Crisis Team One of LifeHouse’s New Additions

By R. Gabriel Villalobos

In a quiet office at Life House, a behavioral health facility blazing trails across the state of New Mexico, Kendra Kee leans forward with a smile. As the director of nursing, she is finding herself in a new role as a powerful agent of change in her community. The reason she’s excited has to do with a pioneering new treatment that Life House is rolling out right here in Carlsbad.

This year, Life House has become a beacon of innovation in a region that desperately needs mental health and addiction services. A groundbreaking new program they launched in May of this year is forcing the evolution of crisis response and opioid recovery in New Mexico, a state that has been struggling more and more with these issues.

January marked the debut of Life House’s most ambitious project yet, a 24/7 mobile crisis team, the only one of its kind in southeastern New Mexico. The nine-member unit responds to calls across the region, offering an alternative to traditional law enforcement for mental health emergencies.

“We get called out by police, EMS, and sometimes worried neighbors,” Kee explained. “Maybe someone’s behaving erratically or talking about suicide without a concrete plan. That’s when we step in.”

The team’s approach is different from the standard crisis response. Rather than handcuffs or emergency rooms, they bring counseling, de-escalation techniques, and immediate connections to ongoing care. One of their functions is to comfort people involved in serious car accidents, perhaps involving fatalities. They also calm families in distress and intervene, hopefully before situations turn tragic.

The nearest comparable service? Nearly 200 miles away in Albuquerque. Before this team was assembled, people in crisis here often ended up in jail or the ER. Now they can often avoid those outcomes and get actual help with the specific issues they’re experiencing.

Just as the mobile team finds its footing, Life House is unveiling its next innovation. In May, the facility launched an outpatient Suboxone program, tackling New Mexico’s opioid crisis with medication-assisted treatment.

Suboxone helps ease withdrawal symptoms and cravings in those recovering from addiction. What makes Life House’s approach unique is its focus on transitional care—helping patients who might not be able to commit to long inpatient stays but still need support.

“We see people who want to get clean but have jobs, families, responsibilities,” Kee said. Before, they might have relapsed because the cravings were too strong. Now they have this tool to help them through.”

By the numbers, without medication-assisted treatment, 93 percent of opioid users relapse. With it, that number drops to about 50 percent. Life House’s early results are promising—several patients have already begun tapering their doses under medical supervision.

These innovations come as Life House earns another distinction: becoming New Mexico’s first state-certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC). The certification acknowledges the facility’s comprehensive approach, which combines crisis care, addiction treatment, and ongoing mental health services under one roof.

For now, the work continues. The mobile team answers its calls. The Suboxone clinic welcomes its newest patients. And in her office, Kee reflects on how effective the program seems to be as modern medicine, committed professionals, and ready patients come together to effect change in people’s lives and meet a dire need in the community.

Hope isn’t some abstract idea here. The work done at this facility is flipping the script for people who, not long ago, had little cause for optimism. Success has a different measure in this landscape and takes the form of someone’s first clean urine test. It also appears quietly in a patient who finally sleeps through the night, in all these small victories that quickly add up. That’s how change happens.