You may know that your troubled child needs help, but it’s not easy to figure out what type of treatment will deliver the greatest benefit. And it’s not only your child who needs help; frequently the entire family is in disarray and unsure of how to achieve a rescue.
Different options abound: wilderness programs, residential treatment centers, and therapeutic boarding schools all offer particular treatment approaches, and individually each of these options has its strengths and weaknesses.
Turning Winds offers a hybrid residential treatment program for teens, filling in the gaps left by those other options. And we allow enough time for the treatment to succeed. “It can be long enough to really help young people,” says John Gordon, MD, Turning Winds’ medical director. “These days, most psychiatrists just do short-term hospitalization, usually about a week, which isn’t very much time to deal with anything but a crisis. And a lot of the kids here have been in other programs before that either were not long enough or there was too much resistance on the adolescent’s part to make it useful.”
Over the past two decades, Turning Winds has been able to help many families overcome what seemed impossible odds. The parents of Nathan felt their son had gone down the wrong path for a while. “Smart kid, bad decisions,” remembers his dad. “It felt like a tornado,” remembers Nathan’s mother. “You just keep getting sucked into it. It’s a vicious cycle and until you make the decision to change that cycle there is not a lot of hope.”
They did decide to change the cycle and sent Nathan to Turning Winds. Nathan was depressed and suicidal at that point. Driving their son to the treatment center in Montana was one of the hardest days in their lives.
The biggest immediate change they found was that Nathan finally started to open up and care. “My therapist was awesome,” Nathan remembered. “He helped me to get to the root of some problems that needed to be changed and we found some solutions.” Nathan also appreciated the highly individualized academic instruction. “You work at your own pace and if you struggle with something you can skip it.” He felt a lot of clients at Turning Winds benefit from that approach.
Nathan’s parents felt that kind of change could never have been achieved at home. Taking him to treatment at Turning Winds was hard for them but they found the changes in their son were priceless. If your child needs help, “it’s the best thing you can do for your child.”
“You’re rescuing your child from a path of destruction and are setting them on a path of hope,” Nathan’s father added.
A little over twenty years ago, Turning Winds began with the simple desire to help young lives see a new path. In the two decades since, the program has matured into a sophisticated program that blends the benefits of a wilderness program, a residential treatment center, and a boarding school.
Our mission is to rescue teens from crisis situations, renew their belief in their own potential, reunite them with their families, and put them on a sustainable path to success. Contact us online for more information, or call us at 800-845-1380. If your call isn’t answered personally, one of us will get back to you as soon as possible.
