Gene Johnson

President/CEO

GENE JOHNSON

My career in behavioral health began in the 60s.  This was a time of self-expression, social change and transformation.  Loyola University, where I completed my MSW, provided a solid professional foundation while creating fertile ground for choice, empowerment, and transformation, values that have been a re-occurring theme throughout my career.

Looking back, I am struck by how history has repeated itself in my own behavioral health professional experience, each time with a different twist.

Early in my career, I was a manager in the inner city of Chicago of a crisis service in a hospital emergency room. The goal was to find community alternatives to institutionalization. Now, at META Services we manage the Urgent Care Centers (crisis centers) in Maricopa County, one of which is in a hospital.   Now, 30 years later, the intention, although driven by managed care and different system models, is still to find community alternatives.

In Wyoming, I worked as the community liaison with the one state hospital where the concept of short-term intensive treatment was 90 days.   Once a month the state hospital plane flew around a picked up people who were being held in local jails and hospitals.  When you when the state hospital, you stayed.  Finding alternatives and acceptance back in the community was challenging.  Now, even though we don’t put folks in the state hospital, finding good community alternatives seems to be just as challenging.

I was hired by Maricopa County in 1978 to develop a “partial hospital” program to reduce/manage the inpatient census, which at time exceeded 100.  In 2000, I provided leadership for the creation of a partnership, Another Direction, L.L.C., the county-wide integrated crisis network, where we found ourselves with a “risk-based” contract to manage to an inpatient census of 44 beds.  Since the population of Maricopa County is double what it was 20 years earlier, the system now has half the inpatient capacity.  Obviously the task is still to develop effective service alternatives.

In the 1980s I managed the large county-operated substance abuse program (LARC).  A decade later, the LARC service was privatized and META Services was awarded the contract, giving me the chance to continue building the program that I left ten year earlier.  Now, at META I have had the privilege to develop recovery programs for people not only with substance abuse and addiction problems but also those with psychiatric symptoms.

I would describe myself as an entrepreneur, seeking opportunities to create and build a better future.  My hope for the future combined with my early roots in social change has been my motivation for the continuous desire to develop new solutions that can transform our service system.  During the past several years, I have had the privilege to develop over a dozen new programs, incorporate six behavioral health companies, and form four behavioral health partnership networks.  At one point in my career, I was worn out.  I took a break.  Again, my entrepreneurial spirit and my love for woodworking took me on an adventure of creating a unique custom furniture line that was marketed nationally.  When I returned to behavioral health to form the company that is META Services, my sabbatical into woodworking served me well.  I had learned how to run a business.   And, since in the beginning META did not have a lot of money, I was able to build the furniture for the first META program.

For many years at META Services our mission was to provide crisis stabilization.  However, this seemed too small. I felt the challenge to help people move beyond the goal of stabilization to recovery.  From my own personal experience and that of countless other, I knew that people with addiction could recover.  So, I had this gut feeling (perhaps nothing more that a wish) that people with psychiatric symptoms were also resilient.  Recovery for them should also be possible but the behavioral health profession did not seem to support this possibility.  Gradually, the stories of consumers followed by the research began to confirm my hope that people with psychiatric symptoms can recover.  At META Services, however, we operated crisis services.  We did not provide those longer-term ongoing services where recovery could grow.  How could we integrate recovery into what we did?  With the assistance of Mary Ellen Copeland, colleagues at Boston University and at the National Empowerment Center, I came to realize that our crisis services had to be transformed.  Instead of being agents of “social control” we had to search for empowerment initiatives in our programs.  Now, I am so pleased to be part of innovative efforts such as “getting to zero restraint”, yeaching Wellness Recovery Action Plans with the crisis plans becoming an “advance directive”, creating a Peer Support Training Center to train peers to work as Peer Support Specialists in our programs.  Now I have the vision of teaching people who experience psychiatric symptoms how to get well and stay well so they will not even have to show up in our crisis centers.