Mental Health Care Heroes
Reprinted from WV Living Magazine - Spring 2025
By Wendy Holdren and Taylor Maple
All across the state there are West Virginians experiencing a mental health crisis. But also all across the state are those whose mission it is to treat and prevent those crises and help put West Virginians in a healthier state of mind. This feature honors just a few of the most innovative, dedicated mental health professionals who are doing just that as well as a few of the caring leaders who are bringing those efforts to the forefront of their institutions and communities.
Although he now serves as chief medical officer of behavioral health for Community Care of West Virginia, Kevin Junkins didn’t initially plan to pursue a career in mental health. “Being a doctor, I loved the concept of having a relationship with my patients and wanted to pursue family medicine as my career,” Junkins says. “But family medicine wouldn’t allow me to get to know patients to the degree I wanted to.”
In his third year of medical school, the Grant County native found his calling, along with the doctor–patient relationship he desired, in psychiatry. After meeting with CCWV, Junkins fell in love with its mission. As the second-largest Federally Qualified Health Center in the state, CCWV offers 18 community health center locations, 50 school-based health sites, eight pharmacies, and one dental office. The mission is to provide high-quality, accessible health care services to West Virginians, regardless of their ability to pay.
Junkins started as the only staff psychiatrist, but when CCWV expanded its behavioral health mission, he was selected as chief medical officer for that division. He is especially proud of CCWV’s expansion of the Critical Access to Pediatric Psychiatry program and of a collaboration with West Virginia Wesleyan College to increase the number of mental health providers in the state through its clinical mental health master’s program.
“There’s a lot of satisfaction I get from helping people who are vulnerable, who don’t always have a voice for themselves,” Junkins says. “One really rewarding thing is being able to treat people with mental health conditions with respect. A lot of our patients, when they first come to us, they haven’t historically been heard. They felt like they were a number. We’ve really tried to build a program where we treat people like people.” — WH