About the Clinic: Mission, Clinical Staffing Structure and the History Behind Behavioral Health Treatment at Mount Vernon

The agency’s stated mission began with stigma. Not with clinical excellence, not with outcomes, not with evidence-based practice, but with the thing that keeps people out of treatment in the first place.

That ordering was deliberate and it is worth pausing on. In a county the size of Skagit, where the receptionist may be a neighbor and the parking lot is visible from the road, the barrier to walking through the door is frequently social rather than clinical. People delay for years over what it will mean about them. A mission statement that names stigma first is making a claim about where the real obstacle sits.

The commitments set out below are the ones the agency published as the means of addressing it.

Two phrases in that list carry more weight than the rest, and both are technical terms rather than sentiment.

Least restrictive setting is a standard running through behavioral health law and clinical practice alike. It holds that a person should receive care in the setting that meets their needs while limiting their freedom as little as possible. In practice it means outpatient before inpatient where outpatient will do, voluntary before involuntary, and stepping someone down as soon as they are ready rather than keeping them at a high level of care because it feels safer for the agency. It is also a constraint on the provider, since it rules out recommending more intensive care than a person actually needs.

The individual service plan is the working document of outpatient treatment. Grounding it in strengths and natural supports rather than deficits changes what it contains. A deficit-based plan lists what is wrong with someone. A strengths-based plan starts from what they still have going for them, whether that is a job, a sibling who is still speaking to them, a trade, or a church, and builds the plan around protecting and using those things.

Natural supports means the people already in a person’s life rather than the professionals paid to be there. It is a deliberate acknowledgment that a counselor sees someone for an hour or two a week and the rest of the time somebody else does.

For an outpatient agency of its size, Phoenix ran a notably layered staff structure. Rather than a single pool of counselors handling whatever came in, the agency separated its work into distinct divisions with their own clinical leadership, and kept dedicated specialist roles for the programs that demand them.

The roles below are those the agency listed on its staff page. Individual names are omitted here, since the clinic changed ownership in 2019 and the people who held these positions are private individuals whose current employment is not a matter of record.

Washington uses a specific set of credentials for behavioral health work, and the abbreviations after a counselor’s name tell you what they are qualified to do and whether they are practicing under supervision. Anyone reading a staff list at any agency in this state benefits from knowing what they mean.

Washington has since renamed the substance use credentials. What was a Chemical Dependency Professional is now titled a Substance Use Disorder Professional, and the trainee designation changed accordingly. The scope of practice is the same, and the change reflects a wider move away from language that framed the condition as a dependency problem.

Credentials in this state are verifiable. Washington’s Department of Health maintains a public provider credential search, and anyone can check whether a named counselor holds a current credential and whether any disciplinary action sits against it. That verification route is worth knowing about regardless of which agency a person is considering.

Phoenix opened as a substance use treatment agency and added mental health services later, going through state licensing for community mental health provision along the way. By the time the staff list above was published, the agency had a mental health division with its own director.

Standing up a separate division is a significant undertaking for an organization of this size. It means separate licensing, separate documentation standards, separate billing and separate supervision requirements. Plenty of agencies decide it is not worth it and refer mental health cases out.

The argument for doing it anyway is the one the field eventually settled on. Co-occurring conditions are the norm in this population, referring people across town loses a substantial share of them, and a person whose panic disorder is untreated is at meaningfully higher risk of returning to the substance that was managing it. Having a mental health division director who also held a substance use credential is the structural expression of that view.

Phoenix Recovery Services was founded by Corky Hundahl, a chemical dependency professional, and began serving Skagit County in the early 2000s. She has described studying emerging trends in the field before opening, wanting to know what worked and what was coming, and building the program around what she found rather than around convention.

What she concluded was that substance use disorders have a substantial physiological component and that a program which addresses only the psychological side is incomplete. That led the agency into medication assisted treatment relatively early, which was an uncommon position for a rural outpatient clinic at the time.

Over the years that followed the agency accumulated contracts that a clinic its size would not normally hold. It became the contracted provider for Federal Probation and Pretrial Services and for the Washington State Department of Corrections. It facilitated Skagit County Family Treatment Court, provided urinalysis collection for Skagit County Mental Health Court, and delivered treatment for adult, youth and family drug courts in Island County. In 2015 it partnered with Skagit County Public Health to restart the county’s syringe exchange.

When Hundahl prepared to retire, she approached Pioneer Human Services herself about a sale, wanting the agency to continue under an organization that shared its view of behavioral health as a treatable and manageable condition. The acquisition became official in March 2019. Pioneer, a Washington nonprofit founded in 1963, already ran inpatient facilities, a jail program and a transition house in the county, and comparable outpatient clinics in Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane.

That list is the substance behind the mission statement’s line about working in partnership with allied community providers. A clinic holding contracts with two separate correctional systems, three court systems in two counties and the county health department is not operating in isolation, and for a person moving between those systems it meant the same agency stayed with them.