Eagle Ranch Academy Supplies Treatment for Adolescent Depression
By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-12-13 15:02:06 | Word Count: 664
As a residential treatment center for troubled adolescents, here at Eagle Ranch Academy we see many young people whose lives have been ruined by depression. So many clinical disorders and destructive behaviors, such as drug and alcohol abuse, ADHD, bipolar disorder and anorexia, have depression as a component of the overall problem.
We take the necessary steps to adequately supply treatment to adolescents suffering from depression in our program. First of all, many of them come to us already on various medications that have been prescribed by their primary care physicians and others. Our program is not just a specific drug treatment course, therapy course, or a 12 step program. We include all of these and much more, including emotional growth and life skills training, intensive group and individual therapy, fitness and nutrition services, character building and self discovery, etc. We believe depression is a multi-faceted issue that requires a multi-faceted approach.
[ advertisement ]
Since we are one of the most comprehensive residential treatment centers in the nation, we get many students who reside out of state. Thus, to treat their depression effectively and to make it easy on their parents, we have clinical staff on hand to be able to assess, prescribe and monitor their prescription treatment needs.
Many insurances make it extremely difficult to transfer prescriptions outside of your home state. It can be a nightmare if you know your adolescent needs his or her medication to function, but their primary care doctor’s office (or primary mental health practitioner’s office) is telling you they can’t transfer the meds, and your insurance is telling you that you will have to pick up the cost. In fact, if your child has been on a depression medication for some time and will need it ongoing, they might be required to periodically present in person for reassessments, even to get their refills written.
At Eagle Ranch Academy, we have an open-ended program. This means that your child’s graduation of the program depends on their individual progress—not a predetermined length of time. This is an incentive for troubled teens to really take the different treatment strategies to heart, and to truly make an internal change. Otherwise, we know that they will just “wait out” the program and return to self destructive behaviors when they get home. Our aim is to address their issues (be it depression, addiction, anger, avoidance, eating disorder, etc), and to get them to WANT to change their own behaviors. From our standpoint, this is the only way to achieve long term behavioral change.
As such, your adolescent might be with us for a few months. He or she will need their medications. As they detoxify in our natural environment with exercise and wholesome food, they will probably also need their medications to be adjusted. That is why we have medical staff on hand in the form of a medical doctor (MD- general practitioner), psychiatrists and psychologists. Our medical doctor is involved in the initial physical evaluation and lab tests that we perform when teens first enter the program. He also makes regular scheduled visits and is on call 24 hours per day. Our Psychiatrists, psychologists and licensed therapists are here at Eagle Ranch Academy full time.
Eagle Ranch Academy helps adolescents suffering from depression not only with medication, but with a range of therapy options, including 1 on 1 talk sessions, group counseling, prescription drug treatment, embedded therapists as instructors, unique workshops, emotional growth seminars, physical fitness, and nutrition. We have a staff comprised of state-licensed, highly qualified, well experienced experts who are able to supply multi-faceted treatment options to adolescents suffering with depression.
