Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
The world can feel heavy. Children can feel worry, frustration, tiredness, sadness, helplessness and hopelessness.
Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (CAP) at UnityPoint Health – Meriter is where children in mental health crisis can begin their journey toward healing. CAP offers a safe and caring environment for hundreds of children each year, ages 6–18, facing severe mental health challenges, such as depression, self-harm behavior and ideation, anxiety, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and more.
The Difference we Make Together
With your help, we can continue to offer lifechanging and lifesaving care to kids who need it most.
Your support provides the caregivers at CAP with the extra resources necessary to address the individual needs of every patient who enters their care—uniquely meeting each kid where they're at.
You can help provide healing gardens, music in patient rooms, art kits, safe kits and other tools to promote self-expression and self-calming behaviors. You can help to bring enhancements to care units that keep our providers and young patients safe. You can fund facility artwork, which helps to create a warm and comforting space for the children who come to CAP for inpatient and outpatient care. Your gift can also help us expand and remodel the CAP facility to accommodate every child who needs our help—so we never have to turn anyone away.
The Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Inpatient Facility
The CAP facility focuses on overall health, nutrition and well-being. Following a 2020 expansion, the 30-bed inpatient facility offers private patient rooms, a classroom, a gym and outdoor recreational spaces, a yoga studio and calming, sensory rooms.
This transformative space was made possible, in large part, through overwhelming support from our generous community.