A Collaborative Community to Help Troubled Teens

Kevin speaks to Danny Baucum, Outreach Director at Turning Winds, who shares how he travels the country to coordinate with other professionals and organizations. By working together, they are able to provide families with options to help teens during this critical time in life and get them the help they need.

To learn more about Turning Winds, visit turningwinds.com or call 800-845-1380.

Transcript

 This is what happens when you get to work with the community and share what helps teens thrive. 

Um, and I think that's super important and I think that's why it's more successful.  

Welcome to the Turning Winds podcast. My name is Kevin Zundl. Turning Winds is a full continuum of care for teens who really could benefit from extra support  clinically and academically. 

Today  I speak with Danny Baucum.  He works with others around the country in coordinating care  To help adolescents,  Danny, thank you for your time today.  Tell me a little bit about the importance of collaboration in care for teens. 

Yeah, I think collaboration is, is key in our business and in our industry and in serving these students and these families, I mean, that's.

Basically,  my job is collaborating, knowing when turning winds is, when turning winds is inappropriate for families from a clinical standpoint, from a scholastic standpoint, from a financial standpoint, from uh, uh, maybe a length of time standpoint. I mean, really lots of different kind of aspects to it. And so, Yeah, I mean, you're driving.

I mean, California just left a meeting. I've got to head to another meeting here shortly. Um, that's a huge part of what we're doing. We're out and about and knowing community members, knowing different levels of care. Just this morning, I was helping a family kid for, from a year or so ago, graduated turning winds and unfortunately struggling a little bit more on the SUD side of things these days.

And And so getting him connected with some industry colleagues and professionals that can get him the care and get him really the community that he needs after struggling again with the substance use stuff. So we're out and about I think turning winds being remote and removed. Not being a wilderness, but being a longer term residential, but having that green space to be able to let the stressors of the Instagrams and all those things of the world that really pressure these young people, I think allowing that green space to be transformative and find passions and, and be with professionals who can really move the ball is important, but I also think having supports.

I mean, assimilation back into quote unquote, the real world, but maybe larger cities or larger population centers and knowing the different supports there is super important as well. So yeah, we're, we're constantly, I'm constantly on the road and interacting with these folks is I know you are, and I know a lot of my team isn't.

So , what are examples of situation or organizations or professionals that you're going out meeting with and then coordinating on to get someone care?  

Yeah, shorter term RTCs because the financial picture is different for everybody and getting some care is better than getting zero care, of course. So shorter term RTCs,  transitional. 

Um, some with the housing component, but most don't, especially in the adolescent space. And so PHPs, IOPs met this week with school districts here in California, where Hey, when students are  really not participating in school, they've got a lot of struggles at home, so on and so forth. Hey, how can we collaborate and get students the education that they need? 

There's issues, of course, with all kinds of different care. One of the big issues with shorter term care  is that their schooling piece, and maybe rightfully so, I'm not, like, pointing a figure, but their schooling piece isn't as strong as Turning Wind's, and collaborating with the school districts and assuring and demonstrating how we're a fully licensed, fully accredited school, how students really not only will be able to stay on track, but in most cases Be able to catch up on the schooling front.

And so lots of different care, everything from an outpatient therapist or a psychiatrist or what have you all the way up to IOPs and PHPs and transitional care, living short term residentials, acute stabilization hospitals, really everything. And, and all things 

as a parent. Who's working through some of these things at one point, some of the things in my mind were like, of course, I know.

Turning wins exists and, you know, what it does and what that longer  term care looks like. And what are the outcomes as a result of that? But even just talking to my wife, it's like, oh, I realized that. Okay. They don't know all the options available. So is it do come into situations where they. Just didn't know that they could spend the amount of time at Turning Winds and do that as opposed to just seeing a psychiatrist once a month or something like that. 

Yeah, I mean, you certainly run into it and like one of the biggest questions that I have the privilege of answering for families is even if they find a shorter term place or like well so and so is 90 days or so and so is 60 days, and you're like 180 days or more. And so, Yeah, they, they don't know about the longer term prospect of it.

They're really worried about, uh, especially in the adolescent population, them losing school. And one of the things that I answer is like every study that I've ever seen, the longer you're engaged in a community in care, the greater the outcome is because you have a chance to reinforce, maybe it's not just behavior, but reinforce tools that students then gain and reinforce and practice actually.

Practice and have failures in a safe place and then be able to have the time to maybe basically come for a full circle and then have successes. Um, and I think having failures in a place that's safe, that you can learn from, that you can grow from. I mean, failures is how humans, is how humans learn the best, but then having the time to then see it come full circle and have successes is important.

So.  Yeah, I mean, I run into it all the time where like, Oh, longer term options. I didn't even know that many of those existed. And unfortunately there's not a ton of them. Turning winds is certainly one of them. And, and, and I think we do really good, good care, good work on the longer term side of things. 

That's funny. What immediately came to my head when we're saying, well, this program is a 90 day program. If you look at the common thread with every family that I've spoken to on these podcasts, every alumni, it's that it's what happens after 90 days at Turning Lens. That's when something, the spark goes off and, and they're actually working on themselves in a proactive way.

You're not just trying to wait it out.  

It's true. And I mean, you can white knuckle, uh, for 60 or 90 days. It's a lot harder, especially a teenager, but even young adults or adults, you can white knuckle it for, for a quite, quite a long period of time, but you can't white knuckle it for six months. And so you. 

Circa open up are willing to kind of do that deeper dive. And I think the biggest thing in layman's terms is you're open to the idea of having some failure. Right. Um, and I think that's super important and I think that's why it's more successful to be longer term. I think again, our green space, our remoteness really helps, especially the adolescent population, they are away from all of those stressors that, that quite frankly, generations prior didn't have.

And so they're away from those for an extended period of time. And then when they come back to them, they know kind of what it feels like to not have to be so consumed in these social media platforms that, that they are unfortunately these days. 

Well, thank you and enjoy the rest of the time in California. 

I shall. I shall

If you haven't had a chance yet to listen to some of the other podcasts in this series, I recommend that you check a few of them out. Our last one was with an alumnus who visited the program on campus. After 13 years of graduation and being in the world. I also suggest that you listen to encouraging your team to be a self solver with Carl based as you're learning about all the help that's out there,  it takes nothing  to pick up the phone and call turning winds and talk about your specific situation, 800 845 1380  also know there's a wealth of resources available to you at turningwinds. com.