McDermott Center/Haymarket Ctr

About McDermott Center/Haymarket Ctr

Haymarket Center, legally McDermott Center, is a nonprofit, community-based substance use treatment organization in Chicago. They were founded in 1975 by Monsignor Ignatius McDermott and Dr. James West, who saw addiction as a disease that called for treatment rather than criminalization. As a Federally Qualified Health Center, they pair addiction care with behavioral and primary health services, with access available around the clock and levels of care spanning detoxification, residential treatment, intensive outpatient, and standard outpatient. Medication-assisted treatment is offered in every program, and they primarily serve people facing homelessness, poverty, or justice involvement from the city’s South and West Sides, regardless of ability to pay.

Residential care is organized into gender-specific units, including trauma-informed tracks built on cognitive behavioral therapy for people with opioid use and trauma histories, integrated programs with psychiatrist access for co-occurring serious mental illness, short-term crisis stabilization, and a rapid stabilization unit for men who relapsed after earlier treatment. Parents have unusual options here: in the MATER Hall and MOMs programs, mothers (including pregnant women and those with criminal justice involvement) can keep up to two children under five with them while the children attend on-site developmental child care, and a family-centered program for fathers focuses on parenting, co-parenting communication, and financial literacy. Beyond clinical treatment, they provide a year of follow-up recovery coaching, supportive employment and food-service job training, on-site GED classes, primary care and health screenings, and services in Spanish. They also run a DUI risk education program and street outreach at O’Hare and on the CTA Blue Line that can connect people directly to admission.