The changing face of adolescent inpatient psychiatric treatment.

Abstract

Widespread changes in the criteria and resources for psychiatric inpatient treatment of adolescents present enormous challenges and demand serious and far-reaching adaptive efforts. Among these efforts may be a redesigning of the inpatient treatment milieu to accommodate different patient populations for whom different models of treatment and therapeutic strategies are necessary. This paper describes the redesigning and successful integration of an adolescent inpatient unit at a private psychiatric hospital to include separate treatment tracks for three different patient populations. An intensive/reconstructive treatment track provides the long-term inpatient treatment of youth with treatment-refractory personality disorders who have the clinical justification and resources for therapy that aspires to effect structural personality change. An acute crisis intervention track provides short-term inpatient treatment with an adaptation-oriented and highly focused approach to patients who have had limited previous treatment, are confined to short lengths of stay by financial constraints, or for whom regression should be discouraged. Finally, a psychosocial skills treatment group conducts longer term inpatient treatment for neurobiologically impaired patients. Psychotic, severely developmentally disturbed, profoundly abused patients, and those with extremely primitive personalities characterized by an abundance of deficits cannot tolerate the emotional and interpersonal intensity of a reconstructive treatment approach, but can benefit from a supportive, developmental, ego-building strategy.