Intensive Crisis Intervention

ICI is a brief (Average Length of Stay \[ALOS\]: M±SD=4.5±1.4 days), intensive family-centered, skills-based alternative to traditional inpatient psychiatric care. Adolescents participate in 2-3 individual sessions and 1-2 family sessions daily. Based on the cognitive-behavioral model of suicidality, ICI emphasizes that learned, maladaptive cognitive, behavioral, and affective responses to stressors contributing to suicidal behavior can be changed. Master's-level clinicians facilitate this process by engaging adolescents and their families in developing more effective coping skills when faced with potential triggers to suicidal crises.

APIU provides comprehensive assessment and treatment services to children and adolescents with significant psychiatric difficulties and to their families using a multidisciplinary approach. Symptoms and behaviors that led to admission are targeted through a milieu-based model of care and therapeutic group programming. The multidisciplinary treatment team includes a child and adolescent psychiatrist, often in collaboration with an advanced practice provider, psychologist, psychiatric nursing staff including trained mental health specialists, behavioral healthcare clinicians, care managers, rehabilitative care staff, teachers, and parent partners. Average length of stay is 9-11 days. An individualized treatment plan is developed by the entire treatment team, including the patient and caregivers, and includes initial planning for discharge with the primary treatment goal being stabilization of acute psychiatric symptoms. Programming is based on a trauma-informed biopsychosocial approach.