• Yellowbrick is a national center of excellence specializing in the treatment of troubled emerging adults and their families. Yellowbrick is distinguished by the fact that treatment is delivered directly, and supervised daily by a team of expert, senior, full-time Yellowbrick professionals with decades of combined experience as clinicians, teachers, and program executives. This is integrated with a community process among peers that is a powerful vehicle for supportively confronting the necessity for change.
• Yellowbrick’s model of treatment evolves out of the latest research in neuroscience, developmental studies of emerging adulthood and clinical outcome studies. Yellowbrick’s treatment model has been developed in consultation with internationally recognized premier clinician-scholars. Assessment and treatment are in-depth but also practical. It is integrated into a coherent model for lasting change.
• The Residence and Supported Apartment Program each offer a developmental platform for those emerging adults who cannot move forward living at home, on campus, or in an independent apartment. Both programs offer 24/7 skilled support and membership in the Yellowbrick community. The intensity of programming and target goals differ within the residence and supported apartment program. Both provide a supportive adult presence which respects demonstrated effective autonomy, individualized programming for further development of life strategy skills, career and education services and productive activity in the Evanston community.
• Yellowbrick utilizes neuroscience research to guide the pattern, rhythm and content of treatment. Attention is paid to developing normal nutrition and sleep-wake patterns. Early morning interventions consist of individual support for developing effective self-organizational skills and daily-living/working patterns. Initial groups are designed for introducing gradual arousal, mind-body integration and a structured, goal-oriented, cognitive approach to the day. As the program proceeds, groups and interventions become more interpersonally and emotionally intense. Later there are opportunities to process and metabolize emotions and understand their personal meaning and impact on functioning. Evenings and weekends provide skilled support for developing the capacity to structure individual time, sustain inner vitality, socialize and play.
• Treatment occurs within the context of deep, often intense, relationships with professionals, peers and families within the Yellowbrick community. Neuroscience research demonstrates that effective emotional enagagement in relationships promotes new learning and functioning, especially in the emotion-regulating capacities of emerging adults. This has been demonstrated by neuroimaging studies showing changes in actual brain networking.
• Yellowbrick treatment occurs in “real-time.” This is akin to “strike while the iron is hot.” The brain is best positioned for learning when there is a live situation with real responsibility and choices to make. Emerging adults at Yellowbrick retain their capacity to make symptomatic choices in response to their emotional experience. Treatment relationships provide a container within which they can better hold their tensions and be supported towards self-affirming responses. The primary purpose of staff presence is not to assume responsibility for preventing symptomatic behaviors but to be vitally present to guide new patterns of choice and experience. This is consistent with the neuroscience on new learning and targets the development of core competence in life skills.
• Yellowbrick recognizes the complex transition occurring in the families of emerging adults. Questions as to privacy, boundaries, autonomy and responsibility are confusing, especially in the face of at-risk behaviors. Families at Yellowbrick are involved in the assessment process and prescriptively throughout treatment. Yellowbrick’s family model emphasizes an evolution towards adult inter-dependence balancing autonomy with connectedness. Emerging adults and families learn new ways of relating and communicating rather than revisiting family traumas.
• Yellowbrick’s culture and philosophy emphasizes a strength-based approach leading to competence—individuals are more than their illness.  A successful outcome means identifying, eliciting and collaboratively actualizing authentic core strengths, talents, goals, interests and motivation.
• Traditional and alternative interventions including psychiatric medicine, new findings from neurobiology, integrative medicine, evidence-based forms of individual therapy and small and large group psychotherapy, competence-based approaches, and family workshops.
• Yellowbrick Foundation has developed an extensive, unique clinical research program designed to study emerging adult development and treatment as well as track outcome. Yellowbrick’s clinical research professionals are on the faculty of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Medicine.

It can be difficult for professionals, parents and young adults to clearly distinguish the various programs available. The following chart is developed to aid in making comparisons. For your convenience you may download a pdf file.