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Photos by Erin Nelson.
Dr. Aaron Hawkins, far left, outside of the Hawkins Group Psychiatric Consultants new office — interior seen at right — in Greystone. Since the pandemic, the need for mental health providers has increased significantly, Hawkins said.
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Dr. Aaron Hawkins, a board-certified psychiatrist, said there is a critical shortage of medical health care providers in Alabama.
Hawkins is the clinical medical director of The Hawkins Group, a psychiatric medical facility he founded in 2019 to address the growing mental health needs in east Alabama. It has now expanded to three locations: two in Auburn and a new office in Greystone.
The Hawkins Group added its Birmingham facility because a lot of the previous mental health care providers in the area either retired or moved to jobs in different places. The new office facility fills in some of those gaps.
Since the pandemic, the need for mental health providers has increased significantly, Hawkins said. He wrote an article in Psychiatry Advisor magazine about this growing need. He said because of COVID-19, rates of depression and anxiety have increased to 53.4 percent, and in the past year, 13 percent of adults turned to substance abuse to help cope.
When COVID-19 began, their Auburn offices had increased referrals from primary care physicians who were struggling to meet care demands.
There are seven employees working in the Greystone office, but some move between the three locations depending on the day. The doctors, physicians assistants, therapists and nurse practitioners go where the care is needed.
“Our goal is to provide full, comprehensive care to our patients in each office,” said Chief Financial Officer Benny Paternostro, who manages The Hawkins Group’s day-to-day financial operations.
Employees at the Greystone office include physicians who provide medication and counseling services, an addiction medication specialist, licensed counselors and psychologists. Treatments offered include medication and counseling services, treatment for people struggling with substance abuse, telemedicine services and transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy, or TMS.
TMS is a treatment for severe depression that has been FDA approved since 2008, but not many businesses provide it. The Hawkins Group uses it in all three offices for outpatients only. Treatment comes from a machine that uses a focused magnetic field to treat the part of the brain that does not work well in people that have depression. If someone has depression symptoms that do not respond well to medications, TMS can move directly to the part of the brain that isn’t responding well and provide help.
“The data behind it shows that it actually has less side effects than most of the medicines we use,” Hawkins said. “The remission rates, which means the symptoms that go away, are actually higher with that than certain medications as well.”
His article said that since beginning the TMS treatment at his practice in early 2020, his patients have seen a 70 percent response rate and more than a 50 percent remission rate.
Hawkins’ hope for the future of The Hawkins Group is that the capacity to treat people with severe depression using TMS will continue to expand because it is so effective, and that telemedicine services will be made available to a wider range of individuals in Alabama.
The Hawkins Group Greystone office is at 2803 Greystone Commercial Blvd., Suite 12. For more information, visit hawkins-psychiatry.com.
