Libby’s Place

The Libby’s Place program is suitable for teenage girls who many we struggling with a variety of mental health challenges, including emotional distress and behavioral issues. 

Program Overview

The highly structured program at Libby’s Place emphasizes and uses both individual and group strengths. The therapeutic milieu includes group therapy, group and individual activities, group tasks, and chores. It also includes individual meetings with an assigned child and youth worker. 

The program reflects a Centre-wide commitment to competency-based approaches to treatment. Family involvement is encouraged at every level of the program.

Group Emphasis

The emphasis on group allows for the residence to rely on a forum, which will help with group problems and difficulties. The individual worker attached to each resident allows for conversations, which the resident may or may not want to share with the group.

Staff

Libby’s Place is staffed with dedicated and professional child and youth workers. Psychiatry, psychology, social work, and education, are fully integrated within the program.

Admission

Pre-admission discussions lead to a beginning clinical formulation regarding the problem, the context, and the particular idiosyncratic aspects, which are preventing change. The length of stay is one to two years.

Approach

Upon admission, each girl and her family meet with the psychiatrist. Following admission, a psychological assessment on each girl is completed. All residents of Libby’s Place have access to the Centre’s School.

The approach to treatment is based on a multi-disciplinary process in which the above-mentioned disciplines collaborate in clinical discussion and coordinate all aspects of treatment jointly with the clients, their families, their George Hull Centre clinician, and outside agencies.

An outside consultant provides additional clinical support to the team on a bi-weekly basis. A clinical understanding of each girl’s behaviour and symptoms is developed, and specific treatment plans, team issues, and therapeutic programming are discussed. 

Girls are interviewed in the presence of one another, which increase group cohesiveness, understanding, and compassion.

The girls participate in their treatment planning as well as the operation of the house. A weekly House Management meeting involving all the girls and staff builds on relationships and creates an atmosphere of trust and working together.

Family Involvement

In addition to family sessions with their clinician, family members are invited to spend time in the house, come for dinner, and participate in special organized events throughout the year. Parents are encouraged to attend seminars and groups offered by the Community Clinic. On weekends, girls go home to their families where appropriate.

Mother-Daughter Group

All Libby’s Place, clients participate regularly in a group designed to increase the bonding between mothers and daughters.  This innovative group, facilitated by skilled child and youth workers, as well as the program social worker, provides structured activities that foster improved communication and increased understanding of one another’s experiences.  

The group setting provides mutual support for all families, further integrates families into treatment, and complements the family-based work.  

Program evaluation results indicate many positive benefits of the group including:

• Improved levels of trust between mothers and daughters.
• Increased ability to ‘share stories’ with one another.
• Increased ability for mothers and daughters to listen openly to one another.
• Increased ability to explore issues from the perspective of the other.