally throughout the design of the building. Also, for us, providing daylighting within the whole facility. A natural secure outcome of that is that you have this transparency and you have a vista out to you know, the front of the building or the back of the building. And so, you know, while we do have some clients that say we really we want to have that bulletproof glass and we want to have everything you know, contained and locked and that sort of thing. We are also seeing a number of schools push back and say, hey, we're at the heart of the community. And we want people to feel that connection when they come into this building, especially our students.

Steve Carr:

You know, in our case, the treatment areas, we're setting the space up so people can have a really good conversation with eye-to-eye contact. You can include the family in a genuine conversation circle, and at the same time provide, you know, for the needs of the physician, or the psychiatrists, if we position them near the door, because things happen. And they sometimes need to just be able to get out, you know, they don't put the family between them and the door. So just the ways that we're organizing those rooms, but most importantly, setting them up so they can have a really good conversation, and they can be connected with each other.

Stephanie Grose:

That's so important, that kind of human scaling of spaces and setting up for those interactions. And in the educational setting, we talk a lot about making sure that we're not shoving a kindergartener into a big soaring adult space, because what better way to create anxiety than to do that, and just making sure that we're keeping the child's scale in mind and the impact that that has to your, your well being. And then also those different types of spaces for different types of students. You know, some kids want to sit on the side and observe, some kids want to be in the middle of everything, and making sure that we provide those opportunities for all types is important.

Jeff Lane:

You know, when you talk about those types of things, I think about furniture, I know, years past, and just from the justice side, furniture was not friendly, but it's gotten softer. And so we one of the things we did in the Crisis Recovery Center was because of the types of individuals that might be in that facility, they were concerned about putting furniture in there that was furniture you may see in, in a school or in a hospital, because people can pick them up and do damage with them or hurt somebody or whatever else. So we actually worked to find a more dense furniture, when we looked for that the client asked us, we're okay with that, but we still want it to feel like it's normative. And I'm still in my living room. And so we worked with a couple different vendors to find furniture that's like that, it fit a little bit better than what it would have if it was, you know, corrections-type furniture. And so that's the other piece that we're starting to see within our world to help the process, too, as we think about behavioral health.

Stephanie Grose:

And we were seeing furniture that is designed to allow students to move. So when they feel that urge, or you know, the what we might have typically called the ADHD-type students in the in the past, you know, they need to move to be able to stay focused on what they're doing and stay a part of the class environment. So seeing that come to the forefront is pretty interesting, and learning the science behind that as well. I'm always interested in the science behind things.

Jeff Lane:

Well speaking of science, I want to share a statistic that is estimated that 97% of incarcerated individuals in the United States have experienced one or more traumas in their lives. So when you think about that, that's pretty big deal. So we're talking about agencies, we're talking about other building types, how does architecture help to engage that and I know we talked about natural daylighting, we've talked about some furniture, we've talked about, how do we handle finishes? I also think it comes down to how do we handle the spaces that these individuals are going to be in? And what does that look like at the end of the day? Is that changing? For us, when we think about those spaces, it really comes down to how do we bring it to a more normalized environment, because most of the folks that are going to be in are there for an amount of time, it's not five minutes, or an hour or a day, they're there for three or four days or potentially 16 days or longer. So how do we engage the architecture to be a little bit more normative?

Steve Carr:

Actually just giving people choices about the space that they're in, so when they get somewhere, they can find a place where they're comfortable. You know, the other analogy is like in a restaurant or a lobby, you can sit as a group or you can sit as an individual guests the wall at a bar top and look out the window. Just giving people choices, you know, whether they're under lock and key, but they may not feel that way.

Jeff Lane:

That's a good point. I was thinking as you were talking there, Steve, the idea that quiet rooms and things that we actually incorporate into some of our facilities. You talked about the choice of do I have a roommate, or do I not have a roommate? There are individuals that that is a good choice, right? Some of them want somebody to be in the same sleeping room, and some don't, some have a real anxiety issue with someone else in the same room.

Stephanie Grose:

You know, it kind of goes back to that idea of of science and the neuroscience of how people perceive space. And when you can create that sense of trust and safety and belonging, that oxytocin gets released. And that is what counteracts the effects of trauma. And so can our architecture actually heal?

Megan Brock:

I think you may have just titled our episode, Stephanie, can architecture heal? It's interesting how you brought up choice, Steve, because that seems to be an important element across all backgrounds and life situations. Having choice and learning the responsibility of choice can be really powerful. So even those elements that you all are talking about on the micro level, within schools or rehabilitative environments, those could be extended to a macro level within our communities. And that extends across those services and those systems that we interact with. So on the more macro level, what are some of those elements of design that overlap between our areas of practice?

