The Letty Owings Center, a residential treatment facility in Portland where patients can recover from drug addiction while parenting their babies, will close at the end of October.
First opened in 1989, the center has long been a place for pregnant women and new mothers to get well and bond with their babies. But in recent years, the severity of many of the mothers’ addiction and mental health conditions grew beyond what the center was staffed to treat, according to Dr. Amanda Risser, chief medical officer for Central City Concern, which has run the center since 1997.
Partly due to the more potent and cheaper drug supply now available in Oregon, she said patients were coming in with far more extreme mental and physical health care needs than staff at the center used to see. Postpartum psychosis, multiple medications to manage and an ongoing inability to safely parent had become more common, she said…