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Golden rule applies
to teens
(October
2005 Issue)
By Jennifer Chase Esposito
TASP treats mentally ill teens as they need to be treated: often,
and with care.
Beth Simpson, M.A., has a message for mental health professionals,
but an even bigger one for parents, teachers and caregivers of teenagers:
Sometimes, a teen acting up is just a teen acting up.
"The lay population needs to remember that all teenagers aren't
ogres, and are not all anger and conduct disordered," says Simpson,
who has been program director at the Home for Little Wanderers'
Therapeutic After School Program for seven and a half years. "It's
just an amazing type of ability that they manage twice as much in
a day as I do."
It's easy to tease that a mentally ill teen is an oxymoron, says
Simpson. But the reality is that they're living through a double
whammy dose of issues: both emotionally and hormonally, their lives
can be overwhelming as they navigate school, work and relationships
with the pressures of dealing with ADHD, depression, anxiety or
psychotic-related illnesses.
The Therapeutic After School Program, or TASP, has serviced Boston
metro-area youth ages 10-18 for the last 10 years. Says Simpson,
teens typically need more than once-weekly therapy sessions, but
less than the intensity of services provided in a residential program.
TASP allows kids suffering from various forms of mental illness
to continue living at home with their families and care givers,
while receiving extra attention five days a week, between 2-6 p.m.
- those after-school, unstructured hours before most families reconvene
at home after work and school.
For kids with mental illness, other than hospitalization and residential
or outpatient levels of care there's but a small happy medium for
kids needing a less-is-more approach to services. "Residential programs
remove teens from families, and often remove them from their community,"
says Simpson "Family is such an important support for anyone, and
for mentally ill teens or kids … [TASP] is really important and
can be a key component in treatment," she says. "I think we really
fill the gap pretty well, by offering a partial day therapy care
milieu."
TASP, one of 26 programs run by the Home for Little Wanderers,
is located in Roslindale, Mass., a suburb of Boston. Kids arrive
at TASP after school and participate in group therapy sessions which
are clinician led by one of TASP's six full-time staff or one of
two interns, all of whom are either licensed clinical social workers,
have their master's in psychology, or some other bachelor-level
or para-professional degree. The clinical coordinator leads or co-leads
group programs and psychoeducational classes that focus on things
like life and social-skill building are often led by the rest of
the staff.
But the golden nugget of this program is the supervised activities
that TASP provides to the kids. Simple events like sitting through
a movie in a darkened theatre can cause angst for a teen recovering
from a trauma history; large crowds, or even navigating public transportation
- alone - are social hindrances preventing many of these teens from
participating in normal teen life. With staff-led excursions to
movie theatres and vibrant yet crowded outdoor shopping plazas like
Boston's Faneuil Hall, teens learn to control their mental illness
or cognitive behaviors both within the comfort of group therapy
and in the real world.
Simpson fields calls, often, from people and groups wanting to
participate in TASP or create something like it. But TASP - which
is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health - is
unique in its services for teens through age 18, and its effort
to place kids beginning around ages 14 and 15 in "volunteer placement"
positions that will hopefully turn into jobs in their communities.
Although teens are referred by the Mass. Departments of Mental
Health or Social Services, "we get kids who are invisible in the
system for quite a lapse of time," says Simpson. "In caring for
them, we really need to treat them as growing kids [and] adults."
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