History

1985 Virginia Impaired Professionals Program (VIPP) was created. Joni Pazera, a counselor working for Peninsula Hospital, now known as Riverside Peninsula Behavioral Health, visited Talbott Recovery Center in Atlanta, Georgia and returned inspired to begin “a professional’s program for healthcare professionals with a Substance Use Disorder.” “We didn’t even have charts” exclaims Joni Pazera (who currently still works as a Family Educator with the Williamsburg Place/William J. Farley Center) who, along with Jackie Jeffries, Mae McAllister and David Flaharty, M.D. founded VIPP. On a shoestring and inspiration, what was the VIPP would become Perspectives, then The William J. Farley Institute for Recovery and today Williamsburg Place and The William J. Farley Center.

1991 “We needed to do this…” George White, President of Diamond Healthcare Corporation, often remarks as he remembers the beginnings of Williamsburg Place. Inspired by the courage of those in recovery, Mr. White envisioned a facility in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia that would provide high quality, dignified treatment to people with addiction to alcohol and drugs. Due to the given pressures of the early days of managed care and the climate of behavioral health in general, it was not a good year to begin such an endeavor. 1991 was a slow start for Williamsburg Place.

Mr. White shares a story about the first Christmas Eve at Williamsburg Place. Owing to a “lack luster” beginning, staff were concerned about the future of Williamsburg Place. Mr. White came and along with staff and a handful of patients lit a Yule Log. He promised the staff that he would be there the next year to light the Yule Log if they would continue their dedication to the work of Williamsburg Place and that is exactly what happened.

1995 Pressures were mounting and nationally, free-standing treatment facilities were struggling, in some cases, failing. Under the leadership of George White, Diamond Healthcare Corporation, the nation’s number one management/consultation business development agent for behavioral health, made an offer to the struggling William J. Farley Institute to join forces and combine addiction treatment expertise from the Williamsburg Place staff and the William J. Farley Institute. The goal was to develop a continuum of high quality, intensive, and intimate partial hospitalization and treatment under one roof.

In 1995 these two professionally dynamic programs came together to create what is now a nationally recognized residential treatment program for physicians, psychiatrists, and therapists. The merger of these two programs increased the quality of our treatment and validated our reputation as a leader in treating the nation’s number one public health crisis: ADDICTION. It worked.

We are continuously licensed by the Commonwealth of Virginia to provide substance abuse treatment services in a supervised living milieu. We are accredited by JCAHO-Behavioral Health with glowing reviewer comments such as “the best treatment center we have seen”. We have received the JCAHO gold award as well as Accreditation with Commendation. We have treated and introduced recovery to over 5000 patients and families since the lighting of that first Yule Log. Not including the patients and families whose lives were changed by VIPP and William J. Farley Institute prior to 1995. We foster a “History of Recovery”.

Referral sources consider us to be a Center of Excellence in abstinence-based treatment because of our intimate, intensive, comprehensive multi-disciplinary approach to problems including:

~ Alcohol dependence

~ Drug dependence

~ Co-occurring Psychiatric Disorders

~ Chronic Pain Disorders

~ Families and Children at Risk

~ Healthcare professionals attempting career preservation

~ Relapse prone clients

We are a place of healing in our nation’s first colonial capital where good people come to get well and where families find hope and a solution that really works.