Learn about our mission, our team, and our commitment to your recovery.
In the first half of 2015, Porterville Health System recorded a year-over-year increase in overdose admissions among patients under thirty-five - fentanyl-contaminated pills, polysubstance presentations, and the kind of younger demographic profile that hospital systems across the Central Valley were beginning to see. The hospital leadership reached out to a group of addiction medicine clinicians who had been running outpatient programs in Bakersfield and Visalia, and asked a specific question: could you build a residential treatment center here, designed specifically for the population we are losing?
The answer became RBH Rehab. The founding partnership with Porterville Health System shaped the clinical architecture from the beginning - detox protocols coordinated with the hospital emergency department, medical rounds that mirrored hospital standards, and referral workflows designed for seamless hospital-to-residential handoffs. The first patient walked through the doors in October 2015. Eleven years and 5,500 patients later, the hospital partnership remains active, and the young-adult focus that drove the founding still organizes how we admit, treat, and discharge.
RBH stands for "Recovery, Belonging, Honesty" - the three words the founding clinicians posted in the staff lounge during the first week of operations and have not taken down since.
Our mission is to deliver clinically excellent addiction treatment for young adults in the Central Valley - a standard of care that our founding hospital partnership made possible, and that our 101 clinicians make real every day.
Clinical excellence is not a marketing claim at RBH. It is a measurable standard: evidence-based protocols with documented adherence, outcome assessments at admission and at 90- and 365-day follow-ups, quarterly clinical-quality reviews that include patient-reported metrics, and a continuous-improvement discipline borrowed directly from the hospital system that launched us.
We publish our 12-month sustained-sobriety rate to patients and families who ask on the first call. We believe the right to that number belongs to the person making the treatment decision, not to the treatment center.
Three clinical pillars organize the work at RBH Rehab. Each is visible in daily programming.
Our campus sits at the edge of the Sierra foothills. Desert hiking trails, an outdoor fire pit, and family picnic grounds are clinical settings, not scenic amenities. Residents receive structured outdoor programming daily - grounding practices, somatic regulation, and group work in the landscape that surrounds the facility. The research on nature-based therapy is unambiguous for young adults, and we design the program around that evidence.
Language is not always the fastest route into buried material, especially for young adults whose substance use began in adolescence and whose emotional vocabulary is still forming. Our creative arts studio - staffed by licensed expressive-arts therapists - runs music, visual art, creative writing, and psychodrama blocks integrated into every resident's treatment plan. For many patients, these hours are when the clinical work finally cracks open.
Addiction lives in the body before it becomes a story in the mind. Sleep, nutrition, somatic regulation, and physical movement are treated as clinical priorities at RBH. Morning movement, supervised meals, acupuncture sessions, and trauma-sensitive bodywork appear on the same schedule as CBT and group therapy.
Executive Director and Co-Founder
One of the founding clinicians who opened RBH in partnership with Porterville Health System in 2015. Board-certified in addiction medicine, Dr. Arroyo spent twelve years at Porterville Health System before co-founding RBH. She oversees clinical strategy, the outcomes-measurement program, and the ongoing hospital partnership that anchors the facility.
Medical Director
Board-certified in addiction medicine and psychiatry. Dr. Ibe-Okafor joined RBH from Fresno Community Regional Medical Center in 2019 to lead the medical detox wing. He sets withdrawal protocols, chairs weekly clinical rounds, and directs the dual-diagnosis psychiatric review program that reviews every co-occurring admission within forty-eight hours.
Clinical Director and Creative Arts Lead
Holly directs all therapy curricula and leads the creative arts programming that distinguishes RBH from standard residential programs. A licensed family therapist and board-certified art therapist, she designed the expressive-arts curriculum that is now used as the clinical spine of the residential day.
RBH Rehab maintains the highest standards of care through nationally recognized accrediting bodies.
"I was twenty-three, two semesters from finishing my degree, and I had been lying about my fentanyl use for eight months. My parents drove me to RBH after I overdosed on a Tuesday afternoon and somebody called 911. I was certain I would hate every minute of it. The admissions nurse who intake me had worked a detox wing at Porterville Health System before joining RBH. She walked me through what the next 72 hours would feel like in specific terms, and for the first time in months I felt like someone was treating me as an adult making a decision, not a kid being managed. I finished 60 days residential, then their IOP, then went back and finished my degree the following spring."
- Casey M., residential alumnus, 2024
"By the time I got to RBH, my wife and my two younger brothers had stopped taking my calls. I was twenty-nine, working construction in the Central Valley, drinking a fifth a night, and every conversation with my family for three years had ended with me defensive and them exhausted. The family programming at RBH is what rebuilt that. Not because it was easy, but because it was structured - there were clinicians in the room, there were scripts for the hard conversations, there were apologies I had to make out loud. My wife walked me out on discharge day. My brothers call me now."
- Devon R., residential alumnus, 2023
"I am the mother of an RBH alumnus. My daughter was twenty-one when we brought her to the admissions office, and I want to say what I wish someone had told me then: the treatment is not just for your child. The family programming runs every Thursday, and I attended every one I could from Fresno. The clinicians taught me how to stop doing the things I thought were helping and actually were making it easier for her to keep using. She is sober twenty-two months later. So am I, by a different measure - sober from the frantic, hovering version of myself I had become."
- Yolanda K., parent of residential alumna, 2024
