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Specialized Assessment & Treatment
for Emerging Adults and their Families

Our Services

Yellowbrick’s mission is to serve as the national leader and resource for the psychiatric treatment of emerging adults. Yellowbrick has created a developmentally specialized, research-based clinical model that integrates cutting-edge findings from neuroscience, innovative psychotherapies, strength-based life skills and wellness medicine. Treatment is provided across all diagnoses and levels of care from supported apartments through PHP, IOP, Outpatient and wrap-around supportive services.

Comprehensive Assessments

Yellowbrick recognizes that individuals and families are best served when offered options that respond to their clinical, personal and financial context. Therefore Yellowbrick provides several choices for assessment and pathways for treatment.

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The Residence

The Residence offers around the clock support and membership in the Yellowbrick community while emerging adults work within The Life Strategies Program (LSP) and productive activity (school, work, community service) within Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. The Residence offers these individuals a meaningful and effective context for personal growth by challenging them with the tasks of independent living while simultaneously providing on an outpatient basis intensive, expert professional resources beyond those available even in most inpatient hospital settings. The Residence is a “Step in and Step Through”, not a Step Down settings.

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Minding the Brain & Life Strategies

Yellowbrick’s developmental neurobiological model integrates leading edge findings from neuroscience, developmental psychology, evidence-based psychotherapies, and wellness medicine to treat complex, and often treatment- resistant problems in emerging adults. Findings from developmental neuroscience indicate that emerging adult brains are more neuroplastic and capable of enduring change than at any other time other than conception through the first three years of life.

Research further indicates that the old adage, “experience is the best teacher” is true. The optimal conditions for brain healing and new learning require active engagement of those brain systems that are under-developed and deregulated in order to achieve true lasting change. That is why at Yellowbrick we have a dual synergistic model: Heal the Brain, by improving its neuroplasticity, inter-connections and self-regulation, while we Transform Lives through building cognitive, emotional, relational and life skills in the real world, in real time.

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Reward Alternative Pathways (RAP) for Substance Use Disorders

This program includes expert assessment of each individual’s substance-related issues; development of individually tailored relapse prevention plans; individual sessions with the Substance Abuse Specialist; support for attending 12 Step meetings in the Evanston and Chicago community; and, three hours a week of group programming to educate and to assist members in gaining and maintaining sobriety.

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Trauma Recovery Program

The Trauma Recovery Program at Yellowbrick is rooted in the understanding that traumatic experience affects not only our minds, emotions, and systems of belief but also the body. What are adaptive survival responses under threat; fight, flight, or freeze/collapse, become symptoms. The Trauma Recovery Program addresses the neurobiological and psychological effects of a hyperactivated nervous system and trauma-related attachment patterns from both a mind and body focus with the ultimate goal of integration of the fragmented self-states that trauma creates.

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Soma Self/Eating Disorders Program

Yellowbrick works with individuals who have eating disorders and a broad range of challenges in the relationship between their body and self-experience within the Soma-Self program. Patients with histories of eating disorders, trauma, chronic pain, physical injury, chronic illnesses such as Chrohn’s Disease or asthma, or having survived cancer, etc., all share a challenging relationship to their bodies which have often been experienced as having betrayed, disappointed or otherwise failed them. Yellowbrick offers a Soma-Self IOP in addition to a comprehensive array of personalized Professional Services to eating disorders and Soma-Self young adults.

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Specialized Treatment for Adopted Young Adults

Yellowbrick’s emphasis working with emerging or young adults with early developmental trauma has particular implications for working with those who are adopted. They may have experienced not only early losses or attachment difficulties but also problems in interpersonal relationships, conflict with their parents that is often displaced, various kinds of learning problems, associated medical or neurological problems, and struggles to learn and understand the complexities of their personal identity.

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Extreme Experiences

Yellowbrick offers services which appreciate the fears and concerns associated with the onset of psychosis in emerging adulthood.Extreme Experiences is organized to address these apprehensions amongst both emerging adults and their families. Following medical and neuroimaging workups to rule out non-psychiatric causes for the onset of psychosis, services target the key elements associated with deterioration in the research literature and clinical experience working with early onset psychosis. The good news is that research demonstrates that early and intense targeted interventions can affect the life-long trajectory of these conditions.

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Synchrony Brain Health®

Yellowbrick offers neuroscience technologies and neuromodulation services through an agreement with sister company Synchrony Brain Health.

Services include Deep TMS, Neurofeedback, Cognitive Enhancement, Mindfulness & Meditation Training, Yoga and Mind-Body Integration, Holistic Nutrition, Genetic analysis for medication consultation, and support for other self-directed healing practices.

These services can provide relief for depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD/trauma, insomnia, TBI, post-Covid brain fog and other conditions.

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Family Services

The family treatment model developed at Yellowbrick incorporates both foundational principles and contemporary discoveries and insights into the neurobiological, developmental and systemic processes that govern change and adaptation in families.

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Yellow Brick

Yellowbrick is proud to present a wealth of leading-edge books and papers on the treatment of emotional, developmental and psychological challenges of the emerging adult. Books are available through Amazon. Papers appear in their entirety and include pdf files for download. Visit the Yellowbrick Library.

Take the Next Step

Yellowbrick collaborates with adolescents and emerging adults, ages 16-30's, their families and participating professionals toward the development and implementation of a strategic “Life Plan.” An integrative, multi-specialty consultation clarifies strengths, limitations, and risks, and defines motivations, goals and choices.

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    Real-Time Treatment for Emerging Adults and their Families

    Bipolar Disorder

    A mental health condition that’s characterized by intense shifts in mood including both manic and depressive episodes.

    Major Depressive Disorder

    People living with Major Depressive Disorder, or MDD, experience episodes of depression and sadness that are debilitating to daily life.

    Anxiety Disorders

    Those living with anxiety disorders experience high levels of anxiety and stress that interfere negatively with daily life.

    Thought Disorder

    A mental health issue in which a person’s cognitive function is impaired, resulting in symptoms like experiencing challenges with conducting speech, reading and writing, and behavior.

    Personality Disorders

    Mental health disorders that negatively affect a person’s behaviors, thought patterns, and function. People diagnosed with these disorders experience challenges with managing relationships and understanding various situations.

    PTSD

    Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental health condition that people can develop as a result of experiencing traumatic situations, characterized by symptoms including flashbacks, avoidance behaviors, and more.

    ADHD

    A mental health condition that is characterized by specific symptoms of forgetfulness and lack of concentration, which makes it challenging to complete necessary tasks.

    Eating Disorders

    Mental health conditions that interfere with a person’s eating habits, thought patterns, and behaviors in negative ways.

    OCD

    A mental health disorder diagnosable with the DSM-5 that is characterized by both obsessions and compulsive behaviors.