Dubai: Boarding facility for kids with mental health issues to open soon
In the United Arab Emirates, a boarding school for boys with behavioral and emotional disturbances is being established. Resicare Alliance, which currently operates 11 homes in the UK, will soon expand to the UAE.
“Most of our children come from broken homes for security or learning and physical difficulties,” remarked Antony Bainbridge, clinical services head and clinical lead.
“We have a reunification pathway model where the child is in the home for 12 to 16 weeks and only then can the child return home or the family foster the child.”
Challenges
One of the most regularly recurring issues that Anthony engages with a number of the students regarding is online bullying. “There are times when I feel that the internet should never have been created,” he stated.
“When it comes to kids, the internet could be the greatest ally or the biggest threat. For a directly related post‐Covid situation where everyone was within the walls of a single room, what we are seeing is a huge explosion of mental health concerns within the children and youth population.
They are having anxiety, depression, and health anxiety-related issues that really make everything else so much more difficult.”
He remarked that he has experienced the ‘thick of it’, the worst part of the social media while performing His duties. “What we have is an incredible problem of cyber bullying in children and youth which is a breeding ground for eating disorders or body dysmorphia,” he said.
“Thus social networking sites especially Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are some enemies of my life. I understand it very well that working therapeutically with children, social media is the most effective communication tool. Although I only work with kids therapeutically. I also know how much trouble that brings.”
I have interviewed children who have made suicide attempts due to harassment in cyberspace or being stalked by someone. Thus, everything we conceptualize positively with regard to social media can, unfortunately, also be very disruptive and dysregulated to children.”
How the facility helps students
Antony clarified in detail that it is during their period of three months at Resicare Alliance that the children have to be stabilized and a stringent regime is put in place.
“Most of these children are generally very dysregulated and we have to provide a lot of guidance to stabilize them,” he opined. “We help them settle by putting us as much structure around the child as possible- from getting up in the morning and having meals to bedtime routines. Unfortunately, this structure is missing in families for whatever reason.”
He stated that the child also explains this issue in his own way and tells how important it is to have some, or even a lot of predictability. “That predictability becomes so important in giving that child regulation, stabilization, nurture and guidance, which they need to navigate their way through their journey,” he claimed.
“That is what we aim for. Whenever a parent is willing to entrust care of his child with us, that is what we probably want to achieve with every single child. Every single time we take a child into our services, we always look at the child closely and try to see whether the needs packages can be matched to the service.”
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