Bear with me on this one, this is going to be a long one. My reasons for posting this are varied. Probably the biggest one is that I hope this might be an avenue to let other parents out there know about our experience with Uinta Academy of Wellsville, Utah.
As a background our youngest has suffered from extreme panic/anxiety disorder for 5+ years. After exhausting every available option, we made the difficult decision to place her at Uinta. The center was recommended to us by an educational consultant. We did not insurance to cover any of it. While we had some positive outcome from her time at Uinta, we also endured a lot of frustration and heartbreak at how we were treated by staff. Bottom line, L.’s therapist, looking for a reason for L.’s issues, decided that I must have anger management issues and therefore was the reason for L.’s disorder. I should disclose that L., in an attempt to be able to come home, fabricated to her therapist that she needed to leave treatment so that I could get treatment for anger issues. L. later told her therapist that she had made it all up in a mis-guided attempt to make us pull her out of treatment. It was too late, the ink had been set. Sue’s (Sue Hoffman–L.’s primary therapist at Uinta) mind was made up, ‘bad kid-bad mom’. I should say that I am like most moms, I advocate for my children. And, when I feel that someone is trying to prevent me from seeing/having contact with my child, I am going to question it and be tenacious in my quest to protect my child. Our perception was that this was interpreted as a bad thing by Sue and the staff at Uinta–they felt we were too controlling. I should also say that during the almost 9 months L. was in Utah, we were granted permission to see her 3 times, she was 12 years old! Incidentally, after she came home from Uinta, she has received a diagnosis of Panic/Anxiety Disorder--Separation Anxiety, meaning that she never went thru separation anxiety as a toddler, therefore it came on at a later time and was that much more severe....Uinta's approach to cut off almost all contact with our daughter, was the worst thing for her. Live and learn.
A difficult part for me has been that someone who didn’t know me (nor took anytime to get to know who I was) decided who they thought I was and it was a very ugly depiction. In an ‘exit interview’ with one of our local providers, Sue even went so far as to tell him that she felt I was a ‘potential barrier to L.’s treatment’ and that I appeared to have issues that needed to be investigated. I was devastated. I’m still trying to get over that one.
After L. came home, we felt we needed to send a letter to Jeff Simpson. Jeff and his wife Becky, established Uinta. The following is excerpts from that letter which described some of our experience with Uinta. While we know that he received the letter, we never received a response from Jeff, Becky, or Sue. Here goes....
Dear Jeff:
We wanted to thank you and Becky for establishing Uinta and offering a spot for L. to be there. In all of our interactions with you, we have always walked away feeling your desire to help make a real difference in the lives of the girls that find their way to Uinta . It’s very apparent that it isn’t just a job for you, it’s a passion. L., and our family have benefitted greatly from her time at Uinta.
...
Other factors for bringing L. home, were our increasing unease with what we felt was lack of access to L. as well as our perceived direction of where L.’s treatment might be going. We understand that our perceptions might be mis-perceptions, but they were our perceptions that we simply could not ‘shake’. Finally, we could not ignore our parental instinct and we made the difficult decision to bring her home.
For the last several weeks we have struggled with whether to voice our concerns to you, and we finally decided to share with you some things that we experienced while L. was at Uinta. To preface all of this, we want to state that we feel Sue worked extremely well with L. and so we repeatedly tried to set our own misgivings and concerns aside in the interest of our daughter’s treatment.
From the very beginning, we had an undefined uneasiness about our interactions with Sue. We felt like she was constantly trying to ‘put us in our place’ and establish that she was in control of our daughter and that she didn’t really need or want our input. Again, we will readily admit that this is our perception and that it might be a mis-perception, but we are relaying how we felt, not just once, but repeatedly. Reasons why we felt this way? The examples are varied. One simple one was Sue not turning her cell phone off (or even turning it to vibrate) during our family therapy sessions. We often felt that she was distracted by her cell phone, checking e-mail, etc. during our family therapy sessions. We want to be clear that this was not just once, it went off almost every session. One session we could even tell that she was texting during our session. Incidentally this was a very important session where we were telling L. she was coming home–L. when hearing the news, stated ‘oh you all think I’m good enough to go home?’ Because Sue was busy texting someone else, she made no response to this statement. We ended up explaining to L. that we felt she had worked very hard and that she would need to continue treatment when she was at home. Sue never responded to this, and as her therapist, we certainly could have used her direction and at least assistance in this conversation with L.. In our years of working with therapists, we had never experienced this and we felt that it showed a lack of respect to our limited family therapy time. Again, please understand that we are not completely dense and selfish to not realize that there are emergencies that may come up from time to time. However, we also know that Uinta has a wonderfully trained staff of family teachers that are always available. We were just frustrated at our perceived lack of her respect to L. and our family therapy time by the fact that her cell phone was not silenced during our sessions. After bringing L. home, she told us that it bothered her that Sue would take phone calls from her daughter during their sessions, or that she would check e-mail, etc., during their therapy time. We wonder how it would have been perceived if we had our cell phones going off and were texting others during our family therapy sessions. My guess is that Sue would not have looked on it too favorably and that she might have felt we weren’t fully engaged in our family therapy.
