Our Mission

Ironwood is a residential treatment center committed to helping families in crisis with troubled teens. We trust the teens and families we treat to share our commitment to generating successful, rewarding outcomes. Our aim is to assess and treat the causes of unruly behavior, while providing self-esteem building activities and life-enriching experiences along with academic studies. We strive to reunite youth and their families through clinical therapy, animal therapy, discipline, hard work, and shared experiences in a safe, secure, and therapeutic learning environment.

Our professional, caring staff is committed to helping resident teens adopt positive, proactive behaviors and interpersonal communication skills, and to develop a core set of values including self-discipline, a sense of personal honor, and the courage to accept responsibility for one’s decisions and actions. We develop personalized, individual treatment plans for teens who are admitted to our course correction and self-esteem building program to help them achieve these goals.

Set against the wilderness backdrop of rural Maine's rolling, wooded hills, our residents and their families can expect the respect and empathy to which they are entitled, in an atmosphere of acceptance and genuine interest. The real problems, not the symptoms, are identified and treated with professional clinical techniques. Ironwood's structured and disciplined programs including the highly successful animal-assisted psychotherapy, provides a safe, therapeutic context from which the disengaged youth and their family may reengage at a functional level.

Through adventure-based experiences, teens are taught how to work through conflict for the good of the family; they are challenged to clarify their values and goals; they learn to bond in loving, positive ways. Through individual and group therapies, youth and their families learn more effective ways to communicate with each other and learn to relate to each other in a more understanding, respectful and appreciative manner.