Residential Treatment for Depression - How Helpful Can It Be?

Depression is a disorder whose treatment entails a focused regimen of medication, therapy, and counseling. One approach is residential treatment for depression, wherein the sufferer is admitted to a residential facility that provides holistic therapeutic programs.

The treatments of depression range from the simple to the complex, but experts agree that a combination of medication, therapy, and behavioral programs will probably be more effective and will have longer-lasting effects.

Residential treatment for depression may include an array of general psychiatric and neurodevelopmental programs, programs for children and adolescents, general psychiatric outdoor programs, even hospitalization and residential halfway house programs.

What are these programs all about?

Treatment Centers That Feel Like Home

The general psychiatric programs will focus more on developing the patient's socio-emotional skills in coping with the depression. Neurodevelopmental programs, on the other hand, will entail more specialized and individualized services with neuro-clinical foundations like QEEG (quantitative electroencephalography) testing, audio-visual testing and training, speech therapy, social therapy or occupational therapy, neuro-feedbacks, and even sensory integration programs.

Residential treatment of depression in children will require a different approach that, although inclusive of the foregoing tests and therapy regimens, will take into consideration the tender age and eccentricities of the younger patients.

Outdoor programs within residential facilities focus on developing group process skills and relationship skills, living and coping skills, and close coordination and therapy involving the patient's family. The program may entail patients going on regular outings involving family or peers within a wider community to prepare them for their eventual reintegration into their respective communities when finally cured of the depression.

Outdoor programs may also include a neurodevelopmental aspect that takes into consideration again the previously-mentioned QEEG tests and neurofeedback therapies, the sensory, speech and occupational therapies.

Patients with histories of emotional and behavioral disturbances and deep-seated depression are integrated into a residential treatment community that understands their coping and relating problems. The residential treatment facility thus provides for a home setting where patients are encouraged to naturally seek acceptance within the closed community by coping, processing their group relationship skills, their social functioning, communication, and independent living abilities.

Your Own Home as a Treatment Center

There are cases wherein the best treatment place for your loved ones is your own home.

This is most especially true if a depressed person is a child or an old relative (a parent, grandparent or aunt) that need special care that an out-of-home treatment center can not accommodate.

There are lots of changes that you must do with your home such as making it accident-free (and suicide-free zone). You also need to repaint walls to make it livelier and sunnier than before.

Even if you take home a loved one and opt to treat him or her at your own home, you also need to send him over to the outdoor programs of a treatment center for socialization and group therapy.

If you prefer this treatment method, you need to submit yourself too, as the caregiver, to trainings and conferences of the treatment center. This is to train you how to handle effectively a depressed person at home and the people living with him.

Is residential treatment for depression more likely to be successful?

The key to a successful residential treatment for depression is multi-faceted. There must be focused, individualized attention to the patient, preferably same-sex or single gender programs, intensive clinical regimen of individual-group-family-peer therapies, diversity to allow for personality differences among patients, competent and experienced clinical or medical staff of the residential treatment facility, inclusion of academics into the program, and conducive venues or sites for the residential treatment of depression.

A professional residential treatment for depression, in other words, must include, to be truly successful, an individualized treatment plan completely backed up by psychiatric and psychological evaluation, and including individual and social psychotherapy, family-related counseling, complete nursing care, fitness exercise and dietary regimens, and experiential therapies. Taken holistically, the patient is allowed gradual shift from individualistic depression to a socially acceptable relation.

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