Changing Your Life at Turning Winds
As a teenager, Kendrick was struggling with serious mental health issues. He wasn’t stable enough to stay at home and his psychiatrist recommended a long-term facility. After briefly receiving treatment at a facility in Florida, Kendrick came to Turning Winds.
We offer a full continuum of care for teens facing mental health challenges including major depression, anxiety disorders, conduct or personality disorders and other complex conditions. Our clients succeed through a combination of therapeutic and educational approaches that provide the best possible outcomes.
Kendrick’s Journey: Transforming a Teens Life From Struggle to Stability
Kendrick quickly realized that Turning Winds was different. “There is much more structure. In the other place, I had a lot of freedom but didn’t know what to do with my time. There wasn’t a lot of guidance—it was more like babysitting.”
The Turning Winds program is modeled after a healthy family environment with strong role models and structure paired with focused academic support and clinical individual, and group sessions. The full-day approach includes longer stays and helps invest the time needed for meaningful change.
A Unique Therapeutic Approach to Teen Mental Health
“The simple, singular focus of our residential mental health treatment is to help each student improve their self-image and their self-confidence and change the behaviors that have been hindering their growth by teaching them to create stable patterns of living through education, process groups, and individualized treatment planning,” says Turning Winds CEO Owen Baisden.
The process of learning itself can be powerfully therapeutic(1). The mindful pursuit of education can relate to all areas of life. At Turning Winds, educators help students see parallels between the rigors of academic life and the pursuit of a meaningful personal life.
Kendrick started to change when he developed a close relationship with his English teacher at Turning Winds. “He allowed me to express myself. I like art, and he asked me to write about my drawings—that helped me a lot and I started doing other schoolwork.”
Another important aspect of the Turning Winds program is mentoring. Our teenage clients get the opportunity to practice leadership and accountability, take responsibility, hold others responsible, and have confidence in doing that.
Mentors are “kids that have been here for a while and who were oriented by other kids when they got here,” says Baisden. “Kids who told them ‘here’s how Turning Winds is, here’s how it works. These are the ins and outs.’ The entire process from enrollment to when the kids leave is all about mentorship and helping newer kids or kids who are struggling to rise to the top.”
Teen mental health success at Turning Winds
For Kendrick mentoring was the opportunity to realize he wanted to help people, a notion reinforced during a service trip to Panama. “We helped build a sidewalk for a school and painted the walls of classrooms,” he remembers.
At Turning Winds, it’s the people who make the difference—staff and fellow patients. Over the past two decades, we’ve built a team of some of the world’s finest academic and therapeutic professionals, all of whom share the same goal: to help teens re-engage meaningfully with their lives, families, and their futures.
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.
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