Tylar Cooper grew up in South Hadley, where she now heads a CHD respite program designed to help individuals recover from mental health crises and strengthen their connections to care.

The program director of CHD’s Retreat at Hampshire Woods said her favorite part of her job is working with her team and helping clients get to where they want to be in life.

The Retreat at Hampshire Woods is a respite program that provides a nontraditional, innovative, and individualized support network for people who need to re-energize in a healing therapeutic space. Cooper’s staff offers peer-led wellness and mindfulness activities, individual and group therapy, and trauma-informed behavioral health services.

Cooper can sum up her team’s attitude in two words: “They care,” she said. Then she elaborated: “They’re very passionate about their work. They’re self-starting, and they approach their work with a really good sense of humor, which I appreciate, because this work can be really difficult sometimes, and if you have a positive attitude, it makes your job a lot easier.”

The program provides five onsite residential beds, as well as mobile services in the home or setting of the client’s choosing. Its treatment bridges the gap between inpatient and outpatient care—providing more support for clients than simply weekly therapy sessions, but is more flexible than a locked space. Like respite programs that are growing in popularity across the country, the Retreat at Hampshire Woods has proven to be an effective alternative to hospitalization and provides a home-like environment that is more intimate than a typical psychiatric facility.

Individualized Attention

“The client is the author of their own life,” said Cooper. “They take the driver’s seat on their own treatment—they tell us what they want to work on and what their goals are. And it’s not cookie-cutter treatment—it’s person-centered, and that has helped us be very successful. Clients really like this model. This is an unlocked unit, and I don’t want to say that they can come and go as they please, because we do have mandatory groups to attend, but they can go into the community and see family and go to work if they have a job.”

Most of the Retreat’s referrals are from crisis clinicians—some from CHD, especially our Gateway Community Behavioral Health Center in Chicopee. “We stabilize them and then they go to their next placement, whether it’s back home or another residential program. If they need more treatment, we try to avoid sending them to a higher level of care.” Indeed, research in other states has shown that peer-staffed respite centers can reduce the need for hospitalizations for many people.

Clients at the Retreat have gone on to such places as CHD’s adjacent Aster House, as well as other residential programs, including ones offered by Community Resources for Justice and the Mental Health Association’s GRIT program.

Cooper said that when she was growing up her parents had mental health and substance use challenges of their own, and they were resistant to treatment, so when she was considering a career, she wanted to help people like them. She earned her bachelor of social work degree at Elms College and her master’s in social work at Westfield State University. Her experience working as a clinician in a residential program at Gandara Center, as well as being a forensic mental health clinician for the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department—and then clinical director at CHD’s Grace House, a residential treatment program designed for mothers—prepared her well for her current role.

She finds that some of the biggest challenges in her job are rooted in social determinants of health: macro and systemic concerns such as housing instability. “That’s a huge barrier for many of our clients, and it exacerbates their mental health and substance use problems,” she said.

The Retreat is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, so clients must have a mental health diagnosis to stay there, but many of them also have a co-occurring substance use disorder, so staff connect them with CHD and community resources, including Alcoholics Anonymous.

Theresa McDaniel, senior director of substance use services for CHD’s residential recovery programs, said she appreciates Cooper’s commitment to providing client-centered, solution-focused treatment for the individuals served at the Retreat. “Additionally, Tylar ensures the staff at the Retreat are supported and offered opportunities for professional growth,” she said. “Tylar has nurtured a dynamic team, which has allowed the program to meet the needs of a very diverse population. It has been a privilege to supervise Tylar, and I look forward to supporting her professional growth as she moves towards her independent licensing requirements.”

Gratifying Work

Cooper cherishes the letters and cards from grateful clients. “They are reminders to keep working and persevering, even when things get challenging,” she said. She recalls one difficult Grace House resident in particular. “She had a lot of trauma in the past, so she had a lot of walls up, and didn’t want to do groups,” she said. “She was stagnant in treatment for a while.” But then she opened up. “After I had left Grace House and started at the Retreat, she invited me to her graduation from Grace House. She moved on from the program successfully and into independent housing.”

Witnessing the positive transformations she and her team bring about in residents’ lives is a powerful motivator for Cooper—and for all social workers, for that matter. She pointed out that this sense of fulfillment makes the profession’s emotional demands and challenges well worth it. “It’s gratifying to see folks work through whatever is in their way to being successful,” she said.