Hello,
My name is Sam. I’m a young mental health and disability advocate. I struggle with chronic mental illness (depression, generalized anxiety, PTSD, self-injury history) and am also blind. I’ve gone through many types of treatment: standard individual and group outpatient therapy, psychiatric units, day treatment/ intensive outpatient, and now live in a long term specialized mental health rehabilitation facility.
Finding services is so hard especially if you’re on Medicaid. Regardless websites and profiles are written by the provider or marketing people. Even the testimonieals re aprobably edited. This doesn’t give a person honest feedback about these places and practitioners.
I am forever grateful to the author/s of Eating disorder Treatment review
I have reached out to them and am hoping they will help me admin or give tips!
The organization and attention to detail of the site is just amazing!
So I’m borrowing about everything she’s done but with different words of course!
Review Guidelines/ topics
In reviewing anything please remember the following. Everyone will have their own opinion. A program or even individual provider (because people are always changing!), can be very different over time. Which is why it’s important to put the year you were involved and for how long. Something more than a few years old has hopefully changed for the better by now! People say restaurants and stores can be reviewed but never therapists! I disagree. Everyone asks one another how they felt about a certain provider/ place when someone mentions it in person. And there are few places to find any such information online. I think as people we can take advantage of the fact that getting a lot of information about a place in one place ( a moderated blog) is worth knowing to take everything with a grain of salt or a whole bottle!
Please be as respectful as possible in all reviews. You can be totally honest without being insulting or swearing, not allowed! Instead of saying someone was amazing or this person was abusive please state in more detail what it is that made you feel that way. This gives specific pros and cons for people to consider and ask further questions about.
If you want to start a post on a topic: please contact Carol Anne or I
https://mentalhealthtreatmentreview.wordpress.com/contact/,fill out Let us know a bit about the place you’re interested in starting a post on website is good, and we will create that post. You can comment on any post started, will be starting a few tonight!
Here are some questions to get you thinking when writing a review. Feel free to not use these questions or to only answer those that apply.
In general for each category:
Residential, inpatient unit, crisis residential, long-term care
Name of facility/ agency/ person and location
Helpful initial contact person if known
? When were you there? year/s or month/s
Disorders treated? (if a hospital/ facility has multiple programs for different disorders would love to hear different perspectives on each track!)
How is program funded? (insurances accepted, financial assistance, medicare, Medicaid?)
How many residents in the program at one time?
Length of stay?
Staff to resident ratio?
Do you have your own room/ roomates?
General environment of the facility, cleanliness etc
Food? Variety/ quality menu plans etc
Groups/ types of treatment offered?
List/ describe groups/ treatment types if able.
How often do you see therapist, psychiatrist, medical doctor?
Is there a level system/ one to one, line of sight ETC?
What priviliges do you have?
Activities recreational, outings/ passes?
Helpfulness of staff? Availability, can give first names but not last names.
What did you like most?
What did you like least?
Is there a willingness to work with people with additional disabilities? (blind, deaf, autistic, sensory processing, physical ETC)
Would you recommend this program to others?
Treatment planning/ discharge/ aftercare?
Other comments?
For day treatment, partial hospitalization/IOP same as above, leaving out residential parts.
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oSe Will be trying to come up with a sensitive and well thought template for reviewing individual providers so stay tuned and feel free to help with suggestions on this.
Any thoughts/ questions and ideas about the site as a whole should go in the comments section under this post.
Mental health treatment review 