Our Philosophies

Recovery and Resiliency | Principles of Re-EDucation

Recovery and Resiliency

Centerstone has adopted the definition from The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, Final Report, July 2003, as follows:

"Recovery refers to the process in which people are able to live, work, learn, and participate fully in their communities. For some individuals, recovery is the ability to live a fulfilling and productive life despite a disability. For others, recovery implies the reduction or complete remission of symptoms. Science has shown that having hope plays an integral role in an individual's recovery.

Resilience means the personal and community qualities that enable us to rebound from adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or other stresses — and to go on with life with a sense of mastery, competence, and hope. We now understand from research that resilience is fostered by a positive childhood and includes positive individual traits, such as optimism, good problem-solving skills, and treatments. Closely-knit communities and neighborhoods are also resilient, providing supports for their members."

Why Recovery? Centerstone's Key Drivers:

• Tailor services around individual needs and choices
• Deliver the right services at the right time to the right person
• Provide increased access to consumers
• Proactively move to innovate and improve services due to the changing landscape of behavioral healthcare
• Capitalize on our ability to prepare for the direction of future funding and service models
• Enhance consumer choice, empowerment, and individual responsibility
• Achieve improved clinical outcomes

• Hope is important in the life of every individual.
• Every individual wants to live a life that is purposeful and meaningful.
• Recovery and Resiliency is a personal journey, an experience that is unique to each individual.
• Individuals should be empowered to make decisions affecting his/her own life.
• Emphasis should be placed on personally responsibility for his/her own Recovery and Resiliency.
• Education about mental illness and resources is essential to empowerment.
• Effective treatment requires a partnership between the individual and service providers.
• Individuals with mental illness can work, and, in other ways, contribute to their community.
• Parents/care-givers and significant others can be and should be taught skills that they can use to help their child(ren) build resilient coping abilities.
• Focusing on the individual and family strengths can help fosters recovery and resilience by helping individuals see their abilities vs. disabilities.

• Our primary goal in providing services is to strengthen and empower youth and families to be self-sufficient.
• The parents are considered the experts with regards to their child and we do everything to help them stay in charge of their family.
• Assessments of the youth must include a review of the family strengths and weaknesses. We use the strengths to help the family learn how to successfully manage their problems.
• We want to help the family keep their youth in the least restrictive, most normalized environment; at home and in the community.
• We will do all we can to keep the youth from going into state custody or in a hospital setting without compromising the safety of the family or community.
• We want to help clients and families by providing consistent encouragement, guidance, and support.
• Each youth and family is a member of the larger community. We will strive to coordinate services with all significant components of the child's ecology. Schools, Juvenile Courts, Churches, Youth Activity programs, Neighborhood Centers are just a few of the important players in a child life and must be included in the treatment program.

• We value our staff by providing frequent support and supervision and keeping caseloads at a reasonable level.
• Each program will maintain a system for clinical supervision and training of its staff to ensure delivery of the highest quality of services.
• Programs will strive to continuously improve services by monitoring its effectiveness in obtaining goals and objectives.
• Client satisfaction surveys can provide useful information to help improve services to families.
• We believe the "Principles of RE-ED" and the "Circle of Courage" provides excellent guidelines for our staff as they work with children and youth.
• We can help improve services to all families by volunteering our time and talents to community services and professional associations.

The Principles of Re-EDucation

The 12 Principles of Re-EDucation are the distiliing of over 20 years of work and research by Dr. Nicholas Hobbs. They were created when the National Institute of Mental Health contacted Hobbs to develop a new paradigm for the treatment of children with severe emotional and behavioral issues. Hobbs and his colleagues developed Projet Re-ED, and the principles associated with it have become an integral part of the treatment of children with severe emotional disturbance.

