Background
David Niknafs founded the RECO program in 2013 and now leads the network that includes RECO Immersive. His path into residential mental health treatment started with a personal recovery journey — and the realization that many treatment programs treated the symptoms but ignored the person, the history, and the family system around them.
That experience shaped his vision for RECO Immersive: a residential mental health setting where every client is known by name, every treatment plan is individualized, and the integration between psychiatric care, therapy, and lived experience is built into the fabric of the day. The facility is the answer to a question he kept asking: what would residential treatment look like if we actually got it right?
Approach to Care
David's leadership philosophy at RECO Immersive starts from a single conviction: residential mental health treatment fails when it stops feeling like real life. Clients should be known, not processed. Clinical teams should communicate, not silo. The alumni network should outlast the discharge date.
That philosophy is why RECO Immersive looks and feels different from a hospital — and why, despite operating to the highest clinical standards, it reads as a place to heal rather than a place to be treated. Hiring decisions, program structure, and the integration with psychiatric care all reflect David's underlying belief that culture is the unspoken treatment modality.
Education & Credentials
David is a Certified National Drug & Alcohol Interventionist (CNDAI) and a Nationally Certified Intervention Professional (NCIP). His credentials in the intervention field combine formal training with the unusual qualification of lived recovery experience and the operational discipline of building a behavioral health network from a single practice.
What to Expect
Clients at RECO Immersive rarely meet David one-on-one — but his fingerprints are on every part of the experience. The reason the staff genuinely know clients by name. The reason your discharge plan integrates with outpatient care across the network. The reason alumni events draw people back years later.
David's standard for RECO Immersive is that residential mental health treatment should feel like the most attentive, integrated, dignified care a person has ever received. If you talk with him at an alumni gathering, you'll find someone whose authority is rooted in the same lived experience as the people he's built RECO to serve.
