New articles are published every Monday and sometimes in between.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Custodial cf. therapeutic residential care

I love "Living Proof" the podcast series from the University of Buffalo School Of Social Work. They distribute a podcast every two week on Social Work topics and they are excellent. The podcast published on August 8 and September 5, 2011 involved Dr. Nancy Smyth interviewing Brian Farragher about the Sanctuary Model in his agency, the Andrus Children's Center,  in Yonkers, NY.

 




My first year internship during my graduate Social Work study at SUNY Albany, NY, was at VanderHeyden Hall in Troy, NY in the fall and spring of 1970 - 1971.



Over the course of my career I have seen residential services move from custodial care to therapeutic community models. I did a term paper in graduate school on the difference between custodial care models of residential services and therapeutic community models of residential services. There are important differences. Rudolp Moos and other social psychologists and sociologists studied and wrote extensively on this topic in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. These ideas have lost traction as the biochemical brain science models and evidenced based practice have moved to the forefront. However with the Sanctuary model attention is turning back to the social dynamics of residential care settings as being important therapeutic experiences to help people learn better self management and interpersonal skills to improve psychological and social functioning in their later life.

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