Bear Project Group Therapy
Who can attend
This programme has been developed to support young people who are in need of more support than a single weekly session of individual support. The programme aims to help young people suffering from a detriorated emotional state and struggling with a mental health problem. This is wide ranging and can include issues such as depression, low self esteem, addiction or substance misuse, self harm or an eating disorder. As a result of these difficulties a young person may be struggling with peer and/or family relationships or at school.
Or it could be the case that they have just left residential treatment in an inpatient facility. When a young person leaves the protected environment of residential treatment it is often at a moment when they have effected tremendous positive change. This programme aims to support and strengthen this change even when the environment surrounding the young person remains unchanged. We have experience of collaborating with a range of residential treatment programmes.
A support discussion group will also be offered to the parents as part of the programme.
The objectives of the programme will be:
To promote peer support
Offer insight, reflection, therapeutic and life skills to young people during a more vulnerable phase of their recovery
To break emotional isolation
To support positive communication between the young person and their family
programme StruCture
The programme is structured in a 6 weekly cycle as a closed group. The group is limited to 8 members to ensure productive group dynamics. In order to allow group dynamics to be beneficial to the participants young people will only be able to enter on the first or second group of any one cycle.
The treatment is delivered in 2 sessions per week from 4:30pm to 7pm. This allows all participants to attend school and join after. It will include the following interventions:
Process group
Family relationships group: ‘How am I getting on with my family?’
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy skills group
Life skills group/ psycho-education
The programme will consist only of group provision and will not seek to replace any existing individual support. The programme seeks to enhance an existing package of support and not to replace it. It will therefore be important on admission that every young person has an existing individual therapist and ideally a treating psychiatrist.
The programme will be clinical led by Dr Paul Bain, child and adolescent consultant psychiatrist.
The group will be managed and coordinated by a dedicated professional and therefore both young people and parents will be able to speak to a person in charge.
Parents Support
A weekly one hour meeting will be offered to parents with an aim to promote cross parental support and to provide a discussion forum.
When young people are in distress the impact on parents can be overwhelming, often dealing regularly with emotional dynamics - their child's, other family members', and their own - which go way beyond the usual parenting role. And frequently they feel very alone with this, at a loss as to what they should be doing, and parents can lose confidence in their capacity to helpfully support the distressed young person. Our experienced counsellor will work with the parents as a group, supporting them alongside the young person receiving treatment, to address and discuss queries, concerns or changes that often occur within a family when a member of that family engages in treatment.