Starting teen residential mental health care can be the turning point for an important new chapter of your life. Whether you’re struggling with substance misuse, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, or any combination of mental health challenges — a residential treatment program can provide the structure, accountability, and actionable strategies to help you create your own story of recovery.
Contact our team today to learn more about our program options and start your recovery path with Tamarack Center’s help.
What is Residential Treatment?
Residential treatment centers are one of the highest levels of behavioral health care for teens and young adults. The defining feature of adolescent residential treatment centers is that teens live on-site at the facility full-time, sleeping in a comfortable home-like environment with other teens working toward recovery.
Residential treatment is not a hospitalization program, where clients are kept in sterile hospital rooms and monitored 24/7 by nursing staff. Instead, these programs offer individual or shared bedrooms, your own bed, and a number of recreational activities and programs for enjoying your time not spent in direct mental health treatment.
When starting residential treatment at Tamarack Center, everything that you need is accounted for in the program itself.
How Tamarack Center’s Residential Treatment Programs Support Recovery
Taking this all-inclusive approach to mental health treatment provides a number of tangible benefits for helping teens and young adults overcome mental health disorders. This extends beyond just receiving targeted, evidence-based treatment for specific mental health concerns, and into the structure of the teen residential treatment program itself. Some of the key benefits include:
Providing a Safe and Supportive Environment for Recovery
One of the most important components of teen residential treatment centers is providing a safe, supportive environment that is explicitly designed to support you in overcoming mental health challenges. Your environment plays a large role in your mental health, and can either work for you or against you in your path to recovery.
At a residential program, everyday life is carefully curated to promote using healthy coping skills, reduce your stress, and support you on your journey to wellness. This includes:
- Having trained and empathetic staff members to support you through challenges
- Trauma-informed care
- Cultivating a recovery community among peers
- Separation from triggers at home or school
- Mental health support when you need it
- Being surrounded by people who truly understand
With these factors all working together, a residential treatment center can rapidly accelerate your path to mental health healing and recovery.
Peer-to-Peer Support for Mental Health Challenges
One of the hardest parts of living with a mental health disorder is feeling like you have to bear the burden alone. Nobody should feel like they don’t have the support they need to make a lasting recovery.
By bringing teens with similar challenges together, a residential treatment center cultivates true peer-to-peer support from people who truly understand. Working together to overcome mental health symptoms becomes much easier than feeling like the work is placed on you alone and can forge supportive relationships that can last for years to come.
Sometimes, the person who’s best equipped to help you isn’t a mental health professional. It’s the person who’s been in your shoes, felt what you’ve felt, and made it through to the other side intact. That’s what peer support at a residential treatment center can offer.
Around-the-Clock Support from Mental Health Professionals
Mental illness happens around the clock, so it’s important that teens working toward recovery have around-the-clock support. At Tamarack Center’s residential program, treatment professionals are available at all hours of the day to help when you need it most.
Licensed therapists are available each day to help you overcome mental health issues with healthy coping skills and targeted strategies. Our on-site nursing staff is there to support our clients with medical issues as they arise. Support staff are available 24/7 to help you through difficult times.
Every member of the treatment team is equipped with the tools, knowledge, and resources to ensure that you have everything you need to succeed in treatment now so that you can achieve sustainable healing in the future.
Behavioral Health Services in Residential Treatment
Of course, one of the most critical components of an effective residential program is targeted, evidence-based treatment for the mental and behavioral issues that are interfering with your living life as you see fit. Mental health treatment takes up a substantial portion of daily life at our residential treatment centers, each catered to your specific needs and challenges.
This includes services such as:
Individual Talk Therapy
Working one-on-one with an individual talk therapist can be one of the most powerful forces for lasting change that you can experience. Our team of master’s level clinicians is passionate about helping teens achieve their full potential, overcoming the obstacles to symptom relief, and building better and healthier lives in recovery.
Talk therapy at Tamarack Center focuses on the model provided by dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). DBT is a well-studied and highly effective style of therapy that can help treat conditions such as:
- Depression
- Bipolar disorder
- Anxiety disorders
- Mood disorders
- Borderline personality disorder
- Self-harm behaviors
- ADHD
DBT has four main modules for helping teens overcome the mental health conditions that they struggle with: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness. Together, these tools create a holistic model of mental health that can support you in breaking free from your mental health challenges and achieving a lasting and joyous recovery.
Group Therapy
Group therapy is another important component of our mental health programs. While a clinician leads and facilitates group therapy, the power truly comes from the group members themselves. This is a structured space for peers to connect with one another about the truly difficult challenges that they’re going through, to collaborate to find solutions, and to help one another on the path to a lifelong recovery.
Education Programs
Your education doesn’t have to stop just because you need professional support in recovering from a mental health condition. At Tamarack Center, our residential program has a fully accredited school registered in the District 81 School District to ensure that you won’t fall behind in classes while you get the help you need.
Recreation
Our young adult treatment center has an entire department dedicated to recreation, led by certified therapeutic recreational specialists. Our team goes to great lengths to ensure you have everything you need to have a good time and provides opportunities for daily activities such as:
- Softball
- Leatherworking
- Music
- Volleyball
- Swimming
- Tennis
- Model building
Less frequent activities include mountain biking, ropes courses, and river rafting – and each summer, our team organizes a three-day camping trip for staff and residents alike.
Family Therapy
Family therapy sessions play an important role in the treatment process. For many teens struggling with mental health issues, it’s family members who are the hardest to get along with, who trigger mental health symptoms, or who have been hurt as a result of mental health challenges.
Put plainly, family is difficult. Yet your family can be an incredible resource for lasting support in recovery, and working with a family therapist can help you heal these damaged relationships and bring the family together to work toward recovery.
During family therapy sessions, the entire family comes together to talk about issues in the household, how treatment is going, and what needs to change in order for you to maintain your recovery for years to come.
Start Treatment at Tamarack Center Today
If you’re struggling with mental health issues, Tamarack Center is here to help. Our adolescent residential treatment program has been designed from the ground up to help you with every aspect of breaking free from your mental health concerns and forging the path to a new life in recovery.
Contact our team today to learn more about our programming options, and start your path to recovery with the help of Tamarack Center.
