Seneca Health provides critical service in Pocahontas County

Marlinton, W.Va. – Residents of Pocahontas County are all too familiar with the issues of drug abuse that continue to plague our communities. For those caught up in substance abuse, their lives can seem entangled in an unbreakable web. This is simply not the case. For those in need, there is help and it’s close to home. Seneca Health Services, located on Third Avenue in Marlinton, has a team of specialist to provide behavioral health services to adults, children and adolescents with mental illness, developmental disabilities and various addictions.

Seneca outpatient therapist Jillian Lacasse talks about some of the things she does.

“My position is model outpatient therapist, so part time I’m in the office and part time I’m actually working in the schools around the county,” she said. “I’ll go to every school in the county and visit with kids who are active clients and some that are not, basically just to provide a mentoring role, somebody to talk to, I especially try to work with them on substance abuse education and prevention.”

Along with substance abuse treatment, Seneca also provides other services, many of which remain unknown to county residents.

“Seneca Health Services is an outpatient treatment program for mental health and substance abuse,” said Lacasse. “For mental health we have services like individual therapy, psychiatric services for medications, psychological services for testing and that usually aides in treatment planning and its all done outpatient. Substance abuse – we have individual therapy as well as group. We have the Suboxone program and that’s for opiate addiction – it’s for the treatment of people who are addicted to pain pills, basically. The program itself is about six to eight months long. You partake in group therapy, as well as medication management. It’s an outpatient detox. Crisis work – we have in office crisis work so, when people are feeling suicidal or homicidal, they can come into our office and we can take care of it. We can generally line up things for outpatient services or, if necessary, we have a crisis line and it’s twenty four hours a day seven days a week. People can call our regular office number and be connected to a crisis worker.”

According to Lacasse, many residents shy away from treatment due to the potential financial burden. But for those in need of a helping hand, programs do exist.

“We actually have a charity care program, that is basically grant funded and for people that are little to no income they can qualify,” she said. “The charity care does cover the cost of in office visits. A therapy visit, a doctor visit, those would be paid for, the only expense out of pocket would be the cost of their medications. We do accept Medicaid, Medicare, some insurances we can bill those services.”

For those in need, Jillian explains the process for obtaining care.

Contact our front desk or anybody in the office, the number to call is (304)-799-6865 and we’ll be happy to answer any questions,” she said. “Typically for most people, the way they initiate services is to call in and set up an intake appointment, which I can take care of, from there we schedule appointments for the doctor, for therapy, whatever is going to be appropriate for the person.”