Connecticut Counseling Centers, Inc.

Connecticut Counseling Centers, Inc. (CCC) is pleased to announce the opening of an Opioid Treatment Program at 285 Kensington Avenue, Meriden. It will be the first Opioid Treatment program in the greater Meriden area. The clinic will provide state of the art treatment for opioid dependence including both methadone and buprenorphine treatment services in addition to a broad range of counseling services customized to meet each patient’s need. The treatment center will be staffed by an interdisciplinary team including licensed physicians, psychiatrists, nurses, counselors, and social workers. This will be CCC’s second clinic in Meriden, they currently operate a clinic at 290 Pratt St., Meriden which has been providing treatment for both mental health and substance use disorders for the past three years. The new clinic buildout is in its final stages and anticipates opening in January, 2021. The new clinic will be located at 285 Kensington Avenue, across the street from the Westfield Meriden Mall and the Midstate Medical Center.

This new state of the art treatment clinic is in response to the ongoing opioid epidemic in Meriden and the surrounding area. The clinic will provide medications including methadone and buprenorphine in addition to a full array of counseling and psychiatric services customized to meet the individual patient needs. These types of programs which combine medications and counseling services are commonly referred to as “Medication Assisted Treatment” (MAT) for opioid dependence and they are considered by the Centers for Disease Control and the US Department of Health and Human Services as the “gold standard” for prescription narcotic, synthetic opioid, and heroin addiction. According to the National Institutes of Health, “the safety and efficacy of MAT has been unequivocally established. Methadone maintenance coupled with relevant social, medical, and psychological services has the highest probability of being the most effective of all treatments for opioid addiction.” According to the Connecticut Behavioral Health Partnership and the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, opioid abusers who do not access medication assisted treatment have a fifteen (15) times higher mortality rate. In the United States opioid overdose deaths have quadrupled in the last decade. In fact, on average 130 people die of opioid overdose every day. In Connecticut, there have been 1378 drug overdose fatalities in 2020, a 14.6% increase over the previous year. Many of these overdose deaths involved the synthetic opioid, fentanyl which can be hundreds of times more powerful than heroin. The average percentage of fentanyl-involved overdose deaths for 2020 was 85%. The town of Meriden has been heavily impacted by the opioid epidemic and during the last few years has at times experienced one of the highest per capita overdose rates in CT. In 2020, 37 Meriden residents have died from accidental overdoses (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner).

Connecticut Counseling Centers, Inc. is a state-licensed, nationally accredited, not for profit Behavioral Healthcare Corporation that offers a full array of outpatient counseling, medical, and psychiatric services for the treatment of substance use and mental health disorders. CCC has been on the front lines treating opioid addiction since its inception in 1984 and operates similar treatment medication assisted treatment facilities in Waterbury, Danbury, and Norwalk which serves over 2400 patients annually from 67 Connecticut cities and towns. CCC accepts Medicaid and most major commercial insurances.