ODMHSAS Board Chairman Hamel Reinmiller speaks during a meeting Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025. (Andrea Hancock)
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With Griffin Memorial Hospital at the end of its lifespan, the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services announced at a board meeting Thursday that its revised plan to establish new treatment beds in the Oklahoma City metro should begin serving patients by the end of the year.
More than a year in the making, ODMHSAS has leased an annex building from SSM Health St. Anthony’s behavioral health complex, located at the corner of South Pennsylvania Avenue and Southwest 59th Street. The agency intends to open a psychiatric facility in the annex by mid-December, according to interim Mental Health Commissioner Gregory Slavonic.
The ODMHSAS Board also voted Thursday to purchase two connected parcels of land from St. Anthony’s with the intent to build and refit further psychiatric treatment spaces. Eventually, ODMHSAS intends to acquire all of St. Anthony’s property at the complex, a deal Slavonic is confident will be finalized next month.
The retrofitted facilities in southwest Oklahoma City will replace the operations of Griffin Memorial Hospital, a crumbling campus in Norman that originally opened in 1895. Many of the Griffin buildings are now derelict or abandoned, with a church on the property overlooking century-old unmarked graves, including that of Woody Guthrie’s mother.
In a plan dating back three commissioners, ODMHSAS originally intended to replace the Griffin campus through the Donahue Behavioral Hospital, a now-defunct project planned for Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City’s campus. The hospital’s price tag kept ballooning, however, and uncertainty over when and for how much the Griffin campus could be sold to the City of Norman or other buyers derailed the expensive effort, which became symbolic of ODMHSAS’ broader challenges after a celebratory groundbreaking became a political problem.
Chad Carden, ODMHSAS’ chief of operations, said at its final estimate, the Donahue project was expected to cost $187 million, while current projections for the St. Anthony’s complex stand around $66 million. The project will be paid in part through American Rescue Plan Act funding.
“The hospital that we are in the process of purchasing will have the potential of 192 beds. And so at the last revision of the Donahue, which was $187 million construction cost, that was only going to provide 170 beds,” Carden said. “So for roughly $120 million (less), we will get more beds.”
Last year, leaders of the Oklahoma Legislature began to pivot away from the Donahue plan, ultimately touring and negotiating a deal for St. Anthony’s southwest OKC property, which had been eyed as an option for Oklahoma County’s planned behavioral health center.
After a meeting with ODMHSAS leadership last month, Rep. Trey Caldwell (R-Lawton) said he had been told some of the beds at the annex will be used for outpatient competency restoration, a critical need for the state.
ODMHSAS is currently operating its competency restoration services under a court-approved consent decree to settle a lawsuit that accused the agency of unconstitutional delays in providing care to pre-trial defendants deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial. Despite the agreement to decrease wait times and improve outcomes, a report issued by court consultants last month found the agency still lags far behind in terms of competency restoration services. Recently, Slavonic confirmed ODMHSAS was fined more than $928,000 for the past month’s worth of shortcomings.
Caldwell said moving forward with the St. Anthony’s complex at a lower cost but higher bed-count than the Donahue hospital puts the Legislature and ODMHSAS in a position to meet additional needs in a state with a high rate of mental health challenges.
“[This] will leave us more money to then evaluate in FY 2026-27, ‘OK, what else do we need to do?’ I know right now we’re working both with the philanthropic community and also working with Oklahoma County and Oklahoma City to see what that next step is after we get SSM up and going,” Caldwell said. “If we’re going to need more beds, especially with the consent decree, what is the next step in the process to make sure that happens?”
At Thursday’s meeting, Slavonic, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, deployed his military background to make an analogy about coming into compliance with the competency restoration decree.
“It’s much like turning an aircraft carrier into the wind,” he said. “It’s a very slow process. What we have to deal with is not going to be fixed by the end of this year or probably at the end of next year. It’s going to be a long process, and there’s a lot of moving parts to it.”
The St. Anthony’s annex building slated to open by the end of this year will feature 32 beds, Caldwell said. Factors contributing to ODMHSAS officials’ confidence it will be ready in December include its lease, which allowed renovations on the property to begin before its official sale, and the building’s history, as it was already outfitted for serving mental health patients.
Under new management, Vatican approves St. Anthony’s sale
Oklahoma Department of Mental Health chief of operations Chad Carden presented an aerial photo of land the agency plans to acquire at a board meeting Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025. The land highlighted in blue and green was purchased at the meeting, while the building in the top left is currently being leased. Ultimately, the agency plans to buy the entire plot of land outlined in blue.
Because of St. Anthony’s affiliation with the Catholic Church, the sale had to have final approval from an unusual source: The Vatican.
