By Melanie Dallas, LPC

If you count new programs, grants and the sheer amount of work, 2025 has been a year of abundance for Highland Rivers Behavioral Health. But most years are that way for us, and we wouldn’t want it any other. When you serve 13 counties with a population of nearly 1.8 million, you stay busy.

As we come to the end of 2025, I want to highlight some of what Highland Rivers has done over this past 12 months, how we have continued to innovate, to make behavioral health services more accessible in the communities we serve, and what we have in the works for next year.

One of the accomplishments in 2025 I am most proud of is the opening of the Cobb Veterans Outpost in Marietta. Because serving Veterans has long been a priority for our agency, we worked for several years to create a drop-in support center for Veterans and their family members. The Outpost provides peer support to Veterans – but also help with applying for benefits, job search, linkages to community resources, and expedited access to clinical mental health and substance use services if needed.

This fall, we were able to go a step further and begin providing clinical services onsite at the Outpost, including counseling with a licensed clinical social worker (who is also a Veteran), as well as nursing services, medication management, and telehealth. We are the first Community Service Board in Georgia to create such a place for Veterans, and we want to have Veterans Outposts in as many of our other counties as we can in coming years.

Also in Cobb County, we re-opened Hartmann Center, a residential substance use treatment program for adolescent girls ages 13-17. In prior years, Hartmann had been a co-ed facility, but is now the only publicly funded residential treatment center for girls in Georgia – and accepts girls from anywhere in the state. Because it is funded by the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, once a girl is accepted into the residential program, there is no cost for services.

In May we launched the Highland Rivers Connect Training Institute, which offers low-cost or no-cost trainings on topics including suicide prevention, crisis intervention, mental health first aid, understanding substance use, and more – as well as continuing education (CE) courses for professionals. Established through a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Highland Rivers Connect helps increase knowledge and reduce misunderstanding about mental health and substance use in our communities.

Highland Rivers also continued to grow our co-response programs in partnership with local law enforcement agencies. Co-response pairs a uniformed law enforcement officer with a licensed clinician to respond to individuals in the community in behavioral health crisis. During 2025, we added a second co-response team with the Cobb County PD, as well as new teams with the cities of Marietta and Canton (in addition to our established programs with Sheriff’s Offices in

Cherokee, Catoosa and Pickens counties). Several more co-response teams are in the planning stages within other counties in our service area.

Of course, I could write pages about all we did in 2025 – about finding a new facility for our Mothers Making a Change program and the capital campaign the Highland Rivers Foundation launched to refurbish it; about how our clinicians continue to meet the highest state and national fidelity standards for services; about our hospital ED diversion partnerships and the nearly 1,500 hundred individuals we diverted to more appropriate care; about our Recovery-to-Work grants and the local employers we partner with – and still not capture it all. The fact is, we work hard all year, in every community – and our work benefits thousands of individuals, youth, families and Veterans throughout our service area.

As 2025 comes to a close, I want to wish everyone very Happy Holidays, and a New Year filled with health, happiness and hope.

Melanie Dallas is a licensed professional counselor and CEO of Highland Rivers Behavioral Health, which provides treatment and recovery services for individuals with mental illness, substance use disorders, and intellectual and developmental disabilities in a 13-county region of northwest Georgia that includes Bartow, Cherokee, Cobb, Floyd, Fannin, Gilmer, Gordon, Haralson, Murray, Paulding, Pickens, Polk and Whitfield counties.