"If you're having a psychiatric emergency, hang up and dial 911, or go to your nearest emergency room." This voicemail recommendation is very familiar to patients, families, and caregivers seeking mental health assistance, especially those with suicidal thoughts. And people who follow the advice also know that a 911 call will likely bring them to that nearest emergency room (ER). Yet there has long been concern among the mental health community that ERs are not optimal places for those experiencing a crisis, with too many stories of retraumatization, long waits, or people simply "boarded" in hallways without appropriate psychiatric care. In response, many communities have focused on “upstream” projects to divert people away from ERs, through hotlines, mobile crisis teams, and community-based crisis centers. Even with these new crisis options, however, the number of people coming to U.S. ERs for behavioral health reasons has continued to climb, and has now risen to roughly one in every eight patients in ERs nationwide. This presentation takes a different tack: what if, instead of assuming emergency rooms must remain frightening places in a crisis, we made it a policy priority to redesign parts of the emergency section of the hospitals into welcoming, soothing, therapeutic sites specifically for behavioral emergency patients? What if state and local leaders, advocates, peers, and families worked together to create healing design standards, funding streams, and accountability measures that turn EDs into trauma-informed, recovery-oriented, and peer-inclusive components of the crisis continuum—aligned with 988, SAMHSA's crisis guidelines, and the advocacy community’s vision for humane crisis response?This presentation will detail how the innovative Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment and Healing (EmPATH) Units challenge long-standing design and clinical approaches to dramatically improve behavioral health emergency care, metrics, and outcomes, showing how the environment can actually be a treatment in itself, resulting in much safer spaces with fewer episodes of aggression, far less need for coercive interventions, and newfound positive engagement and patient satisfaction compared to the traditional approaches.