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NATSAP staying strong in todays economy.

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Whooter:
All members of NATSAP are now required to be licensed and/or accredited.  This sets up standards which parents can rely on.  It is good to see they are staying strong in this difficult economy.


The National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP) was created in January of 1999 to serve as a national resource for programs and professionals assisting young people beleaguered by emotional and behavioral difficulties. The Association is governed by an elected, volunteer Board of Directors comprised of representatives from the NATSAP membership.

Membership In NATSAP
Membership in NATSAP is voluntary and is renewed annually. Our members include therapeutic schools, residential treatment programs, wilderness programs, outdoor therapeutic programs, young adult programs and home-based residential programs.

NATSAP requires the members of our organization to be licensed by the appropriate state agency authorized to set and oversee standards of therapeutic and/or behavioral healthcare for youth and adolescents or accredited by a nationally recognized behavioral health accreditation agency and to have therapeutic services with oversight by a qualified clinician.

NATSAP's Role In Placement
NATSAP members are independently operated and owned; therefore, NATSAP does not provide placement services.

Each young person has his or her own specific needs that must be determined in detail before placement in any program is appropriate. Since NATSAP has no means of determining the needs of young people whose counselors or families may be using the NATSAP directory and information on members, NATSAP does not recommend specific programs.

Information About Our Members
NATSAP publishes a directory annually to inform professionals, programs, and families about the many residential placement alternatives available to help struggling young people.

Listed alphabetically, the schools and programs in the Program Directory are diverse. The directory's listings offer a wide range of programmatic types, lengths of stay, and services to meet the needs of a variety of troubled young people.

Matching the services of a particular school or program to the specific needs of a young person is arguably the most important decision that will ever be made on behalf of that young person. The NATSAP directory is not intended by itself to supply enough information to make a placement. NATSAP encourages programs, professionals, and families to have appropriate academic and psychological testing conducted and to use multiple informational resources before suggesting or pursuing a placement for any young person in any program.

Professionals and parents seeking information on placement for a young person experiencing difficulties have access to the NATSAP Directory on this website. Searching the directory will return each relevant program's basic information, including contact sources.



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Whooter:
Dealing With Issues of Program Effectiveness, Cost Benefit Analysis, and Treatment Fidelity:  
The Development of the NATSAP
Research and Evaluation Network

Michael Gass, Ph. D., LMFT & Michael Young, M. Ed.

   Say you walked into the office of your trusted medical professional with your sick child.  After going through a proper assessment, your doctor advised you of several drug treatment programs that would help your child recover. You were provided three options on the series of drugs your child could take to become well again.  Here are choices you were given to consider to select the treatment program for your child:
   1. You could choose to select from a group of drugs (Group “A”) that had been repeatedly tested against other drugs (Group “B”) several times in “blind trials” (i.e., experiments where other children like yours with the same illness were randomly given either Group A and B).  Three drugs in Group A repeatedly demonstrated a significant level of beneficial effects in addressing the issues facing you child far beyond what Group B drugs ever did.  
   2. The costs of the drugs that worked in Group A varied.  While both achieved similar results, two drugs (Drugs A1 & A2) cost an amount that you could financially cover.  The other drug (Drug A3) was 20 times more expensive than the first two, meaning that if you wanted to have your child become healthy with Drug A3, you needed to take out a second mortgage on your home to have your child become healthy again.
   3. With Drugs A1 and A2 that were available to you, one drug (A2) only worked when administered by your specific doctor in a particular manner when conditions were appropriate (e.g., it only worked if your child was not under any other medication, worked much better with girls than boys).  And when administered by another physician who was covering for your physician when she was on vacation, it only worked half as well.  Contrary to these “interactive” effects, Drug A1 worked to the same level of effectiveness no matter what other medications your child was taking, their personal characteristics, or who administered the treatment.

Which drug treatment program would you choose for your child?



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Whooter:
Residential Treatment and the Missing Axis

John L. Santa, Ph.D.
Montana Academy

Abstract

This article is based on a keynote address at the NATSAP Annual Conference in February of 2007.  It centers around describing the evolution of modern private residential programs, beginning with early alternative programs of the 60’s and 70’s that eschewed mainstream medicine and psychiatry and focused on character development. These programs were enriched in the 1980s by the positive influence of wilderness programs, and further enhanced by changes in mainstream psychiatry brought about by managed care and pharmaceutical companies who limited length of care and created a focus on symptom diagnosis and treatment.  All these factors combined to create a rapid exponential growth of private residential programs in the last decade.  This growth has also resulted in an interesting merger of professionalism with the ideas and environments of the earlier alternative programs. The importance of understanding adolescent problems at a deeper level beyond the symptom clusters of Axis I is needed, one that offers an alternative for a description of adolescent struggles.



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Dysfunction Junction:
NATSAP was started by Len Buccellato who has run two abusive programs, HLA and RCS.  RCS is currently getting a lot of bad press for riots, rapes, beatings, assaults and robberies right at the facility, many of which go unreported to police or oversight agencies.

Many programs are dropping out of NATSAP now because of this association with abusive programs like HLA/RCS but also because there were five NATSAP programs found to be abusing children and a child needlessly died in each of these programs.  Three are still in operation and currently enjoy NATSAP approval.

As news like this spreads, NATSAPS's membership and donations shrink, so I would need to see some financial statistics to show that the OP assertion is indeed true.  I have serious doubts.

Whooter:
The hot topic these days is The National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs.  If anyone wants more information on this topic you can get it here:

NATSAP Information



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