Adolescent residential treatment centers, or RTCs, are designed to provide comprehensive treatment to clients whose problems are severe enough that they require supervision 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Although there is a range of residential treatment centers that provide different levels of intensity, most licensed facilities include masters and doctorate-level clinical staff, psychiatry, nursing, school, and a therapeutic living environment. Some facilities are locked; however, Logan River Academy is not. Specific residential treatment centers cater to different levels of client needs, often specializing in specific diagnostic similarities among their clientele. Some residential treatment centers work with only the most severely troubled kids. Others work with clients that may be less impaired. It is important that parents and clinicians find residential treatment centers that work well with the needs of their child, as there can be great disparity in acuity and program cultures, depending on which clients a treatment center works with. When it comes to residential treatment centers, one size does not fit all. Aligning the needs of the family and client with the culture and services a residential treatment center offers is critical in selecting a program.
There are other levels of care that work with less troubled clients, such as therapeutic boarding schools, military schools, or even foster homes. They do not typically have the same level of professional services that you will find in a licensed residential treatment center. There are also other interventions such as hospitalization, wilderness programs, and outpatient therapy that may have been used prior to a client needing residential treatment. All of these interventions fall on a continuum of care and again, aligning the needs of the family and child with the level of care, at a specific juncture, can be a challenge. There are resources to help parents navigate through these decisions, such as therapists and educational consultants.
The goal of Logan River Academy as a residential treatment center is to effect long-term internal change for our students, helping families heal and students to succeed at home, in school, and in the community. This is achievedby creating a comprehensive, individualized, and consistent treatment plan for the classroom, the clinical setting; and the therapeutic milieu. These three areas are highly integrated; giving residential treatment centers like Logan River Academy an advantage over other levels of care that may be more segmented. This integrated and comprehensive approach allows less room for a student to slip in one area and excel in another, or split the stakeholders in their lives. Parents, therapists, teachers, counselors, physicians, and other treatment team members work together to ensure each area of concern supports the others.
In many residential treatment centers one element of the program is emphasized over the others, such as therapy or school. At Logan River Academy, we provide a very balanced program ensuring that education does not suffer at the expense of therapy, or the other way around. All facets of the program are important and treated as such.