Therapeutic Foster Home Homepage

Welcome to this site written by Filip Marceron. It describes the project of a therapeutic foster home designed to cure some children with special needs and chronic conditions when the cause of their disabilities, illnesses or disturbances is likely to be emotional, i.e. repressed emotions as a consequence of having been abused (called psychogenic disorders or illnesses).

Conceived for a rural location, it is based on milieu therapy, psychosomatics and psychoanalysis, and is relevant for

- children with anorexia (difficulty to eat)

-children with asthma

- children with autism

- children with bipolar disorder

- children with cancer (all kinds : brain tumor, leukemia...)

- children with diabetes

- children with divergent eyes

- children with epilepsy (seizures)

- children with mental retardation (when not genetic)

- children with migraines (headaches)

- children with obesity

- children with schizophrenia (psychosis),

- children with chronic pain

and generally any illness or disturbance

1/ with unknown cause, and

2/ without a medical cure, hence called incurable.

Then it is possible to suspect that some repressed emotions in the young sufferer might be the cause, allowing to hope that such children could be curable by milieu therapy.

Filip Marceron is a member of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry

www.psychintegrity.org

That purpose includes advocacy for children's right to be cured by milieu therapy (which is a non-medical residential treatment) when medical treatments led to no cure, as typically those conditions are said to be with no medical cure and are of unknown cause(s).

This project is not in practice because the founder is too old to continue trying to create it.

Contact : Filip Marceron, founder (French citizen, speaks english)

filip_marceron2003@yahoo.com

Vocabulary used here :

Therapeutic Milieu : definition

means a place where milieu therapy is practiced, where everything is conceived to help the suffering children recover, including the physical location, how the place is made, the attitudes of the team toward the children, the protocol for visitors, the arrangements for activities outside of the place, the food proposed to the children.

No feature is too small to consider as it can be highly significant for a given child and thus highly efficient for that child's cure if managed well. And also anything that can make the children simply feel better to regain positive dynamics in themselves.

As a whole, children's needs have priority on any other consideration.

Bruno Bettelheim (please see the Books page) and other therapists at the end of WW2 created the concept of milieu therapy in the US, after having personally experienced surviving some time in Nazi Germany concentration camps and having seen there that people when submitted to extreme adverse conditions like daily risk of being killed, became mentally insane or physically ill because the permanent stresses were too much to bear in a situation where there was no possibility to fight back, protect oneself or escape. Those therapists then thought that if an extremely bad environment could turn healthy persons sick and insane, then an extremely good environment could restore sick and insane persons to health.

Many psychotherapy practices for children and adults are located downtown : this is a hindrance for the patients ' ab-reactions even if the next door businesses are aware of the need for such occurrences as part of the curing process. Their tolerance is limited by the necessity for them to run their businesses in a decent environment : high screams, yells and loud cries then can not go beyond a limit, which is contrary to the conditions needed for children and adult patients ' actual curing.

Pronoun creation "ce" :

To avoid that the male pronoun "he" be used generally for a person of either gender male or female, we propose instead to use "ce". Thus here "ce" means a male or female person indifferently, and "ceself" means as well "herself" or "himself" when the gender of the person does not matter. Then "he" here will

always be used only for a boy or a man.

Please take "ce" as an equivalent for "s/he" as well as for "him/her". And please take "ces" as an equivalent for "his" or "her" when the gender of the person spoken of does not matter.

Assistants : definition : means the adults who choose to work along such lines, they assist the children along their struggle to recover.

Non-directivity : definition : means that the therapeutic process is not under adults' control but appear spontaneously in each child when relationships are good enough. Assistants must remain in a position of support and let the children lead all the way the path to their recovery.

All stories and examples quoted on this website are true.

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"We don't know yet how the world would be if children were raised free from humiliations and treated with respect by their parents and fully as human beings right from the beginning." (Alice Miller's book : For Your Own Good, Adolf Hitler had been an abused child).

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A French language version of this site is available as a book under the title

"Le droit de choisir, le droit de guérir" :

- paper format : for sale at www.edilivre.com

- ePub format : for sale on iBookstore (the iBooks app needs be installed).

Any part or any page of this website can be reproduced and used free of any restrictions and conditions.

A version in french of this website is available at :

https://sites.google.com/site/therapiedemilieupourenfants/

rev. 2017