Guest House to build new $3.5 million facility

Kristin Lukowski of The Michigan Catholic
Published January 27, 2006

Detroit – Guest House, which provides alcohol and substance abuse services to men and women religious, has announced plans to build a $3.5 million treatment center for sisters at its 102-acre Lake Orion campus.

Guest House has treated nearly 300 women religious since it began doing so in 1994. It has also treated more than 6,600 priests, brothers and deacons, although men are now treated at a center in Minnesota. Guest House celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and is one of a few such treatment centers across the country.

“I believe we’ve treated more priests than any other health care facility in the world,” Daniel A. Kidd, Guest House’s president and chief executive officer, said.

Currently, sisters are treated for alcoholism, drug addictions, compulsive gambling, compulsive eating and compulsive spending in the historical, 67-room Scripps Mansion, built in 1927 and formerly owned by William Scripps of The Detroit News and WWJ Radio fame.

Kidd said the new building will be more easily accessible to sisters who might have mobility issues as the population of men and women religious ages.

The Scripps Mansion “was not meant to be a treatment house for 70-year-old sisters,” Kidd said. “We need to accommodate the sisters we are treating.”

They’d considered renovating the mansion, Kidd said, but not only was there concern about maintaining the historical significance of the building, but it could have gotten very expensive. Building a new, state-of-the-art facility seemed the better option for maximizing treatment opportunities and was recommended by an advisory board.

Plans for the new treatment center include a spa for water therapy and staff offices in one wing; offices are currently spread out over three floors, Kidd said. As in the mansion, the new treatment center will also feature a chapel and kitchen, although the new center’s plans call for those spaces to be more modern.

Sisters will have access to recreational space, and all 16 bedrooms will look out over the back of the property and a valley. Those rooms will be far enough away from the rest of the center to ensure privacy for the women receiving treatment.

Skylights in the chapel and in the main patient lounge will help to bring as much sunlight as possible into the building, as many patients are also depressed and could benefit from the sunlight not often abundant in old buildings, Kidd explained. The new building will also try to capture the flavor of the existing mansion, as a matching turret is in the plans for the new center.

“We’re going to try to match the buildings as well as we can,” Kidd said.

Although the mansion offered a non-clinical feel, the new treatment center will also be built to feel like a home, Kidd said. The rooms will all be decorated with different motifs, and the center will not have much of an institutional look. After all, most sisters stay at the mansion for three to six months, he said.

“It needs to be a home away from home,” he said.

After the treatment center is built, the Scripps mansion will be used for training and education, including accommodating those attending training; as an after-care program, for sisters to stay when they come back for evaluations; for board of trustees meetings; and even for groups who want to see the see the historic building. If it is opened up to tours, the house could generate revenue without compromising the privacy of the sisters receiving treatment there.

Kidd said about half of the women who seek treatment at Guest House do so for alcohol or substance abuse, usually legal painkillers and tranquilizers, with another third seeking treatment for eating disorders and the rest for gambling or spending.

Sisters are usually in their mid-60s when they come to Guest House, although they can be as old as in their 80s or as young as their late 30s. Kidd said the good news is that women religious tend to live longer than lay women, so after recovery through treatment, they have many good years left.

Priests, brothers and deacons are treated at Guest House’s Minnesota campus, although Michigan does have a halfway house for men who need extra time to recover from their addiction.

Building permits for the new treatment center have been secured by Orion Township, and Kidd said bids still have to be taken for the main contract, although preliminary work has started to make way for the new center. It will likely be funded at least in part by donations, although he has already received loans from 20 different religious orders of sisters for the project.

In all, Kidd says there’s been a lot of backing for the new treatment center. “It’s been good to see that kind of (support), and it’s been very, very helpful to us,” he said. “Quite a few communities backed us. They see the need.”