Therapeutic environment
The home-like setting at Newmarket House is an active component of our recovery-orientated approach to treatment. It is designed to provide a supportive therapeutic environment, encourage a shared sense of trust and respect, minimise the risk of institutionalisation, promote autonomy and facilitate the practice of daily life skills that will be important to patients’ sustained recovery.
The open-plan kitchen and dining area where all meals are prepared and patients and staff eat together is designed to normalise the place of food as an aspect of daily life. Our art and music room, where most therapeutic groups are held, is also available to patients at other times to explore their creative interests and express aspects of their identity that may have been overshadowed by their eating disorder. Patients use the living room as a communal space to relax, chat, play games and watch TV together, in addition to its use for post-meal supervision and support, demedicalising this environment.
At different points in their admissions patients share or have their own bedrooms, promoting shared experience and a collective commitment to recovery on the one hand and the develop of independence and individual responsibility on the other. The large garden provides a peaceful setting in which to reflect and connect with nature, as well as being used for groups and parties in the summer months. It also contains our garden room, which offers a calm, quiet location for therapy sessions and the sensory space, which patients can adjust to match their current sensory needs and use to practise their use of self-regulation strategies.
We aim to provide a peaceful, optimistic and inspiring setting. We recognise that the voluntary nature of all admissions to Newmarket House and its non-restrictive environment may be challenging for some patients who are feeling uncertain about whether they can accept help, particularly in the early stages of their admission. However, we work painstakingly to support them against their eating disorder. Rather than expecting patients to come pre-motivated, we work hard to support them in bolstering their sense of themselves and confidence in their ability to challenge their illness. As their treatment progresses, through a variety of occupational and other psychosocial interventions and their engagement with the therapeutic milieu, we help patients access their inspiration for an identity and life beyond their eating disorder.
You provide a rare and homely haven amidst the crisis and chaos which surrounds this terrible illness. Thanks to your patience and persistence our daughter found the strength and confidence to confront and ultimately confound not just her eating disorder but many other challenges. Together with her you have built a new life and hope for the years ahead and restored to us the vibrant, funny character that had been lost for too long to an illness that robs patients, family and friends of so much.