Outpatient Mental Health
Our outpatient mental health services are for children from early childhood through adulthood to help them cope with a variety of stressors that impact their mental health. Services can include psychotherapy, psychoeducation, and case management.
MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES
What is Mental Health?
Our mental health is important at every stage of our lives and plays a major role in how we think, feel, and act each day. Having positive mental health allows us to cope with the stresses of life and realize our full potential. Many factors contribute to mental health problems including biological factors, life experiences, and family history.
Because autism typically affects individuals’ communication and social challenges, those on the spectrum are at a higher risk for mental health challenges as well. Mental health services help individuals work through their mental health disorders. Through therapy, they can begin to understand, express, and communicate their feelings.
Please Note:
Our early intervention services are available to all children with developmental challenges through the age of six at which point children are required to have a primary diagnosis of autism or ADHD to continue receiving services at Empowering Kids.
Our Waitlist is Currently Closed
As we continue to grow, we are always checking in on and evolving all of our programs. At this time, we are no longer accepting referrals for our outpatient mental health program. The individuals we are currently seeing will continue to receive services and those on our waitlist will remain on the waitlist as long as they would like to. If we were to expand our mental health providers, we would re-evaluate this program and may open the waitlist back up and communicate that appropriately.
Our Interventions
focus on psychotherapy
There are a number of treatment and therapy options for mental health. We focus on the various modalities of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is talk therapy that aims to enable patients, or clients, to understand their feelings and what makes them feel positive, anxious, or depressed. Our therapists will work with individuals to identify what keeps them from feeling their best.
Mental health sessions vary greatly depending on the client’s age, diagnosis, and the modality being used. They are individualized to meet the needs of the client. Clients can be participating in art, talk therapy, games, reading, etc.
A diagnostic assessment (DA) determines eligibility and needs of each individual. It assesses the client’s current mental health status and functioning. The assessment must include report that documents the clinical and functional face-to-face evaluation of a person’s mental health. The report must include the nature, severity, and impact of behavioral difficulties, functional impairment, subjective distress, strengths, and resources.
There are many approaches to psychotherapy. Empowering Kids offers the following modalities: DIR Floortime, Play Therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy.
DIR Floortime
Intervention used to promote development through respectful, playful, and engaging process.
Play Therapy
Engage the child in play to help them express their thoughts and feelings.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Challenging old ways of thinking to think more clearly and effectively.
Our Interventions
DIR Floortime
Floortime (also known as DIRFloortime) is an intervention that is used to promote an individual’s development through a respectful, playful, joyful, and engaging process. The goal of Floortime is not to help the child with autism look neurotypical. Instead, it is to help the child function better in various environments while retaining their uniqueness.
The sessions look different for every individual because it is based on the interests and capabilities of each person. Sessions may be play-based where the therapist is finding a just right challenge with the child to work on skills. Other sessions may be more conversation-based. Floortime is very adaptable to various children and environments, which means it can be done anywhere.
Our Interventions
Play Therapy
Play therapy is most commonly used to help children ages 3 to 12 years old, although sometimes used with adults. It may look like ordinary playtime, but play therapy is much more than that. This form of therapeutic play takes place in a safe, comfortable playroom with no rules or limits. By allowing the child to explore and play freely, the child expresses and communicates thoughts and feelings that may be too hard for them to put into words.
Therapeutic play can help children communicate better, change their behavior, develop problem-solving skills, and relate to others. Play therapy is beneficial for young developing minds that don’t yet have the language skills of adults.
Through play, the therapist joins the child in the child’s world. Much can be revealed in how a child interacts with different types of toys. Trained therapists use playtime to help the child explore emotions while observing and gaining insights into a child’s problems. They use these observations as a guide to the next steps, such as learning coping mechanisms, problem solving skills, and ways of relating to others.
Our Interventions
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
A common type of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy is structured time with a therapist. The focus is on awareness of inaccurate, negative thinking patterns so the individual can view challenging situations more clearly and respond more effectively.
Get Started
Our enrollment process is designed to evaluate the needs and abilities of your child to determine the best fit.
Step 1
Contact Us
We’ll provide you with a referral form to fill out. Once the form is complete, a provider will contact you with options for next steps.
Step 2
Intake
We’ll schedule an intake meeting to get more info about your child.
Step 3
DIAGNOSTIC ASSESSMENT
We’ll perform a diagnostic assessment (DA) to determines eligibility for EIDBI services.