Why Should Delaware Care?
When people have a poor experience with mental health services, they are unlikely to seek treatment again, experts say. For some in Delaware, experiences in the mental health system have led them to seek treatment elsewhere.
This article was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2026 National Fellowship Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being.
As Michelle Varisco sat in the back of a police car on her way to the emergency room in late 2024, all she felt was terror.
Just moments earlier, she had been on the University of Delaware’s campus in the middle of a mental health crisis.
Varisco had been met by police officers as well as representatives from a state-run program created to prevent unnecessary inpatient mental health treatment: Delaware’s mobile crisis unit.
But after her interaction, Varisco was sent to the emergency room. She would soon cycle in and out of the Rockford Center, a nearby psychiatric hospital, for nearly a month.
That experience, she said, only left her more traumatized. After a year of relative stability in Delaware, Varisco ultimately returned to her home state of Colorado in late 2025 to treat a herniated disc in her spine.
She said she left Delaware because she feared being readmitted to an inpatient facility in Delaware. The mother of three spent more than four months away from her husband and children before coming back to Delaware.
“There is a lot of guilt on how I’ve had to be absent as a parent, and that’s the most important thing to me is my children,” she said.
More than two years later, Varisco said she is on more stable footing. Still, she said her experience has left her on an “endless walk of shame” as she works to rebuild her life.
“I never imagined that this entire process would take quite so long,” Varisco said.
Mobile crisis falters
Varisco first entered Delaware’s inpatient mental healthcare ecosystem after an interaction with the state’s mobile crisis units. She had parked her car outside of UD’s STAR Campus after feeling overstimulated at home, and went to listen to music in the parking lot.
She chose STAR campus because some of her medical providers were there, but she said police arrived shortly after she walked inside the campus building twice without her shoes on to use the bathroom.
She said the mobile crisis units did little to calm her down during her post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) episode on UD’s campus. She said the police presence combined with the mobile crisis teams made her feel “very surrounded.”
“I didn’t understand why I needed police officers standing all around me,” Varisco said.
Varisco said she would be asked many of the same questions repeatedly by the mobile crisis team and the officers, which led her to become frustrated and spin further into crisis.
When she was taken to a local emergency room, police never charged her with a crime and she rode in the back of the cruiser without handcuffs. Still, the experience left her feeling afraid.
Amy Watson, a professor at Wayne State University, said it’s common for people in crisis scenarios to feel fear when interacting with police. She also said people may end up feeling “criminalized” for having a mental health crisis.
“They’re being treated like a criminal, and that can make people very reluctant to ask for help again,” Watson said.
Delaware’s mobile crisis unit was created in 2016 as part of a broader effort to remake the state’s embattled mental healthcare ecosystem and keep people in crisis away from hospitalization.
But a Spotlight Delaware analysis found that between 2022 and 2025, the percentage of people sent by the unit to emergency rooms and inpatient facilities nearly doubled. This uptick in hospitalizations followed years of staffing shortages within the program, as well as the broader state agency that runs it, the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health (DSAMH).
Varisco said the mobile crisis unit made her feel “cornered” and did little to calm her down before her eventual trip to the emergency room and later psychiatric admission to the Rockford Center in Newark.
Asked recently if she believed she needed to be hospitalized, Varisco said she did not think it was necessary. She claimed the crisis teams would not let her speak to her husband, who she said would have been willing to take her home, if he was contacted.
A spokesperson for the DSAMH said he could not comment on specifics surrounding a patient experience within the mobile crisis program because of privacy rules.
However, the spokesperson, Tim Mastro, said people are generally allowed to speak with family members, barring safety concerns or during the middle of an assessment. He also pointed to a difference between an emergency room admission and one within a psychiatric hospital.
“The goal of Mobile Crisis is to assess and stabilize individuals experiencing a behavioral health crisis and connect them with appropriate care in the least restrictive setting possible,” Mastro said. “When additional evaluation is needed, staff may facilitate a referral to an emergency department.”
Long time back to normal
Spotlight Delaware first spoke to Varisco in 2025, almost exactly a year after her first admission into the Rockford Center.
Prior to her first admission, Varisco was battling PTSD, which she said stemmed from childhood sexual abuse. She would go to therapy, do a lot of journaling, as well as yoga to help manage some of her symptoms.
Early on in that journey, she said, she had trouble standing up and at times she described dealing with stomach pain and nausea that could at times be debilitating. But overall, she felt herself improving and was hoping to return to work as a nurse for the first time in more than a year.
