Therapeutic Mission Statement
Utilize cognitive, narrative, and behavioral therapy techniques to awaken insight, create motivation to improve ones own trajectory, and practice new and better behaviors. Our therapy goals include increasing healthy autonomy and better integration into our student's families as well as the adult roles they are moving toward in society.
Treatment Philosophy
Although not a short-term treatment option, the Turning Winds therapeutic program is designed to help teens return to live with their families as soon as possible. This program is based upon the philosophy that lasting behavior change must involve personal growth, and that a person's character is important. Our clinical staff helps residents develop the character virtues of industriousness, direction, environmentalism, integrity, responsibility, respect, and familial connection. Residents learn to appreciate themselves as complete persons, their weakness also being their strengths. They are encouraged to explore their own resources and bring their strengths into different areas of their lives as they develop a better understanding of themselves, their peers and their environment.
Clinical Services
An indispensable part of the Turning Winds Academic Institute therapeutic program is that clinical services are overseen by a clinical director who is a licensed clinical psychologist. Upon admission, each resident is assessed by this psychologist, including through use of formal testing, to determine their unique psychosocial and mental health needs. Then an individual treatment plan is created by the treatment team in order to address the needs of that individual.
Teens have weekly individual counseling sessions with treatment clinicians. The predominant therapy orientation in use at Turning Winds is the well-known and validated "Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy" approach. Our treatment team meets frequently together to discuss the needs of each child. Periodically, teens participate in co-therapy sessions involving two or more clinicians. Also several members of our treatment team meet with teens from time to time to assess their progress and provide direction, and parents are frequently asked to participate in person or by phone in these "directions meetings". Certain challenges require more frequent interventions. Decisions are made flexibly, on a case-by-case basis.
Clinical staff present clinical curriculum to groups of teens on a variety of topics each week, and help them to actively process this material. Clinical staff also often mediates other groups, which bring the positive power of the teen peer group to bear on individual teens. In this setting, residents can explore interpersonal relationships and take risks without fear of rejection.
Guided career interest explorations is also provided to teens, typically after they have made significant progress in addressing their individual problems and are closer to reintegrating back into their families.
The Turning Winds treatment team values the input of families. Families are the crucible in which residents have become the persons that they are, and are thus crucial in the turnaround process. During family visits at the Turning Winds facility, family therapy sessions with the resident are scheduled in order to work on challenges within the family as well as to prepare residents and their families for reuniting during the aftercare phase of treatment.