Bureau of Behavioral Health | Division of Community Based Care Services | New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services

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Bureau of Behavioral Health

The Bureau of Behavioral Health (BBH) seeks to promote respect, recovery, and full community inclusion for adults, including older adults, who experience a mental illness and children with an emotional disturbance. BBH works to ensure the provision of efficient and effective services to those citizens who are most severely and persistently disabled by mental, emotional, and behavioral dysfunction as defined by NH laws and rules. To this end, BBH has divided the entire state into community mental health regions. Each of the ten regions has a BBH contracted Community Mental Health Center and many regions have Peer Support Agencies.

Psychiatric Emergency & Crisis Services

Services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to any person in the state of New Hampshire who may be experiencing psychiatric distress. If you are dealing with an immediate crisis, please

call 911, or
call the statewide suicide hotline at 1-800-273-talk (1-800-273-8255), or
call the national suicide hotline at 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433), or
visit the emergency room at your local hospital, or
contact your local community mental health center.

For less urgent situations, please contact your local community mental health center, or your local peer support agency. Several of these agencies offer "Warm Lines" which provide telephone peer-to-peer support, understanding, sympathy, and advice.

Community Mental Health Centers

Community Mental Health Centers are private full service clinics which offer a wide variety of programs such as individual and group therapy, medications, and symptom management. They also provide special intensive services to persons who meet the BBH eligibility requirements because they have a severe mental illness or emotional disability.

Peer Support Agencies

The Peer Support Agencies (PSAs) are private not-for-profit agencies that have contracted with BBH. PSAs provide help to people with mental illness who are 18 years of age or older and who identify themselves as a recipient, a former recipient, or a person who is at significant risk of becoming a recipient of publicly funded mental health services.