Austen Riggs Center (ARC)

The Austen Riggs Center is a therapeutic community, open psychiatric hospital, and center for education and research, promoting resilience and self-direction in adults (18+) with complex psychiatric problems.

They specialize in the long-term residential treatment of psychiatric disorders with intensive psychodynamic psychotherapy and a full range of psychiatric services, offered in a completely voluntary continuum of care that includes inpatient, residential, and day-treatment services.

Mission:
The Austen Riggs Center is a vital therapeutic community, open psychiatric hospital, and institute for education and research. Their mission is to promote resilience and self-direction in those with complex psychiatric problems -- to help people take charge of their lives. Their work is grounded in the conviction that an individual's problems are inherently meaningful, that such problems are best understood in a social context, and that treatment leads to a more fulfilling life when the sources of suffering are addressed.

Vision:
In an increasingly complex and fragmented world, the dignity of the individual, the importance of human relationships and the centrality of a sense of community are more difficult to find. The focus and traditions of the Austen Riggs Center orient the staff to help troubled patients meet these and other rapidly changing psychological challenges of contemporary society. They will continually build on our distinguished past, helping our patients develop personal competence in a completely open setting that emphasizes the individual’s capacity to face and take responsibility for his or her life—past, present, and future. They nurture our patients’ strengths, foster their social functioning and encourage family collaboration. Through our research and training programs, they educate professionals in our psychodynamic perspective, applying this learning to a broad range of psychosocial problems. Finally, in this time of diminishing mental health benefits, they will continue to develop cost-effective treatment settings that focus on individual psychotherapy, community living and that attend to resource limitations as both reality to deal with and metaphor for other limits and losses.