Yet once she was admitted to the Rockford Center, she said much of the progress went away. During the month spent cycling in and out of Rockford, she also recalled losing more than 20 pounds.
She was admitted to the Rockford Center three separate times before the end of 2024, and she said her treatment had left her afraid to seek care in Delaware again. Many of Varisco’s claims about her treatment in the Rockford Center, she said, stem from her taking medications that did not align with her previous PTSD regimen.
Varisco said she had been previously diagnosed with PTSD, but not bipolar disorder as she said she had been by doctors in the Rockford Center. She said she challenged the bipolar disorder diagnosis, and felt she “wasn’t being listened to.”
For months after her discharge, Varisco said she was left questioning her own reality about the bipolar diagnosis before her personal psychiatrist said she did not have the disorder.
Varisco also alleged she was pressured into taking medications, including Zyprexa, an antipsychotic typically given to patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Following her first discharge from the Rockford Center, Varisco said Zyprexa left her in a “medication-induced mania.”
She described side effects including feeling like her body “was on fire” if she sat still for any extended period of time and paranoia that “something was in her blood.” Varisco said she visited multiple medical professionals to find out if anything was wrong.
“I’m driving around like a lunatic like this, which was totally unsafe,” Varisco said.
When reached for comment, the Rockford Center said it cannot speak about patient experiences, however it said it “is committed to providing safe, high-quality, individualized behavioral healthcare based on each patient’s clinical needs.”
“Treatment decisions are guided by comprehensive clinical assessments, established standards of care and ongoing evaluation by qualified healthcare professionals,” the Rockford Center’s CEO, Bill Mason, said in an email.
When Spotlight Delaware first spoke to Varisco in August 2025, she said she was doing well. But shortly after that conversation, she left Delaware for nearly five months.
In December 2025, Varisco said she had a herniated disc but was afraid to go to a Delaware hospital. This led her to her home state of Colorado, where she stayed with her mother and sought treatment.
Varisco was later admitted to a psychiatric hospital there, where she felt like she had more control over her medication regimen. She also said she received medications like Clonidine, which lowers blood pressure but also can be used to treat PTSD, which she said had never been offered to her in the past.
Morgan Shields, an assistant professor at the Washington University in St. Louis, said many people have bad experiences with inpatient facilities, which may cause a hesitancy to seek care in the future.
She said she views the usage of inpatient units as an “outcome” of how the country has structured its community supports to manage risk, instead of addressing issues at their root.
Additionally, she said providers are oftentimes concerned about liability, and inpatient settings act as a “catchment tank” for most behavioral health issues.
“Hot potato, and then everyone just gets collected in these hospitals,” Shields said.
She also pointed to what she called a “medical model approach” in which behavioral health issues are treated medically as opposed to focusing on someone’s long-term recovery.
Where is she now?
Varisco is back in Delaware now, and her days are much slower. She goes by “Victoria,” now and cuts her hair much shorter than it was a year ago.
She also goes to church a few days a week and spends more time in the gym. Varisco wants to reclaim activities that used to bring her joy like returning to her old gym.
“I walked in and I could smell it,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I miss the smell of the gym.’”
It is not without its challenges, though. She wears dark green glasses, a nod to mental health awareness but also to tone down overstimulating environments like the gym or grocery store.
But she said if her new normal is being the “green glasses person,” then so be it. If she becomes too overstimulated, or does too much in any given day, she said it could trigger an episode of her PTSD.
Still, she said the fear of hospitalization hangs over her.
“It feels endless, and it’s the way that it weighs on me, that I’m always afraid of that happening to me again, and I just wonder if it will go away,” Varisco said.
Varisco also makes it a priority to see her children off to school each morning and “treasure the moment.” But with the renewed time comes grief, she said.
Grief for the memories lost, grief for the missed baby teeth and for the explanations to come.
Varisco said in the aftermath of her hospitalizations, her children have also struggled.
Her children still talk about her time away, and they get worried when she goes to doctor’s appointments. She has to reassure them every time, she will only be gone an hour.
This summer, Varisco spent much of her time rebuilding that relationship with her kids and working to be a “stable presence in their life.” Still, the whole experience has been “heartbreaking” for the mother who still harbors guilt for her time away from her family.
Varisco hopes to never be readmitted to a psychiatric hospital in Delaware. But just in case, she makes a point to remind her daughter of something every day before she leaves for school.
“I love you.”
