Psychiatric Care for Lynwood

Lynwood’s rail station is on Long Beach Boulevard. So is our office. Metro’s C Line station in the city is named Lynwood Station and it stands on the boulevard, and if you turned south from there and stayed on the same road you would arrive at our door about nine miles later. That is the simplest fact on this page and the one worth holding onto. Everything else about getting here is a variation on it.

Before the directions, the coverage answer, because it applies to nearly half of the city. In Lynwood, 28.0 percent of working-age adults are on Medi-Cal or a similar program and 18.7 percent have no insurance. We contract with commercial insurance, which 46.8 percent of residents hold, and we take self-pay with a sliding scale. We do not currently bill Medi-Cal managed care. If that is your coverage we are a self-pay option and not a covered visit, and the county help line at the end of this page can point you toward care we cannot match on price. We would rather you knew that now than at the front desk, and the wording is deliberate. Not currently is not the same as never.

For the rest, here is what we are. A psychiatric practice, which means evaluation, diagnosis, medication chosen carefully and then watched, and follow-up that changes course when the plan is not working. Not a therapy group and not a walk-in clinic. The problems we see most from this direction are anxiety that has tipped into panic attacks, which people often mistake for a heart problem first, and depression that has already been through two medications without moving. Both are treatable. The second one in particular is a reason to see a psychiatrist rather than to keep trying the same thing.

Now the boulevard, in three forms. By car from City Hall on Bullis Road, Google’s quickest option when we checked at three on a weekday afternoon was 10.1 miles and about 18 minutes by Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard and the 710. Straight down the 710 was 10.0 miles and about 19. Long Beach Boulevard the whole way, joining the 710 partway, was 8.6 miles and also about 19. The morning and evening peaks were not sampled. By bus, Metro’s Line 60 picks up at Imperial, Tweedy and Rosecrans inside Lynwood and heads south along the boulevard. Metro publishes the route as ending at Artesia Station, and in daylight it does. Artesia is your change: Long Beach Transit’s Route 51 takes the same boulevard from there and finishes it for you, past Bixby Road and Wardlow Road, the two stops our door sits between. Ten of the 256 weekday trips stay on the boulevard all the way to those stops without a change, which sounds like the answer until you look at the times. They run between about 12.20am and 4.16am, on the hours when the A Line is closed and the buses cover for it. By train, ride the C Line one stop west from Lynwood Station to Willowbrook, change to the A Line south, and finish on the same Route 51 from Artesia Station.

A local note for the weeks after a first appointment, when people often need somewhere to be. Lynwood Library sits on Bullis Road a few doors from City Hall, a 12,000 square foot building from 1977 that was renovated in an eight million dollar county project, with a proper adult reading area and two study rooms. It was founded in 1915 as a volunteer library. It is free, quiet, and legitimate to sit in for an hour, which is a more useful prescription than it sounds.

Most people from Lynwood will do the first visit in person and the routine reviews by secure video, which is what we would suggest. In crisis, 988 answers by call or text at any hour. The county mental health line is (800) 854-7771, and Lynwood falls within the county’s Service Area 6.