The Retreat at Sheppard Pratt
At The Retreat, patients come first. As Francis Weld Peabody explained to Harvard medical students 80 years ago, The secret in the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.
This is our guiding principle, the force that drives everything we do.
Each patient is an individual seeking help with a suffering he or she has been unable to overcome alone. This may manifest itself through psychiatric illness, inhibitions in work and relationships, physical symptoms, addiction to substances, or in other ways. We work to understand the nature of the suffering and the nature of the person. We form an alliance with the patient and his or her unique strengths to work in the service of recovery.
At The Retreat, we combine the best of the science and art of modern psychiatry. Accurate diagnosis leads to state-of-the-art medication treatments. Understanding the patient helps with psychodynamically informed psychotherapy and cognitive therapy. We teach DBT skills for affect management, pay attention to healthy diet and exercise and integrate Eastern approaches to meditation and movement therapies for comprehensive healing. Most importantly, the care always involves human relationships – between patient and doctor, patient and nurse, and patient and therapist of every discipline.
When the Retreat opened in June 2002, we had over 100 years of experience in treating complex patients within humane, psychotherapeutic, and scientifically informed paradigms at Sheppard Pratt. The Retreat pulled what was best from that tradition. We established a small, private pay unit, free from the pressures of insurance and managed care third parties, working for the best interest of the patient as our only goal. We have grown from a six bed unit to a ten bed unit. After more than seven years of experience, we have found many advantages to the therapeutic intimacy of the small size of the unit, which still allows us to have specially tailored groups and one-on-one treatment for patients who suffer with treatment resistant depression, substance abuse issues, borderline disorders, anxiety disorders, body image issues, and other conditions. As before, all Retreat patients have access to all the consultative specialty services within the Sheppard Pratt Health System.