Another ongoing issue was trying to schedule visits with L.. One of our main concerns when we made the decision to send L. to Uinta was whether or not we would be able to have regular visits with L.. Looking back at our notes of our initial phone conversation with you and Becky, we noted that you said we would be able to see her approximately every 6-7 weeks. We always understood that any of these visits were subject to last minute cancellation if L. had not earned the privilege. Our frustration was getting even the ok to plan a visit.
We don’t know how it works with other parents and therapists, but we (perhaps wrongly) expected that after 1 visit was complete, the therapist would say, ok that visit went well, next visit could be <date>, why don’t you plan for that, and we will decide the week of if your daughter has earned it. That never happened. Without going into the he said/she said scenarios of how each visit was scheduled, suffice it to say that we were always left feeling like we had no say in when we could and could not see our daughter. Better communication on this issue would have greatly relieved a lot of our family’s stress. Instead, we often used valuable family therapy time discussing logistics of visits. If a clearer level of written communication had existed in this area, we could have better used that time with L. on actual therapy issues.
That brings us to another nagging concern that we could never shake. E-mail communication, and our perception (or again readily admitted possible mis-perception) that Sue never completely read our e-mails. Please understand that we tried to keep e-mail to a minimum. We understood Sue’s time constraints, and we didn’t want to be parents that filled the in-box. However, from the beginning we were told (at parent weekend) that e-mail was the best way to communicate–if we had questions or concerns we should send an e-mail. For example as to why we felt they weren’t fully read, when we would send an e-mail with 3 questions, we might receive an answer back to 1 of them. We would re-send and this would go back and forth. We also had it more than once that we would send something, have no response, and then the following week in family therapy we would bring the concern up and to us it always felt like she hadn’t read it, or at the most skimmed it and put it aside. Sometimes it wasn’t questions, it might have been input and observations that we felt important to L.’s ongoing therapy–we don’t think these type of e-mails ever received a response, or even a one line acknowledgment to the extent of ‘thanks for the information’. Sometimes we wondered if she had even received our e-mail (maybe a simple setting on the e-mail system that sends out auto receipt acknowledgments??)
When L. hit her 6 month mark we sent a detailed e-mail asking if it was possible to have a phone conference with the entire treatment team and we listed the things we wanted to discuss. We also listed several things that we would like input from the academic team on. The following week when we finally discussed the e-mail, it came across to us repeatedly during our conversation that it was very possible Sue had not fully read the e-mail. For instance, she asked us what information we wanted from the academic team–this had been detailed in the e-mail. At one point she said to us, it sounds like maybe it would be a good idea to have a phone conference with the treatment team, would you be ok with doing that? To this we responded yes, we would be in to that, that is why we asked for it in our original e-mail. It was during this conversation that we were told our level of reaction to receiving no response from her was excessive. Sue told us she was very busy working with girls and that she often didn’t have time to respond to parents, and finally that we needed to understand that Uinta was better at communication than other facilities so we should be glad that there was the level of communication that there was. More than once we expressed to Sue that at times we felt like we had no idea what was going on with L. and her treatment. Sue always defensively responded ‘that’s not true, you know what is going on with her’, invalidating our feelings.
When Sue told us she often didn’t have time to respond to parents and that essentially that is just how it was, we were disheartened and walked away with the perception (again our possible mis-perception) that Sue did not really need or want us involved in L.’s treatment. This was very concerning to us. We did not want L. to perceive that we didn’t want to be involved in her treatment, or that we had asked to have limited contact with her. We realize that some might view this as a control issue, we view it as wanting to be involved in our 12 year old’s life and treatment and our desire to continue to build a healthy relationship with her as she grows up. Finally, it was sad when Jane went to bring L. home and Sue had nothing to say, not even good-bye. Jane had told her and Kristi ahead of time when she would be arriving. When Jane arrived, no one was available (which is understandable–it was the middle of the day). When Sue later arrived at the house, she walked into the room, made one statement, handed Jane L.’s transcript and walked away. They never saw her again. The discharge summary that we had asked be prepared and ready to go wasn’t ready, nor did Sue explain when it would be ready or even acknowledge that it wasn’t ready to go with L.. Before she and L. left, Jane ended up asking Kristi when it would be ready. We received it a few days later, luckily in time before our first scheduled appointment with L.’s local treatment providers.
We don’t know how you will interpret or take this letter. We hope that you will see it for what it is intended to be, a relaying of parents’ observations and concerns and how maybe things can be improved for others. It is not intended as criticism. Again, we appreciate all that was done for L. while at Uinta. After several years of therapy, L. had given up and nothing we could do would get her to engage in therapy and trying again. Now, she knows that she can feel good and is willing to work at it. That is a blessing.
Thank you again,
