Susan Coven

Review of MSA Child and Adolescent Cente...

I found this place to be very dishonest. We were ...

I found this place to be very dishonest. We were told our child would be in group therapy sessions with a licensed therapist for three hours a day. The conversations would be monitored and directed to allow opportunities for the group to develop coping skills to help deal with various issues. Well it turns out that the groups were allowed to break off into various social clicks and self talk, self direct and come up with solutions with no adult or licensed therapist supervision what so ever. So it was the blind leading the blind; which lead to enhancing our child's issues vs. develop into a workable condition.
Here she learned that she didn t have to go to school if she couldn t make it out of bed, she didn t have to deal with working on issues that caused her to enroll in the program. Her stress level has elevated to hives and massive panic attacks. While she no longer self harms, (because we have locked up all material that she could use) she will scratch the hives till they bleed. All conditions that never occurred before MSA. She now believes that she is her diagnosis and not who the person she was prior to the program.
We were told on Tuesdays there were meetings for parents to attend to learn more about how to help our children. In the six week period that we were at MSA we were able to attend two. The parents waited for over a half hour one night before we were told the class was cancelled. This was after the director of the class saw a large group of parents in the waiting room, did not address us, and left the building. I waited three hours to have a parent meeting with my child s councilor and never had the meeting.
When tiring to communicate with the therapist we were forced to leave messages and wait DAYS to hear back.
Every scheduled appointment that we had was a minimum of 30 minutes late. We were never able to oversee a group session with the kids being told that this would provide an unsafe environment for the group. Meaning they would not be able to open up and work in the problem. Now I fear that there was no structure to the groups and a lot of bad information was shared.
When we started the program we were told our co-pay per day would be $20.00. I should have double checked with my insurance because it was in fact $60.00. Which means we are $3,000 in the whole for a program that didn t work.
We a filled out paper work to have her records released to her continuing care providers. No information was ever forwarded. Her current physiatrist in AA county said she has not heard good things about MSA and from what she can tell the program did little to improve my child s situation. Meaning she was no better then when she started MSA. I can say with 100% certainty she is worse.