Becky Hammill: a force behind peer counselors and Spokane’s new mental health respite

Becky Hammill believes in the power of trained peers to bolster mental health recovery. She also backs healing in respite care – a sanctuary – if life gets overwhelming.

Hammill now can call both those passions a reality.

At the helm of Passages Family Support for more than 20 years, she is founding director of the nonprofit, which offers Spokane County outpatient mental health services mainly for state Medicaid-eligible residents. It’s licensed by the Department of Health as a behavioral health agency.

In recent years, Hammill has advocated to create a respite model in the state to support people who fall into a gap: They need more than outpatient mental health services but don’t require behavioral health care in a hospital.

Since 2019, she has poured that vision into a newly built respite home for adults called Termonn, Gaelic for sanctuary, and that structure opened late this month on the Passages campus, at 1700 S. Assembly.

“The newest service we’re adding is the peer respite,” said Hammill, 69, who admits her ideas fill Termonn’s interior.

It has four bedroom suites and then common spaces. Her touches are in the decor, journal notebooks and furniture to make all the spaces feel bright, open and restful. Even the name Termonn is based on her experiences.

“One of the first families we served at Passages, their teenage son died by suicide,” Hammill said.

“Having a conversation with the parent at the funeral services for this young man, she said, ‘He was seeking Termonn.’ I didn’t know what that was, so she said, ‘Oh, sanctuary, seeking sanctuary.’ It just always stuck with me.”

Mental health respite houses are widely used in New York, Massachusetts and California, but are less known in the Northwest. Such facilities look like a residence, but they’re not a group home, she said.

Hammill said an adult who qualifies can stay up to seven nights in a month at the new site. In the kitchen and living room, they can make a meal, play a game or watch a movie. Peer counselors are available on-site 24 hours a day.

In Passages’ early days, Hammill worked as a certified peer counselor along with her administrative duties. She later finished graduate school to become a licensed independent clinical social worker.

Passages today has nearly 75 employees, including for Termonn, she said. Many of its employees are certified peer counselors but don’t all work in that role.

The agency serves more than 500 people and families in Spokane County each year. Those services include individual and group therapy, care coordination, medical management, peer support, wrap-around intensive services and programs to help after incarceration or a stay at Eastern State Hospital.

But Hammill led its humble start as a program of Volunteers of America in 2001, until it became a separate nonprofit in 2010. In the first days, Volunteers of America didn’t have much space for Passages, so an interior designer helped create a comfortable nook for families to get support in a former storage room for books.

Overall, Hammill said her career at Passages grew out of experiences from the pain of her family’s mental health issues.

“My family, like many others, was touched by mental health challenges,” she said. “That is a very different experience to be the person seeking services and then when you go to school and learn how to provide services, you end up being on both sides of the desk.

“That lived experience is so rich and brings so much. You’ve been the person on the other side of the desk. You know sometimes what those poorly worded questions feel like. You know what the stigma is like.”

That folds into her work even now, she said, turning pain into purpose – a phrase she once heard in a speech.

A Spokane resident, Hammill grew up in North Idaho. Her family has deep roots there from both parents’ sides, with members who homesteaded in Priest River and Priest Lake.

“I still go to Priest Lake in the summer and feel privileged to have a place to go to, a family cabin.”

After that brush with family mental health, Hammill said she became involved locally with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Spokane County leaders noticed and tapped her for a new program that became Passages. The county had funding to use toward a mental health support organization.

She said Spokane County still provides some support, including funds for a small number of people who might need respite care but don’t have work-provided health insurance and fall just outside of Apple Health requirements.

Hammill saw the large need to help families, even from the start.

“Families who had children who were receiving services because the child had some sort of mental health services, those families really needed a lot of support,” she said.

The organization brought in peer support, or parent-to-parent support, from someone trained but who also had similar experiences.

“It’s healing to reach out and know there are other families that need help and support one another so you don’t feel so alone,” she said.

“There is horrible stigma around having any kind of mental health issue in a family,” Hammill said. “It’s just good for the family members to reach out and support one another and get their own mental needs also addressed. It’s a family issue, not just a child issue.”

She said the state made changes to Medicaid in 2007 so peer counselors could have formal training and Apple Health could be billed for those peers providing services.

Throughout that journey, Hammill wanted to see the number of peer counselors grow. A long-time Passages program brings them into family homes to provide support, she said.

“We knew how challenging and stressful it was to try to pack up children and go to an appointment. We wanted to make it easy for families to access services, so we went to their homes. We still do that.

“What I’ve been known for in my career is the peer aspect, growing the certified peer counselor program, supporting peers and really helping to bring that service provider into the mainstream of the behavioral health agency. That really has been the focus of my career, and all of it driven by the pain, the absolute pain, of the lived experience.”

She calls Passages a peer-operated alternative in Spokane that resonates with many people who feel a connection to counselors with similar mental health situations typically affecting an entire family.

“What I’m proud of is we’ve had enough support over the years from Spokane County and from the Health Care Authority that we can provide a very robust alternative for people who appreciate that and do want that choice.”