It was touch and go there for awhile, but my wife’s dream of opening a psychic detective office in Lawrence is still alive (At least, I assume that’s her dream. She loves the USA Network program “Psych,” and she spends an inordinate amount of time rubbing her temples — especially when I’m talking — like she is receiving a psychic message.)

Regardless, I had heard that there was a new psych office coming to town, and I just assumed . . . But in reality, there is a new psychiatric office that has opened in Lawrence, and it really is no joking matter.

It was about 10 years ago that Lawrence Memorial Hospital closed its inpatient mental health unit, and a major reason behind the closure was a shortage of psychiatrists in Lawrence.

A Kansas City-area psychiatrist says the shortage still exists, which has led her to open Awakenings, an office that offers intensive outpatient mental health programs out of the Medical Arts building at 346 Maine St.

“This is a step down from an inpatient unit, but it is a step up from what can be provided by an ER visit for a suicidal patient, for example,” said Dr. Maria Cristina Davila, who serves as the medial director for the Awakenings practice.

Davila has been a psychiatrist for more than 20 years. She opened her Awakenings practice in Prairie Village last year and quickly decided to expand into Lawrence after hearing about the need.

“I’ve been a resident of Lawrence since 1996, and we definitely have a large gap in services,” said Angie Logan, a clinical therapist on the Awakenings staff. “I have seen a lot of KU students who have had to drop out of KU because they had to go to Kansas City or elsewhere to get treatment.”

The Lawrence office will offer intensive outpatient programs for conditions such as bipolar, anxiety disorders, depression, substance abuse, pain pill addictions and other issues. Awakenings offers both adult and adolescent treatment programs.

Davila will have regular office hours in Lawrence on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and other licensed mental health professionals also will staff the Lawrence office on other days. A big part of the treatment programs at Awakenings involve group therapy, which meet three times a week for three hours at a time.

Davila said the practice also hopes to have serious discussions with Lawrence Memorial Hospital about how her staff can provide services that complement the mental health treatment that is provided in the hospital’s emergency room.

“There is a real problem when patients get sent out of town for treatment,” Logan said. “A lot of time when they come back to Lawrence, they don’t have that continuity of care, and that is critical.”

In other news and notes from around town:

• There’s also news on a different health front in Lawrence. We’ve been telling you for years to keep an eye on the Lawrence-based biotech company CritiTech. Well, the company has recently announced that its latest trials for a possible cancer drug have gone well.

The company put its Nanotax product through phase I clinical trials that involved providing doses to 21 patients with advanced forms of cancers. The trials were conducted in partnership with Kansas University’s cancer center in Kansas City, Kan., which is a National Cancer Institute-designated program.

A majority of the patients were suffering from advanced stages of ovarian cancer, but the drug also is designed to treat pancreatic cancer, colorectal, liver and bladder cancers.

“The study results demonstrated that Nanotax was very well tolerated, and there were no serious adverse events related to the drug,” said Charles Decedue, Crititech’s chief scientific officer. With guidance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, we are looking forward to initiating the next steps to continue to advance Nanotax.”

In other words, the company is still moving down a positive path to gain regulatory approval to sell the drug in the U.S. I reached out to company officials to get a better estimate of that timeline. Drug development is a slow-moving business, but this latest news is a positive development for the company, and there have been other signs that Crititech is optimistic about its future.

As we previously reported, the company purchased a new headquarters location in North Lawrence late last year. The move was billed as a strategy to provide room for the company to expand its laboratory and drug development space.