After along period of development, Boswyns Young Peoples Residential is set to open shortly in Hayle, Cornwall, UK. This new service provides up to eight beds for young people with complex needs surrounding their drug and alcohol use. The building itself is state of the art, and tailored to young peoples needs. The new team, over seen by Jeremy Booker and managed by Jamie Pere, brings together a fantastic range of skills and experience.
I have been working on the programme since last summer. The formal treatment component offers an innovative schedule of modules including:
Understanding Adolescent Development
Substance use and Expectancy Challenges
Life Skills
Luck Lab
Understanding Adolescent Development examines the critical changes that occur during adolescence and helps young people to understand their own development. Based on this, it provides a range of skills and emotional control techniques.
Most young people's drug and alcohol use is influenced and shaped not by the consequences of their use, but their positive expectation regarding what drugs and alcohol can and cannot do for them. The Expectancy Challenge explores these beliefs in order to reduce consumption by revealing the differences between the actual and expected effects of substances.
The Life Skills component considers the essential skills necessary to move into autonomous adult life. This focuses primarily on the development of new relationships as well self-management.
Luck Lab is a new and exciting approach to young people. The research on adolescent development has always highlighted the impact of random events on young peoples life development. However, these forces have always been considered beyond the reach of formal treatment interventions. This led me to consider whether luck was simply random or did lucky and unlucky people behave differently? Based on research by psychologists such as Prof Richard Wiseman, studies showed that lucky and unlucky people do in fact behave in different ways that are replicable. So, part of the programme will teach young people how to generate, identify and maximize life opportunities and to deal with setbacks.
This formal programme will be supported by additional life skills, as well educational, vocational and recreational activities. Young people will also benefit from the dynamics that therapeutic communities can offer in terms of shared living and the challenges and benefits this can bring. As such, the service offers a unique resource to a much under-served population. An extensive evaluation of the service will follow, based on the use of the latest clinical outcome tools.
For more details regarding the new facility at Bosywyns, click here.