“We did not get to go to Rome. I was first on that list,” Slavonic said, earning laughter from ODMHSAS Board members Thursday.
ODMHSAS approved the purchase of a vacant plot of land on the campus for $700,000 and an existing structure for $350,000. Slavonic said he previously feared the St. Anthony’s complex sale would not be complete by a looming deadline to spend ARPA funds.
“As you know, we have a new pope, and when that happens, the cardinals who work for him — there’s about over 110 — all get new jobs normally, and so I was not optimistic that we were going to get that contract back in time to be able to spend the ARPA money by the deadline,” Slavonic said. “I sure didn’t think it was going to get signed, and everybody assured me it would, and it did get signed, and so we’ve been moving full speed ahead to get everything that we need. And so now the big hurdle becomes — we’ve selected an architect and an engineering firm, and so my words to them, and Chad has echoed it to them during the bidding process, that there is a sense of urgency, and the sense of urgency is to get this started and buy the equipment we need and move full speed ahead.”
After Thursday’s meeting, Slavonic said the architectural and engineering firms would be revealed after the rest of the land purchase is finalized next month. He hopes the full facility will be operational by the end of 2026 — which was the original target date for the Donahue’s opening, as well.
With the operations at Griffin slowly being supplanted in Oklahoma City, the City of Norman has eyed the Griffin campus for years as the potential site of a homeless shelter or sobering center. A meeting of the trustees of the ODMHSAS Real Property Trust — comprised of the same individuals on the ODMHSAS Board — sold a vacant three-acre plot to the city off the edge of the Griffin campus. Slavonic said when the new Oklahoma City mental health campus is complete, ODMHSAS intends to sell all of Griffin.
As for the Donahue, more than $7.5 million had been raised from large philanthropic foundations to support site preparation at OSU-OKC for the defunct project. Caldwell said some donors want their money back, but he anticipated others would be donating to the new project instead.
“There are some of them that want their money back, and the state Legislature acknowledges that, and we’re going to honor that. There are some of them [who think], ‘OK, you all made the right decision. The Donahue thing was not going to be able to happen in a timely manner. It was 120 percent over budget.’ So they understand why we did the SSM deal that still meets the same mission set, and I think they’re going to be on board moving forward,” Caldwell said Oct. 29. “But I’m not at liberty to say which ones as of yet, because a lot of them have to go back to their boards to get it reapproved, because most of their boards view it as an entirely new grant.”
OKC targets community mental health needs, particularly for youth
ODMHSAS’ first two purchases of land at St. Anthony’s coincided with the release of a new study Thursday regarding the most pressing mental health needs in OKC. With funding from the City of Oklahoma City and the Inasmuch Foundation, the Healthy Minds Policy Initiative conducted identified five core areas of improvement.
The Healthy Minds recommendations for OKC’s mental health system were:
“Removing structural and systemic barriers to care,” noting areas in the city where mental health outcomes are worse are often areas with poor access to mental health care providers;
“Diverting residents to appropriate settings of care,” such as employing mobile crisis teams or sending individuals to urgent recovery centers instead of a regular hospital’s emergency room;
“Addressing missing community-based intensive services,” noting out of the approximately 25,000 adults in OKC with serious mental illness, only about 8,100 received state-funded behavioral health care in 2024;
“Investing in children and youth to strengthen community wellbeing” through increased outpatient care and school mental health programming; and
“Meeting residents’ basic needs” by helping to ensure residents have livable wages, a safe place to live and food to eat.
Jessica Hawkins, Healthy Minds’ director of community initiatives and the facilitator of the OKC mental health leadership team, said it is encouraging to see OKC officials proactively seeking solutions to issues within their community.
“Oklahoma City is doing something remarkable here,” Hawkins said in a press release accompanying the study. “It’s impressive and rare to see a city take ownership of the issues of mental health and substance use in the way Oklahoma City is. This is a long-term investment in the people of Oklahoma City, and I’m optimistic about how this work is going to pay off in the years ahead.”
The city is now expected to implement “evidence-based interventions” based on the study’s findings.
“While the prevalence of mental health challenges among youth in Oklahoma City was surprising, it is encouraging that Healthy Minds has assembled community and youth-based program leaders, mental health service providers, public school administrators, and public safety officials to work together to remove barriers to programs that can connect young people to the resources and services that will help them achieve better outcomes,” said Andrea Grayson, OKC’s implementation program manager.
Andrea Hancock became NonDoc’s news editor in September 2024. She graduated in 2023 from Northwestern University. Originally from Stillwater, she completed an internship with NonDoc in 2022.
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