The Retreat is a premiere, self funded psychiatric setting operated by the nationally renowned Sheppard Pratt Health System, located in the suburbs of Baltimore, MD.

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.

Because of its success, The Retreat has gradually expanded from six beds to 16 beds, configured as two eight bed units. When we opened in June 2002, we had over 100 years of experience in treating complex patients within humane, psychotherapeutic, and scientifically informed paradigms. 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 only with the goal of what was in the best interest of the patient. After more than four years of experience, we have found advantages to the therapeutic intimacy of the small size of the unit, while 16 patients now allows for us to have more specialty groups 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.