• Life is to be lived now, not in the past, and lived in the future only as a present challenge. We really don't look backward, we don't retreat, and we don't try to repair something so that life can be caught up again. We start with the assumption that each day is of great importance to young people; when an hour is neglected, allowed to pass without reason and intent, teaching and learning go on nevertheless, and the child or adolescent may be left behind. In Re-ED, no one waits for a special therapeutic hour. We try, as best we can, to make all hours special.
• Trust between child and adult is essential. Trust is the glue that holds teaching and learning together. The first step in the Re-Education (Re-ED) process is to help the young person make a new and very important distinction that adults can be counted on as predictable sources of support, understanding and affection. The teacher-counselor, to nurture trust, must be a whole person, not just a "counselor". No amount of professional training can make an adult worthy of the trust of a young person or capable of generating it.
• Competence makes a difference, and young people should be helped to be good at something, and especially at schoolwork. School is near the center of a child's life and that is the natural fulcrum for efforts to help children in trouble. We regard it as sound strategy to attack directly the problem of adequacy in school, for its intrinsic value as well as for its indirect effect on the young person's perception of his worth, and his acceptance by people who are important in his world.
• Time is an ally, working on the side of growth in a period of development when life has a tremendous forward thrust. A broken bone knits more rapidly at six and sixteen than at sixty; we assume a comparable vitality in the psychological domain. Re-ED may simply speed up a process that would occur in an unknown percentage of children anyway. A long stay in a treatment center may actually slow down the process of learning to be oneself.
• Self-control can be taught and children and adolescents helped to manage their behavior. Children and adolescents get rejected in large part because of identifiable behaviors that are regarded as unacceptable by family, friends, school or community. A first step in this process is to help them unlearn particular habits that keep high the probability that they will be rejected by people whose support they must have if they are to grow.
• Intelligence can be taught. Intelligence is a dynamic, evolving, and malleable capacity for making good choices in living. Children and adolescents coming into a Re-ED program frequently have deficits in both concepts and in problem-solving ability. The program provides many formal experiences in problem solving-- especially in interpersonal relationships with other people, about their futures.
• Feeling should be nurtured, shared spontaneously, controlled when necessary, expressed when too long repressed, and explored with trusted others. Positive feelings are important, too. The simple joy of companionship is encouraged. The meaningfulness of friendships and how long they endure impress us. We contrive situations of controlled danger in which children can test themselves, can know fear and become the master of it. Feelings also get expressed through many kinds of creative activities that are woven into the fabric of a Re-ED school.
• The group is very important to young people and it can become a major source of instruction in growing up. When a group is functioning well, it is difficult for an individual student to behave in a disturbing way. Even when the group is functioning poorly, the frictions and the failures can be used constructively. Discussion of difficulties or planning of activities can be a most maturing experience. And the sharing of adventure, of vicissitudes, and of victories, provides an experience in human relatedness to which most of our students have been alien.
• Ceremony and ritual give order, stability, and confidence to troubled children and adolescents, whose lives are often in considerable disarray. The clients we serve come from a widely diverse background. However, one common thread that is present for all is the lack of constancy and stability in their lives.
• The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed. The Peace Corps program involved rock climbing, survival treks, surf kayaking, physical fitness exercises, and other similar activities designed not to train volunteers to do this sort of thing on their jobs but to give them a greater awareness of what they thought they were capable of doing. It was an exercise in self-discovery. The basic notions seemed applicable to work with young children and especially with adolescents. Whether we use basketball or dance or playing drums, we are always helping youth to be aware of the awesome beauty of their physical being and all of its positive powers.
• Communities are important for children and youth. The uses and benefits of community should be learned through experience. Many children and adolescents who are referred to our school come from families that are alienated or detached from community life. Re-ED programs for adolescents have worked out dozens of ways for students to participate in community projects. Helping to build playgrounds, visiting nursing homes, cooking and helping distribute food to the homeless are just a few of the ways in which we teach youth the values of empathy and positive feelings derived from giving of ones self.
• A child should know some joy in each day and look forward to some joyous event for the morrow. There is an extensive literature on anxiety, guilt and dread, but little that is written on the benefits of “Joy”. We thus go beyond most contemporary psychology to touch one of the most vital areas of human experience. We try to become skillful at developing joy. Some of the most satisfying moments are generated by successful achievement in school. To do well in spelling or arithmetic, especially for students who expect and dread failure, is to know a sharp delight.