Therapeutic, Behavioral, and Dual Diagnosis Treatment Terms for Parents to Know

A Partial Hospitalization Program, or day treatment program, is structured outpatient care that equips teens with the coping skills and medication management they need to overcome mental health conditions and co-occurring substance use concerns. Teens attend a full day of treatment before returning home each night.

PHPs involve several hours of treatment 4 to 6 days a week, including group therapy, individual and family sessions, medication management appointments, and more. Treatment modalities include motivational interviewing, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to help teens activate their innate capacity to heal by establishing resiliency.

A Dallas-area Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) may be ideal when your teenager is struggling with depression, anxiety, anger, or other mental health needs. An IOP is considered the middle ground in the levels-of-care hierarchy; it’s often a step up from traditional outpatient care (where a teen might see a therapist or psychiatrist regularly) and a step down from a PHP.

If your child has completed a PHP or needs a more intensive level of care above a traditional outpatient therapy visit, an IOP program may be a good fit.

Behavioral therapy is the broad term used to describe the problem-focused therapeutic approach to identifying and addressing behavioral issues. The overall  goal of behavioral therapy is to facilitate changed behavior in your teenager and to help them develop healthier habits.

Experiential therapy is an interactive, hands-on modality that requires active participation. Your adolescent will physically engage in an activity while confronting thoughts, emotions, and past trauma. This practice helps them address thoughts and emotions around past events and establish healthier processing patterns when faced with triggers.

Experiential therapy is effective at treating a variety of mental health concerns, such as mood disorders, behavioral disorders, stress disorders, and PTSD, as well as substance use.

In some cases, your teen may require the prescription of safe and trusted medications to alleviate their symptoms while your child participates in evidence-based therapeutic practices. Not every teen will require medication management. This will be determined in the initial comprehensive psychiatric evaluation and individualized treatment plan.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a therapeutic approach that focuses on the unhealthy or problematic thoughts that lie behind undesirable behaviors. This therapy will help your teen develop coping skills to process these thoughts and emotions in order to exhibit healthier behavior.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) builds upon the CBT approach with a more significant emphasis on emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. DBT seeks to help teens accept themselves, understand and accept their emotions, and regulate potentially destructive and harmful behaviors. DBT also uses mindfulness to empower teens to establish lasting change.

Unlike problem-focused therapeutic approaches, psychodynamic therapy focuses on the teen’s deepest needs, urges, and desires. The practitioner will employ several techniques, including talk therapy, free association, dream analysis, art therapy, Rorschach inkblots, and more. The goal of this approach is to help your child gain a greater degree of self-awareness and decrease their emotional suffering.

Motivational interviewing is a client-centered counseling style that helps your teen reduce ambivalent feelings, elicits behavior changes, and supports long-term self-efficacy. The concept of motivational interviewing is to help teens overcome indecision or ambivalence and own the responsibility of taking the desired action. This change process empowers teens to take ownership of their ideas and actions.

At BasePoint Academy, we believe the success of healing and recovery for teens is a supportive family and a safe home environment. This requires participation in therapeutic family healing efforts and therapist-led sessions. The goal is to give families or the teen’s primary caretakers access to healthy and open communication that fosters trust and a renewed closeness.

The first step in suicide prevention is awareness — knowing when someone is in crisis. it’s often not obvious, because many teens suffer in silence or give no sign they might harm themselves. As a family member, friend, neighbor, or colleague, you can make a difference by using the Columbia Protocol.

This protocol, also known as the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), an evidence-based assessment tool to determine when someone is at risk for suicide and how to help.

Assertive Community is a skills group specific to BasePoint Academy programming. This group comprises all community members: teens and BasePoint staff. The ongoing development and maintenance of this community is the foundation of teaching appropriate boundaries and our core values.

The community exists within the offices, group and community rooms, clinic grounds, and even transportation vans where teens will interact with other Assertive Community Group members. The specific processes and interventions used in the group are tailored to help teens identify new ways to activate their innate capacity to heal.

Group therapy is a form of counseling that has proven highly effective with teens. It provides a safe space to address and process mental health and dual diagnosis concerns. Healthy peer interactions yield healthy and lasting change. Group members are given the opportunity to participate in discussions, develop strong interpersonal skills, practice coping skills, and receive relapse prevention training.

The term “levels of care” describes the varying treatment options that correlate to the appropriateness of a teen’s current treatment needs. “Step down” in treatment is used to describe the transition in levels of care when the teenager’s treatment needs are indicative of increased stability, safety, and decreased symptomology requiring less-intensive services than their current care level.

On the other hand, “step up” in treatment describes the transition in levels of care when the adolescent’s treatment needs are indicative of increased symptomology requiring more intensive services than their current level of treatment. Some of the various levels of care available include:

• Inpatient Hospitalization: This short-term, highly structured level of care provides crisis stabilization for teens at risk of harming themselves or others, or are otherwise unable to care for themselves. A typical length of stay is 3 to 5 days. Inpatient treatment can be a step-up from day treatment. 
• Residential Care: Residential care is typically longer-term treatment requiring teens to live onsite with 24-hour supervision or treatment. The length of stay is usually 30 to 60 days and is less restrictive than inpatient hospitalization.
• Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHPs): A PHP, sometimes referred to as “day treatment,”  is ideal if your teen has complex systems but doesn’t need inpatient or residential treatment. A PHP involves treatment for several hours a day, 4 to 6 days a week. BasePoint Academy provides PHP treatment.
• Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOPs): Teenagers enrolled in an IOP come in for treatment 3 to 5 days a week for several hours each day. IOPs can be used as a step-down from a PHP or a step-up from counseling or psychiatric services. BasePoint Academy provides IOP treatment for teens.
• Psychiatric Services: Psychiatrists are able to diagnose your teen’s mental health conditions and prescribe medications when appropriate.
• Counseling: Teen counseling is an outpatient level of care that provides adolescents with individual, group, or family therapy sessions to address emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges. It is typically the least intensive level of care, making it well-suited for teens who are functioning in daily life but benefit from consistent therapeutic support and skill-building.

Discharge marks the end of an adolescent’s episode of care and is the point at which the treatment team, teen, and family come together to finalize the aftercare plan. During this process, everyone is educated on the importance of continuing care and following the plan to support lasting recovery. 

The aftercare plan should include specific referrals indicative of the patient’s next level of treatment needs. The goal is to anticipate changes in treatment needs and provide continuity of care between treatment providers. Discharge planning begins when your child is admitted, ensuring an appropriate and effective aftercare plan is developed with the patient, their family, and the treatment team prior to the routine discharge.