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What to Know About Your Child's Stay

What is a day like for a patient?

Patients in the adolescent mood disorders unit have structured days with time for rest and self-reflection built in. Each day begins with a community meeting where goals for the day are laid out. Individual therapy generally occurs in the morning. Group therapy and activities generally occur in the afternoon. Groups are held outside when possible. There is time for journaling in the evening, as well as fun activities like movie nights.

Adolescents can earn points for participating in group activities, which they can later redeem at the point store. The point store contains fun, small items that are safe for our adolescents to have but not normally provided.

Accommodations 

We have 22 private bedrooms with shared bathrooms. Room assignments are based on room availability and personality compatibility.

To make your child’s stay as comfortable as possible, we recommend bringing the following items:

  • Two to three changes of everyday clothes: socks, underwear, pullover shirts, pants, sleepwear, and athletic shoes are recommended. Please do not bring any clothes with drawstrings; any drawstrings will be removed. We recommend elastic waistbands, pants without pockets, and sweatshirts without hoods. Belts are not permitted on the unit.
    • We provide laundry services to ensure your child has clean clothing.
  • Toiletries: toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, and hairbrush
    • We provide most of these items if you do not bring these from home.

Some items cannot be kept in your child’s room; whenever this is the case, we will keep these items in a secure personal cubby within the nurse’s station, and they will be available whenever your child needs them.

Please leave the following items at home:

  • Money
  • Electronics including cell phones, hand held video games, or MP3 players/iPods
  • Board Games or balls
  • Candy, gum, soda, or outside food of any kind.
  • Toys and stuffed animals
  • Pillows and blankets
  • Belts, shoe laces, drawstrings
  • Hair barrettes, clips, bands and bobby pins, paper clips
  • Hair ties with metal clasps
  • Scarves/bandanas, head wraps or hats without religious importance
  • Large or sharp jewelry/earrings (body jewelry is permitted unless abused)
  • Clothing with inappropriate logos, images, or phrases (depicting violence, alcohol, tobacco, sexuality, anything pertaining to negative feelings, skulls, gore)
  • Stockings, leg warmers, knee socks
  • Clothing with numerous buckles, zippers, or strings
  • Shorts and skirts that are excessively short in length
  • Boots, heels or shoes with reinforced toes
  • Bar soap
  • Baby powder
  • Dental floss, string
  • Aerosol cans
  • No perfumes, hairspray, hair gel, eyelash curlers
  • CDs
  • Cell phones and or pagers
  • Electronic devices (hair dryers, curling irons, hair straighteners, personal music players, personal clock radios, etc.)
  • Spiral notebooks and ring binders
  • Pens, pencils and markers
  • Bags, purses, suitcases
  • Metal picture frames
  • Items with glass 
  • Personal pillows, blankets, quilts, or stuffed animals

Meals

In addition to daily therapeutic programming, we provide all meals and snacks; if your child has any dietary restrictions, we will do our best to accommodate them.

Schoolwork

When your child is staying on our inpatient unit, treatment is our biggest priority. Each day is highly structured, and we want adolescents to be focused on participating in our therapeutic offerings. Time for schoolwork is not built into the daily schedule; we provide back-to-school forms to help you work with your child’s school to excuse them for the days and the work missed. If you feel it is imperative they stay up-to-date on their schoolwork, please use visiting time for the completion of schoolwork.