Jeff Lane:

So on the Crisis Recovery Center, we actually did collaborate together with our health group, and our justice group. So that project, we worked hand-in-hand, as we did the design and planning for that project. We needed to make sure that we understood how we were handling the secure pieces, the element of design from a justice perspective, but then being able to reach back and talk about some of the same things that that Steve talked about. How do we get the views into these areas that are a little bit more soft on the health side? And how do we engage the agencies in these these spaces for quiet areas and other spaces, we also had, we have a nurses area, and to be able to work through that together. So that we were able to have a conversation about how that needed to operate, function and look and engage with the rest of the architecture. We also have had conversations and continue to collaborate with our education group as we think about classrooms and program spaces, but also thinking about the individuals that we work with on our justice end have those types of spaces as well. You know, it's intriguing today, as we talked about, not just kids, but adults in giving them spaces that may be a little different, but different from the perspective of what it used to be. It may be that that's now how schools are functioning, set up and designed. So maybe our justice projects need to be thinking about those same types of things, because those individuals are coming to be a part of that. And to be able to share this with a client now has the ability to think about innovative ways of doing justice work that's completely different than what we've ever done before or from a health perspective, how do we engage behavioral health?

Stephanie Grose:

I know that connection to the outdoors is pretty important in the healthcare and the educational world. Much so we've seen a strong drive toward outdoor classrooms, because of the effect of being outside on learning and mental well being, I can see that as an area of overlap as well.

Steve Carr:

Valley Hope, which is a rehabilitation center in Parker, Colorado, was a project we did and they couldn't afford to grow their buildings as much as they really wanted to. So we ended up really capitalizing on the exterior space for that project so they could do exactly what you're talking about Stephanie where they could have outdoor classrooms. I think the other thing that occurred to me that we all have in all of our studio disciplines is just observation, making people feel like they're not in a fishbowl, also humanizing places where people, especially where people live, making it less institutional. So and then, of course, there's the self-harm aspect, and understanding the places you know, where people are most likely to hurt themselves. And if you have to harden something, then kind of focus on the places where something is more likely to happen, then making the entire facility that way, especially, you know, in the more social areas, and where there's a good observation, you can do a lot more to soften that space and make it less institutional.

Stephanie Grose:

I just had a client meeting yesterday. And they said something pretty interesting, too, that I think relates to this conversation, and that is this notion of efficiency and how we can try and optimize everything in our buildings to a point where they might start to feel inhuman. And so it's important to make sure that we don't take efficiency too far. And maybe some of those disruptions are good. And he pointed out disruptions that facilitate those connections and those conversations are important to have.

Megan Brock:

So what overall defines a successful community-driven approach to mental health?

Jeff Lane:

A successful project or a successful outcome is when the community is engaged and having a conversation and understanding that architecture, and the design that we do, can help further the benefit of mental health. That, to me is a success. I also think about a client that we are currently working with that we started a project three years ago. And there was a group when we were interviewing for the project that came to the interview, because it was open public interview. And, and they got to ask questions. And when they asked the questions, their question that they were about was programs, and mental health. How are we engaging that in this project? And who was going to do that? And the commissioners had to answer that question, right? Well, that was not part of the RFQ, the proposal, that wasn't part of the design at the very beginning, as they were planning it, it was not part of it. And we were able to come in, as a team, and work through what that is, and what it looked like for that project. And I can tell you, that Sheriff, the county manager, the community, is excited that we were able to capture spaces that are going to do those things, to be able to know that we started with this idea that the community wanted it. And it was important to them, and to be able to move that needle forward. To me, that's, that's success.

Steve Carr:

I was thinking about the rural health that we do rural health care, real education, justice facilities, and they're almost easier because the communities are smaller. I know Stephanie, you know, when she goes to a community meeting in Del Norte, everyone is there, they're involved, and they want to know what's going on. They want to know why they're, you know, if they passed a bond issue, or if they're about to, they want to know what that extra tax is going to be for, and they get really engaged, it's super satisfying in, especially in the rural areas, you know, because you, you get to know people personally, and it really makes our jobs really rewarding. How do you do that in a large urban area, right? And, you know, one of the things that we've done with the hospital systems is we have asked them when we're starting a project, to have community meetings where community members are invited, where past patients are invited, so they can actually raise the bar of what is going to be that success. When you get a 12-year-old kid that's had cancer for four years telling a story about what they went through, it's very impactful. That's what success is for this project.

Stephanie Grose:

I echo Steve's sentiments, that it's easy to have that community connection in the rural areas and much more difficult in the urban areas. But I think across the board, I would see success if we can continue to have acceptance and awareness and inclusion of mental health and mental wellbeing as a part of the design conversation. I think a lot of our clients don't understand or we haven't had a conversation about how we might impact that very important part of their world. And so how can we wrap it into our processes that that conversation just happens naturally.

Megan Brock:

Great insights, everyone. Thank you again for joining me today on this episode. At TreanorHL, we work with clients in a range of building sectors all over the country. As you heard from the team here today, we push design across boundaries to support entire communities because it just makes sense. The buildings we spend our time inhabiting should do more for us. And with a community-oriented perspective, they really can make a positive impact. You can visit the show notes to learn more about the individual projects mentioned throughout this episode. You can also visit treanorhl.com to learn more about how we've helped all of our clients with space solutions that fit their unique needs. Until next time, thank you for joining us on this episode of TreanorHL Talks. TraeanorHL is a national architecture, planning, and design firm located in the United States. We hold a firm belief in sharing compelling stories and data-driven insights with professionals, clients, and building users to help design the world we want to live in. For more information visit treanorhl.com That's t-r-e-a-n-o-r-h-l.com.