A Residential Treatment Center for Adolescent Males with Behavioral and Emotional Disorders
Our Five Basic Tenets
We ask a lot of the adolescents we treat and we give a lot of ourselves. The patient must actively participate for any treatment regimen to work. Our residents have their days filled with activities, formal education, therapy groups and individual sessions. The program is intense because we only have a short time to change thirteen to eighteen years of learning experiences.Every waking moment must be dedicated to making the needed changes in order to maximize the potential of the individual adolescent to acquire the necessary skills to function in our society.
We are dedicated to providing the most effective care for our clients through various programs designed to target specific problems faced by the adolescent.By using self evaluation, role modeling, individual therapy, group therapy, family therapy, life-skills training and formal education we help our clients establish control over their own behavior, improve decision making skills, maximize academic achievement and develop pro-social behavior to replace acting-out responses to anxiety and depression. Our programs are concentrated learning experiences designed to channel adolescents into functional life skills that enable them to succeed in our society. We teach residents a new way of life that they can recognize as more beneficial to them than their former dysfunctional patterns of behavior. The program works because it is based on common sense, discipline, responsibility, and basic learning theory concepts that have been proven over time.
The therapy program has five basic tenets:
1. The majority of residents have the same basic wants and needs.
2. Each resident has to face similar types of fear and anxiety.
3. The majority of residents have learned inappropriate means of dealing with their wants, needs, and fears.
4. The majority of residents have the potential to learn functional and socially accepted means of obtaining their wants and needs, and overcoming their fears.
5. For this learning to occur, every minute of the waking day must provide a program of maximum intensity to overcome the past thirteen to eighteen years of dysfunctional learning experiences.
To develop the necessary life skills every aspect of the resident’s behavior is constantly monitored and a cuing system provides immediate feedback as to the appropriateness of behavior.There are more than 100 rules that each resident must know.Some of the rules make sense and some of them do not—much like the outside world.There is a peer hierarchy of positions that can be obtained which are coupled with added privileges and responsibilities—much like the outside world. Everything is a privilege except three meals a day, standard clothing and a comfortable place to sleep. Watching TV, listening to the radio or CD player, etc., are all privileges which must be earned and can be removed for dysfunctional behavior.Every resident is responsible for cleaning his immediate area and his assigned common area.
All staff must obey the same rules as residents and can be cued by residents for breaking a rule. Residents can write staff up for infractions of the rules or any behavior they deem to be inappropriate. Each write-up is evaluated in the presence of the resident and the staff member he has accused. A decision is made to either agree with the write-up and sanction the staff, dismiss the write-up as inaccurate, or dismiss the write-up with the addition that the action was frivolous and warrants a sanction for the resident.To further insure the integrity of the program there is a feedback session weekly with all the residents where they can voice their concerns directly to the program director. All problems or suggestions are written down during the meeting and are addressed in writing to the residents within two days of the meeting.
Residents are taught appropriate ways of expressing hostility and anger which are socially acceptable.The program teaches functional life skills by allowing the resident to observe and model behaviors that work more effectively than those he has learned through past experiences.