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March 11, 2024 – “People are dying,” said Dr. Elena Yanchar, chief of psychiatry at The Centers. “People are dying at numbers they shouldn’t be. People are suffering, and we have treatment.” Dr. Yanchar says they’ve been offering these services for years, but not on a walk-in basis. She says this will ensure help is available when needed most without barriers of wait times or pre-treatment requirements.
“I would tell anyone who is struggling with opiate addiction that I would assume you’ve already been through this system many times, and I would assume at times you’ve been treated poorly, and felt judged and shamed, and I hope that you come here,” she said. “We don’t do that. We won’t do that. We just want to help. I tell patients, ‘All I care about is keeping you alive.’”
She says as a society, we must do better at removing the stigma of addiction and treat it as the disease and medical condition it is.
People can bring themselves to the WinMAT. Yanchar also hopes it’ll bridge treatment gaps for people released from emergency rooms for an overdose or discharged from a detox facility.
