Adolescent Programs: Residential Treatment for Girls
Trauma-Informed Care for Teenage Girls
The Johnstown Heights’ medical and substance abuse disorders team offers behavioral treatment for adolescents (ages 13-17). Helping teenage girls get the counseling they need for mental health concerns can be challenging.
Parents and caregivers may find seeking help overwhelming because they are concerned for the adolescent and their emotional response to the situation. This reaction is normal and understandable in the circumstances.
Residential Treatment Center for Young Women
Johnstown Heights Behavioral Health makes finding treatment for teens much easier. Our residential treatment center for young women offers psychiatric services specifically designed to meet the needs of clients between the ages of 13 and 17. Inpatient treatment is available for adolescents admitted voluntarily or involuntarily.
We provide an immediate assessment, diagnosis, and rapid stabilization of acute psychiatric symptoms to our clients.
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Why Choose Johnstown Heights for Teen Residential Treatment?
Our safe, structured, and therapeutic environment is staffed by a multidisciplinary team led by a skilled psychiatrist. The team focuses on each client’s needs.
Our staff and the adolescent’s caregiver work together to ensure a smoother transition to less intensive care and support. We work closely with family members, care providers, and community agencies. All parties know Johnstown Heights’ strategy for the client’s discharge planning, follow-up care, and ongoing treatment options.
Acute Psychiatric Symptoms: Hallucinations or Delusions
Hallucinations are when a person sees, hears, smells, tastes, or feels things that seem real but exist only in their mind. They can be caused by mental health conditions (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, or depression) or drugs and alcohol. Hallucinations may also be a side effect of certain medications.
A hallucination may appear as follows:
- Hearing sounds or voices no one else hears
- Seeing things that aren’t there, such as people, lights, objects, or shapes
- Smelling things that don’t exist
- Tasting things that only the affected person thinks are strange or unpleasant
- Someone thinking their body is flying or moving when it isn’t
- Feeling touch or movement on the body that isn’t real, such as bugs crawling on the skin or internal organs moving around
Delusions are false beliefs. Someone with a delusion will hold onto believing in something that isn’t true. Their belief will continue even when presented with evidence that it isn’t real. Some delusions are about something that could happen in real life (their boyfriend is cheating on them), while others are about things that could never happen in real life (they can teleport from one place to another, like Star Trek characters).
Types of Delusions
Delusions are false beliefs. Someone with a delusion will hold onto believing in something that isn’t true. Their belief will continue even when presented with evidence that it isn’t real. Some delusions are about something that could happen in real life (their boyfriend is cheating on them), while others are about things that could never happen in real life (they can teleport from one place to another, like Star Trek characters).
There are several types of delusions, which can be described like this:
- Erotomanic Delusions: A person with erotomanic delusions believes that an important person is in love with them. Their delusion is more than an adolescent having a crush on a celebrity, which is where the attention and feelings go one way (toward the celebrity). Suppose the teen starts to believe the celebrity feels the same way. In that case, it’s time to consider mental health treatment for adolescent girls. This type of delusion may be harmless or can evolve into stalking behavior.
- Grandiose Delusions: Someone with a grandiose delusion feels superior. The individual believes they are better than anyone else and behaves accordingly.
- Jealous Delusions: A person with a jealous delusion believes they are the victim of their boyfriend or girlfriend cheating on them.
- Persecutory Delusions: Persecutory delusions are the most common type of delusions, which is when another person, a group, or the government is spying on a person. The person may believe that others mean to harm them.
- Somatic Delusions: Some believe they are suffering from a medical condition they do not have. They may have visited multiple doctors who have reassured them they are healthy. However, they still believe the doctors missed the condition, withheld the diagnosis, etc.
Risk for Self-Harm or Causing Injury to Others
Self-harm is when someone hurts themselves deliberately, and it is more common among women than men. A person who hurts themselves in this way isn’t suicidal and doesn’t intend to take their own life. However, they are at higher risk of attempting suicide and dying by suicide if they don’t get professional help. A trauma treatment program for girls can assist an adolescent who is self-harming.
Self-harm generally begins with teens or young adults. For many young people, it gives them a sense of relief and is used as a coping mechanism. They focus on the physical pain they are inflicting on themselves, which dulls the emotional pain they are feeling in their lives (sadness, loneliness, anger, hopelessness).
