THE AUGUST AICHHORN CENTER
for
ADOLESCENT RESIDENTIAL CARE,
Inc.
An Introduction -- Who We Are and What's In
This
Site
Welcome to the home page of the August Aichhorn Center. The
Aichhorn
Center was organized as a not-for-profit corporation in New York State
in 1977 to serve, to study and to teach about the special problems of
providing
long-term care and treatment to teenagers who were "unplaceable" in any
existing facilities except State hospitals or correctional
institutions.
Treatment Programs - RTF, YASL and School
The Aichhorn Center currently operates two clinical service programs, a
Residential
Treatment Facility and a Young
Adult Supported Living Program, as well as the Aichhorn
School, located in the RTF. All the facilities are located in
the Manhattan Valley neighborhood near Central Park and Columbia
University,
in New York City. For more information about various aspects of
these
programs, please go to our programs.
Policy Issues
We want to use our operating programs as models for development and
testing
of various organizational and instructional ideas. We are eager
to
share what we have learned, what we believe will work or not work in
the
future, and our thoughts and questions about unresolved issues in
residential
care--including whether it has any place at all in the range of
psychiatric
services for teenagers. We post discussions of various current
issues
in the section on ideas and issues.
Currently, this section contains summaries, and links to more complete
discussions on maintaining safety in
the
RTF (a topic made timely by the several serious attacks on at
various facilities), follow-up
of residents discharged from the RTF, and Federal
regulations on the use of "seclusion" and "restraint" in
residential
treatment facilities. In operating our programs, we place great
emphasis
on encouraging free discussion among staff and residents. This is
important partly because we want to encourage verbal rather than
physical
disagreement, and partly because we genuinely believe that we do not
yet
have definitive answers to many problems in our field, and we can
actually
learn from each other. In that spirit, we are also very
interested
in responses to our ideas from interested people we have not yet
met.
If you have a comment or question about our comments,
we
would be very glad to hear from you. We are currently still developing
this web site, and particularly welcome any ideas on areas that should
be included. If you are looking for something here that you don't
find, please let us know.
For those with a special interest in our facilities, our
"newsletter" section, "What's New?,"
includes various items of interest about day to day life in our
programs.
The current page features an item on our recent reunion dinner, our
"long-stay" staff, a column by
the Executive Director, and some brief "impressions of Aichhorn" by
residents of the RTF.
Contacts and Employment
If you are interested in working directly with us, please check the
join
us section. We post there specific positions we may be
seeking
to fill at any time, as well as some notes on general categories of
applicants
we are always interested in meeting. To inquire further or
comment
on any aspect of our presentation here, or if you want to reach any
particular
person or department at Aichhorn for any reason, please check the contact
us section.
LINKS -- Aichhorn as
others
see us
New York Magazine ran a brief article on the Aichhorn Center
and
our RTF in June, 1999.
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/health/bestdoctors/features/589
Dr. Michael Pawel, Aichhorn's Executive Director, questioned a
review
entitled "Killer Children," in a letter published by The New York
Review
in December, 1999.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/288
Fox Butterfield, discussing mentally ill teenagers in the juvenile
justice
system, referred to the Aichhorn Center in his New York Times article
of December 5, 2000.
http://www.kersur.net/~mhci/youthinjail.html
The unexamined psychological issues fueling widespread political
disapproval
of all group child care are discussed in an essay from by Dr. Pawel
published
in The Humanist. [Note: downloading this item costs $2.95.]
http://library.northernlight.com/SL19970922040126955.html?cb=0&sc=0#doc
Dr. Pawel reviews a description of the Broward County Mental Health
Court, suggesting that it seems to represent the criminal justice
system's
recognition that many chronic psychiatric patients will not be treated
by the mental health system. The
Forensice Echo .
top
[revised 8/3/07]