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Areas of Expertise: Anxiety

Is anxiety interfering in your child’s ability to be successful at home and at school? Have you found that outpatient treatment is not enough to manage your child’s symptoms? The generalized anxiety program at The LifeLaunch is a residential program run by top clinicians in the field. It combines evidence-based specialty care for anxiety with wraparound support for all aspects of your child’s mental health. Developed and led by OCD and anxiety expert and author, Jon Hershfield, MFT, this program combines intensive, best-practice anxiety treatment with comprehensive, individualized, and top-quality care. 

If your child’s mental health is making it difficult for them to thrive, it is time to consider The LifeLaunch. Investing in the level of care provided at The LifeLaunch could be the key to changing the trajectory of your child’s anxiety—and their life.

What conditions are treated by Sheppard Pratt’s anxiety program at The LifeLaunch?

Who is the anxiety program for?

The LifeLaunch generalized anxiety program is for teens 12-17 who:

  • Have anxiety that would benefit from a higher level of care and attention than is available at the outpatient level.
  • Are struggling with anxiety and a co-occurring disorder
  • Have symptoms of anxiety but need diagnostic clarification

What does The LifeLaunch’s anxiety program offer?  

Anxiety treatment at the LifeLaunch includes:

  • Comprehensive anxiety evaluation
  • Intensive treatment with trained anxiety specialists

Anxiety therapies including exposure and response prevention (ERP), cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and skills-building for handling difficult emotions

  • Individual sessions with a provider or licensed clinician 
  • Specialized treatment for co-occurring conditions
  • 24/7 support
  • Mindfulness training
  • Family therapy
  • Multiple CBT groups, all led by OCD and anxiety specialists

What is different about the residential anxiety program at The LifeLaunch?

The anxiety program at The LifeLaunch provides intensive, best-practice treatment including frequent contact with our expert clinicians and anxiety specialists and a personalized daily schedule that ensures your child is receiving the most appropriate and effective treatment plan for them. 

Teens at The LifeLaunch work one-on-one with our anxiety specialists—not trainees. Program director Jon Hershfield, author of The OCD Workbook for Teens, is a hands-on part of the treatment team, and all specialists were trained by and continue to be supervised by him.

Our team is experienced working with a variety of diagnoses, co-occurring disorders, and complex case histories. We use evidence-based treatment, but not in a cookie-cutter way. We know your child is unique; their treatment plan will be too. 

In addition to the anxiety-specific programming, residents in the anxiety program also participate in The LifeLaunch’s programming for overall improved mental health, including:

  • Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)
  • Yoga, art therapy, and other forms of recreational therapy
  • Academic support
  • Occupational therapy
  • Family therapy, including specific skills training for parents of teens with anxiety 
  • And access to the full continuum of care across Sheppard Pratt, an organization renowned worldwide for its mental health and social services—including specialized expertise in autism spectrum disorder, trauma, eating disorders, mood disorders, and neurological disorders 

Why do our treatments work? 

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) have been proven to be useful for treating anxiety. CBT works by stopping negative thought cycles that create anxiety and fear. CBT helps patients break down problems that initially feel overwhelming into smaller, more manageable parts. By addressing negative thoughts or concerns one at a time, a clinician using CBT can help a patient to prevent their anxiety from “snowballing” and separate negative thoughts and feelings from self-destructive behaviors.

DBT emphasizes accepting troubling thoughts and feelings and finding healthy ways to respond to them. DBT uses dialectical thinking—the idea that two true ideas that are seemingly opposed to one another can exist at the same time. For example, a clinician can use DBT to help a patient accept where they are in the moment, while also cultivating the motivation to change. Using the DBT skills of mindfulness and distress tolerance, patients can learn to experience difficult emotions like anxiety and to improve their capacity to control those emotions and how they express them.

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