Examples of self-harm may include:
- Breaking bones or bruising oneself
- Burning oneself with cigarettes, matches, or candles
- Cutting the skin with a sharp object
- Hitting or punching oneself
- Punching walls or other objects
- Piercing the skin with sharp objects
Symptoms and warning signs of self-harm include:
- Fresh cuts, burns, or bite marks
- Keeping sharp objects on hand
- New scars
- Talking about feeling worthless or hopeless
- Wearing long sleeves and pants, even during warmer months
Teen girls cutting themselves need mental health care. If they can’t stop on their own, they may be at risk of causing physical harm to themselves. Seek professional help immediately if you see these signs.
Risk for Causing Injury to Others
Risk for Causing Injury to Others is a situation where a person has threatened or attempted to cause serious injury. Their mental illness may make them impaired to the extent they don’t understand that they need treatment. At that point, the parent or guardian must consider their therapy options for teens. A residential treatment center for a girl is a reasonable choice in this situation, and Johnstown Heights can provide a secure environment to assess and treat a teen in this situation.
Inability to Manage Daily Activities
When someone is unable to perform daily living activities, it may indicate a mental illness or a substance abuse issue. In the case of a mental illness, it can mean someone who is feeling overwhelmed and is having difficulty with personal hygiene, eating correctly, and performing well at school and work. The person may stop communicating with family members and friends, in person and online.
Someone living with a substance abuse disorder may have similar symptoms to a person. They may withdraw from their former friends but suddenly have a new group of friends. The new group is likely supplying the person with their drug of choice or using it with them.
Significant Anger or Defiance Issues
Everyone gets angry from time to time, and it’s normal.
When someone’s anger seems too intense for the situation, or they can’t control their anger, it may indicate a mental illness. Treatment is available for someone who seems angry or enraged at the slightest provocation.
Our acute inpatient mental health treatment for teens can help clients and their families determine the cause of the issue to help determine an appropriate treatment plan.
Treatment Offerings at Johnstown Heights
We provide diagnostic and therapeutic treatment planning involving our multidisciplinary clinical team, which a psychiatrist leads. Each client in our care is given an individual treatment plan developed to meet their needs.
- Medication evaluation
- Medication management
- Trauma-informed care
- Group therapy
- Family support & education
- Stress management
- Recreation/Art therapy
Comprehensive Behavioral Health
Behavioral health usually refers to mental health and substance use disorders. It also includes life stressors (and crises) a person may face and treatment for those conditions. Moving from adolescence to adulthood is a crucial phase of life. Understanding and addressing these factors is required for a teen’s healthy development in adulthood.
Holistic Approach to Treatment
Our treatment approach considers each teen client as a whole person. We don’t simply treat their mental illness or substance abuse because these conditions don’t exist in a vacuum. Addressing these conditions requires a holistic approach that involves gathering information from parents or caregivers, schools, healthcare professionals, and the broader community.
Residential Treatment Center Helps Girls
Many pressures on young people now didn’t exist even a generation ago. Social media can be a double-edged sword for teen mental health. It allows people of all ages to communicate with each other. Still, it also opens the door to cyberbullying and abuse that reaches its victims anywhere and anytime. The targets can’t feel safe anywhere due to its intrusive effects, which can have a direct negative impact on a teenage girl’s mental health.
If you are the parent or guardian of an adolescent girl aged 13-17 with mental health concerns or a substance abuse disorder, Johnstown Heights can help. Our team provides a free assessment to all clients who come to us, followed by a diagnosis and rapid stabilization of acute psychiatric symptoms at our teen residential treatment facility.
Johnstown Heights is known as a teen psychiatric hospital offering treatment for teens with mental health conditions. We are also a teen addiction treatment center for substance use disorders. It’s not uncommon to see a client with a mental health concern and an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Both issues need to be treated at the same time for the client to get well. Teenage girls get counseling and other help they need.
Our adolescent treatment programs can treat clients’ needs, whether they are living with a mental health concern, substance abuse, or both. A stay at a residential treatment center for teen girls means your loved one will be housed with her peers but away from the distractions that led to her needing professional help. Our clients can focus their attention on their recovery.
