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Peer recovery zone in Charles City supports people with mental illness

Tessa Reints is a mental health peer support specialist for the local peer recovery zone of Plugged-In Iowa, located at the Jordan River Church food bank at 102 N. Main Street in Charles City. (Press photo James Grob.)
Tessa Reints is a mental health peer support specialist for the local peer recovery zone of Plugged-In Iowa, located at the Jordan River Church food bank at 102 N. Main Street in Charles City. (Press photo James Grob.)
By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

Tessa Reints is here to help.

Reints is a mental health peer support specialist for the local peer recovery zone of Plugged-In Iowa, located at the Jordan River Church food bank at 102 N. Main St. in Charles City.

“I just want to welcome everybody here,” Reints said. “Please come in and say hello.”

Plugged-In Iowa provides mental health peer support to adults with mental illness. The non-profit organization’s purpose is to educate the public as to the value of peer support, to provide outreach to agencies that are currently utilizing peer support and to support an individual’s recovery through various peer-based services.

The Charles City location, which opened last summer, is open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Plugged-In Iowa is based in Cedar Rapids and currently has eight facilities altogether throughout the state. The next-nearest facility, in Mason City, is open five days a week.

A mental health peer support specialist is someone who has his or her own lived experience with mental illness, but has achieved a level of recovery that allows them to help others who have a mental illness.

Reints, who recently started work at the Charles City location, said that people with mental illnesses need to get a grasp on their situations without letting the illness define them.

“Mental illness is just a disease, like diabetes or cancer or anything else,” she said. “You have to accept that, but you don’t have to be that.”

Plugged-In Iowa offers games, occasional special speakers, and individuals can get help with personal budgeting. People can see a dietician, they can get assistance with Medicaid and other state and federal services. Its stated mission is to promote awareness and heighten visibility of peer-based recovery through education, outreach and support.

“We play games, we play cards, we have activities,” said Reints, who is from Waverly. “We can talk about anything. We can sit down one-on-one. Everybody’s welcome.”

Jason Orent, statewide director of Plugged-In Iowa, said that peer recovery zones like the one in Charles City were once typically called drop-in centers.

“I didn’t like that name; it seemed to have a negative connotation to it,” he said.

So Orent said they started calling them “wellness centers.”

“The problem with that was that I got tired of people asking me where the treadmills and exercise equipment was, so we went to call them peer recovery zones,” he said.

Plugged-In Iowa is currently 100 percent region-funded. County social services pay Plugged-In Iowa for the service, and Orent said that if attendance goes up at the Charles City location, it could mean more resources and the facility could be open more hours.

“We’ve been pushing all of our managers to try to get more people involved in all the communities we have locations,” Orent said.  “It’s essentially a place for adults with mental illness to go and be able to hang out, meet other people and access resources and services. It’s also there for folks with mental illness to just hang out, so they’re not isolated at home.”

The organization helps those with mental illness get connected to resources and services they need and to help move them into the recovery process. Often Plugged-In Iowa gets people connected with housing, food, clothes and other basic needs. During that process, the group works with individuals on priority-setting, problem-solving and troubleshooting issues.

Once basic needs are met, Plugged-In Iowa will start to focus more on getting an individual into a recovery mindset, where one works on daily living skills, advocates for his or her own needs, and learns coping skills.

Orent said Plugged-In Iowa provides an atmosphere in which an individual’s recovery is supported through the use of one-to-one intentional peer support, peer recovery zones, and crisis respite care.

“We’re there for people,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to show up, because there’s kind of a stigma about it. It’s just a safe, comfortable place — it’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about.”

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