On 2006-04-25 05:33:00, Anonymous wrote:
"My only response to all of you is that you are clueless to what really goes on in a good treatment center like a CERTS facility. You are also blind to what is going on in this world in regards to what is happening to our kids. Your quick to judge without really knowing. What are you doing to help? At least we are trying to do something positive and I Know first hand that we are making a diffrence. Read what parents had to say about there experience with CERTS. AS you can tell I'm tired of tying to defend what we are tying to accomplish when all were trying to do is help.
Thanks and have a great day. "
What am I doing to help? I am personally helping a sixteen year old kid with complex PTSD and a cutting problem from years of abuse in her younger childhood. Our home serves as her "safe place" as well as a safe and welcoming place for her to pursue her education with access to someone who is qualified to help her with any of her academic subjects. Additionally, I serve as a sympathetic ear when she needs one and a source of advice for how she can increase how much she can do for herself.
There are also educational resources at my house that aren't available in her home. And from my own problems, I have a solid understanding of what would constitute an emergency to take her in to the ER and get someone to go pick up her mom to meet us there (mom doesn't have phone access at work).
She lives at home, and with her mother's full endorsement, approval and in accord with her mom's wishes, I provide these supports. (Mother has custody.)
My help is no substitute for qualified psychiatric care and therapy, but I provide day in and day out community-type supports of the kind those professionals don't do.
She's not the first kid I've helped, but she's the one who's needed the most care and attention.
She's a great kid, and a friend to the whole family.
Because of her PTSD and the cutting, pretty much any of these facilities would tell her parents they should send her there, if they were stupid and gullible enough to call them.
There is strong scientific evidence that private, live-in facilities for teens do not do them any good, frequently do them harm, and are far inferior to community based care in which the teen lives at home. Government and drug war activists really wanted these facilities to work, were expecting to find evidence that they worked, and were actively looking for any scientifically credible support for them being effective in some positive way. They looked hard. They really wanted to find an answer in favor of the facilities. Instead, they found the facilities do no help and frequently do further harm.
Government and drug war activists did not want to find that community based care was what worked for teens and that facilities didn't work. But that's what they found.
By the facilities' own oft-stated standard of "do what works," nobody should use them. Ever.
I exempt from "facility," as I've used the term above, the RTCs for mentally ill kids based on the medical model of treatment that strive hard to get the kid stabilized--which inherently makes them ready for a less restrictive setting--ASAP. I also exempt college prep schools of the strictly academic variety. I exempt academic boarding schools with targetted curricula for specific learning disabilities so long as there is no in-house therapy component---or if in-house therapy is all strictly voluntary and serves only a small number of students on an as-needed basis, and so long as any longer term therapy is referred out to independent professionals in the community. I exempt facilities for children who are so severely and permanently disabled that they cannot be cared for at home (severe autism, severe mental retardation). There may be a few categories I've forgotten.
"Troubled Teen" facilities, though, just don't work. They're for nobody.
Julie
