Mick Kirby doesn’t remember how he became interested in psychology.
“I was always interested in it. I don’t know where it came from.”
Kirby does recall growing up in the “rough” mill town of Danville, Va., near the North Carolina border. He started school there and remembers that his singular goal every day “was to get home from school without getting beaten up.”
Maybe that wasn’t the genesis of his interest in psychology, but that interest did emerge in college and grew until he became head of what was little more than a detox facility and engineered its growth into Colorado’s largest nonprofit provider of prevention and treatment services for substance abuse.
Kirby came to that detox facility – Arapahoe House – in 1983, seven years after it was started by the Arapahoe County League of Women Voters. When he took over as chief executive, he was overseeing three facilities and a $1 million budget.
Today, he is still CEO at Arapahoe House, which now has 14 treatment facilities, plus a wholly owned subsidiary in a 72-bed psychiatric hospital, Centennial Peaks in Louisville, and a $28 million budget.
Arapahoe House provided services to more than 17,000 people in 2004, according to Kirby.
“It is amazing how we’ve grown,” said state Sen. Norma Anderson, a member of Arapahoe House’s board of directors. “I don’t think people recognize the value of Arapahoe House. Under his (Kirby’s) leadership, they are.”
A certified drug and alcohol abuse counselor, Kirby said he no longer sees individual clients.
“Now, I’m dealing with senior managers. I get much more enjoyment out of running an organization as large as Arapahoe House, where I can develop an idea and see it work,” Kirby said. “I think you can impact many more people that way.”
He said he likes creating concepts and programs, and watching them develop and evolve over time.
“He is a consensus builder,” Anderson said. “He has a very warm, affectionate personality. He brings people in, but yet, he leads,” she said.
“He does everything so calmly, but I know he’s a nervous wreck inside,” Anderson said. “Particularly the last few years when the state has done so many budget cuts. … It’s been very difficult.”
Kirby moved with his parents and sister to Staunton, Va., when he was 10 and grew up in the historic Shenandoah Valley, not far from Charlottesville. In high school, his interest “mainly was girls,” he recalls.
He didn’t become a serious student until his junior year at the University of Richmond, where he received a bachelor’s degree with a major in psychology in 1966. He received a master’s degree in general psychology from Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
The man who directed his master’s thesis, a former professor at the University of Colorado, had an aerial photograph of Boulder on his wall.
“It looked wonderful,” Kirby said.
He applied to CU and was accepted, where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate, both in social psychology.
Kirby first went to work at Denver General Hospital, which had just gotten a big federal grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for a polydrug treatment program, because people were starting to show up needing treatment for abuse of multiple drugs. But, that didn’t last.
“There were not enough people, and it was expensive treatment,” Kirby remembers.
Kirby was thinking about going into academia, but while doing work at Fort Logan for his dissertation, “I became engaged in the real world.”
He hooked up with Dr. Paul Polak, with whom he published several journal articles on their studies of community alternatives to psychiatric hospitalization. They placed patients in private homes on the theory that the hospitalization added to their problems. Their program achieved better outcomes.
“I found it so fascinating that I went to work at the Southwest Mental Health Center,” he said. Then on to Arapahoe House in 1983.
While he no longer sees patients, Kirby says he gets a lot of satisfaction from the growth and the programs he has shepherded. Many of those programs are no longer even associated with him, but that’s fine with Kirby.
“It’s better that way, in a sense. It means it’s stable and going on. It’s always a sense of pride getting letters from patients and their families about how much a program worked for them,” he said.
“We have tried to create programs that meet the changing needs of people.”
Alcohol abuse is still the No. 1 problem, but methamphetamine has become a major treatment problem in Colorado.
“The drug is so compelling. It’s like cocaine times 10,” Kirby said. “It’s cheap. It gives a long high. It’s difficult to successfully terminate. The brain actually changes, as with all drug use.”
Kirby serves on the board of directors for the Mental Health Association of Colorado and the Signal Behavioral Health Network. He also is the chairman and CEO of the Flatirons Behavioral Health Corp., which operates Centennial Peaks Hospital.
He received the Who’s Who in Executives and Professionals award in 1994. He is a consultant for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Homeless Branch and for the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment.
Staff writer Jim Kirksey can be reached at 303-820-1448 or jkirksey@denverpost.com.
