Residential treatment center

A residential treatment center (RTC), sometimes called a rehab, is a live-in health care facility providing therapy for substance abuse, mental illness, or other behavioral problems. Residential treatment may be considered the "last-ditch" approach to treating abnormal psychology or psychopathology.

In the 1600s, Great Britain established the Poor Law that allowed poor children to become trained in apprenticeships by removing them from their families and forcing them to live in group homes. In the 1800s, the United States copied this system, but often mentally ill children were placed in jail with adults because society did not know what to do with them. There were no RTCs in place to provide the 24-hour care they needed and they were placed in jail when they could not live in the home. In the 1900s, Anna Freud and her peers were part of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and they worked on how to care for children. They worked to create residential treatment centers for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders.

The year 1944 is important because it marks the beginning of Bruno Bettelheim's work at the Orthogenic School in Chicago, and Fritz Redl and David Wineman's work at the Pioneer House in Detroit. Bettelheim helped increase awareness of staff attitudes on children in treatment. He reinforced the idea that a psychiatric hospital was a community, where staff and patients influenced each other and patients were shaped by each other's behaviors. Bettelheim also believed that families should not have frequent contact with their child while he or she was in treatment. This differs from community-based therapy and family therapy of recent years, in which the goal of treatment is for a child to remain in the home. Also, emphasis is placed on the family's role in improving long term outcomes after treatment in a RTC. The Pioneer House created a special-education program to help improve impulse control and sociability in children. After WWII, Bettelheim and the joint efforts of Redl and Wineman were instrumental in establishing residential facilities as therapeutic-treatment alternative for children and adolescents who can not live at home

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