Mississippi Therapeutic Boarding School for Girls

Therapeutic Boarding School for girls from Mississippi. We serve students from all over the southeast and even have enrolled students from 5 countries.

The Evangelhouse therapeutic boarding school was established in 1995 to serve Christian families with a quality residential treatment option for troubled teen girls.  In its quest to do so, Evangelhouse pioneered a treatment model that blends licensed behavioral healthcare with the structure of a traditional Christian boarding school.  Since then, it has evolved to become the premier non-denominational Christian option in the marketplace of high-quality teen residential treatment centers.

At Evangelhouse, we get so many girls from Mississippi that we created this page for Mississippi families looking for a Christian all-girls boarding school. Girls in large cities like Jackson, Gulfport, and Southaven face unique mental health challenges. Located in Louisana, we serve girls from Mississippi and across the US.

The Evangelhouse Community

The unique setting at Evangelhouse provides a safe community that we believe allows our students to grow and study. In our community, we eliminate many of the outside world’s stressors that can hinder our residents from performing well academically and feeling well emotionally. Many of the stressors in our outside world may create overwhelming situations for our teens that are difficult to cope with. In the interest of fostering beneficial change in our teenage girls, we help them to develop coping strategies. 

Milieu Therapy at Evangelhouse

The main goal of Milieu treatment programming is to eliminate the stressors that can trigger negative emotions from our teenage residents. In turn, when we achieve de-risking of our residents, we produce a therapeutic setting.  Under the protection of a controlled therapeutic setting, our residents are able to develop new coping mechanisms. These new coping mechanisms become their personal set of tools to better cope with and understand the world. As our residents become more familiar with the routine at Evangelhouse, their ability to feel safe increases. Likewise, in a mutually safe environment, the peer group is able to build trust and make great progress in promoting emotional growth within each individual.

There are many advantages to participating in Milieu therapy. One advantage is that our teenagers learn to accept responsibility for their own actions. Another advantage is that they learn how to open up and disclose their difficulties. Our peer group receives regular feedback during therapy and this allows our residents to observe how their actions affect the community. This therapy setting offers them time to process and reflect on the consequences of the actions or decisions they have made in the past and how they can improve moving forward. 

At Evangelhouse, our residents will participate in milieu therapy and gain coping skills that will help them in the real world.

Mississippi Teen Statistics

•   Rates of youth depression in Mississippi increased from 8.5% in 2011 to 11.1% in 2014.
•   Even with severe depression, 80% of youth in Mississippi are left with no or insufficient treatment
•   21% of youth (12-17) in the U.S. experience a severe mental health disorder at some time in their life.
•   In Mississippi, approximately 50% of girls age 14 and older with a mental illness drop out of high school.
•   One out of five girls ages twelve to seventeen had experienced major depression within the last year.
•   8.9 percent of teen girls experiment with drugs every month.
•   16.4 percent of teen girls abuse alcohol.
•   9.5 percent of teen girls engage in binge drinking.
•   10.3% of girls aged 3-17 years (approximately 4.4 million) have diagnosed anxiety or depression. Diagnoses of depression and anxiety in girls are more common with increased age.

If your daughter from Mississippi needs to attend an all girls therapeutic boarding school, please contact us today. You can find resources on mental health resources in Mississippi here: http://www.dmh.ms.gov/

OUR THERAPEUTIC BOARDING SCHOOL COMPONENTS:

When to Choose a Therapeutic Boarding School for Girls

Many families that enroll their daughters at Evangelhouse have already sought outpatient therapy. However, outpatient therapy is limited in scope. A therapist has to be 100% reliant on what a child says in therapy to be an accurate portrayal of what is going on in real life. At Evangelhouse, therapists and students alike interact eating meals together and attending activities. We can see how your daughter is interacting with peers and coping with her frustrations in real-time. 

So what makes therapy at Evangelhouse unique? While general therapy can help, our therapeutic boarding school focuses on the most effective methods to help troubled girls. These therapies can include equine therapy, CBT, DBT, group sessions, individual sessions, and family sessions. 

Further, we can help our students try out new coping skills in the moment. This “in the moment” therapy has many advantages over outpatient therapy. The best time to practice a coping skill is when you really need to cope, not hours or even days later in a therapist’s office when emotions have returned to normal. 

There are several reasons why people choose therapeutic boarding schools like Evangelhouse over other options. A positive peer group and a support structure usually help troubled girls make greater progress than a peer group that has a history of negative or harmful behaviors. With staff present 24/7, you can rest assured that your daughter will be supervised and will receive multiple positive, therapeutic interactions every day. 

Evangelhouse Christian Academy has been assisting families just like yours for many years. You will take an active role in your family’s recovery. Well-trained professionals and loving therapists of Evangelhouse will be there for you and your family. While it can be painful for parents to think about missing their child, keeping a teen girl in their existing circle of friends and influences can be more painful.

Teens and Stress

Teenagers in the modern era face difficulties that their grandparents could have never imagined. Electronic media had compounded many of the “typical teen” conflicts that parents and teens normally encounter. Other issues, like issues with authority and control, are as old as time.

At Evangelhouse Christian Academy, we approach treatment knowing that teens’ interactions with their classmates and romantic interests have changed. Many of the issues we see from anxiety to acting out are rooted in screens or as a result of the widespread use of digital communication. 

During treatment, we seek to address a student’s potential lack of crucial interpersonal communication skills such as the ability to recognize social cues. Social skill is a common topic in our therapeutic environment. A lot of the anxiety and stress our students face over socialization can be traced back to excessive use of technology. 

At Evangelhouse Christian Academy, girls learn how to interact without the use of screens. We teach our girls how to manage their social media and texting habits. In insight-oriented therapy, they learn how they consume media, and how media can influence how they communicate, date, learn, sleep, and more.

Our girls focus on the present because they don’t have constant access to the internet. With an absence of digital distractions, girls at Evangelhouse Christian Academy face the issues that led them to our therapeutic community. 

To help combat these stressors, our therapists use:

— Group therapy sessions to develop insight into what is causing stress and to teach techniques to reduce stress. Group therapy sessions are led by a qualified treatment professional. 

— CBT- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT sessions are led by a licensed therapist.

— DBT- Dialectical Behavior Therapy. DBT sessions are led by a licensed therapist.

— Homework assignments to support therapy outside of sessions

— Family therapy to prepare the student for a successful transition back to the home environment.

Girls-Only Therapeutic Academy Option for Christian Families from Mississippi

Troubled Teen girls from all over the world come to the Evangelhouse Christian Academy to recuperate. Every aspect of the campus was chosen to promote recovery.

We have many on-campus activities from sports to horseback riding. Evangelhouse Christian Academy strikes the ideal balance between seclusion and accessibility. Our girls and their families have access to a variety of rehabilitative and recreational activities on a private and secure campus. The girls will have the opportunity to gain stability before participating in off-campus activities.

With supervision, students experience the social atmosphere, group therapeutic process, and spiritual tone of campus life. We nurture a positive peer culture that emphasizes social responsibility, accountability, and leadership. The staff leads weekly interactive small-group meetings to teach students character development within their current social interactions. Here students learn relevant ways to apply biblical teachings to their actions. As students progress, they learn to look beyond themselves to provide encouragement and support for others.

Students participate in a variety of positive peer culture development activities including:

• Biblical character development
• Discipleship small group meetings
• Leadership training
• Student council
• Weekly zone group staff feedback

If you have any questions about our approach to therapy for girls, please call us at 1-800-924-4012 or visit our contact page to receive more information.