Online IOP for College Students and Emerging Adults in MA & VT

When the life you want keeps feeling out of reach

For Prospective Patients

Is Riggs Right for Me?

For Families

Is Residential Treatment the Right Next Step?

For Clinicians

When the Outpatient Frame is No Longer Enough

Depression that doesn’t lift. Relationships that don’t work. A life that won’t come together.

The Austen Riggs Center is an open, voluntary residential psychiatric treatment program in Stockbridge, MA, for adults with complex psychiatric difficulties that have persisted despite serious prior treatment.

Some people come after years of outpatient therapy, hospitalizations, or residential treatment that never fully helped. Others come when it becomes clear that a different kind of psychiatric setting is needed.

Riggs begins with a six-week residential evaluation and treatment program that brings together intensive psychodynamic psychotherapy, therapeutic community life, family work, psychological testing, psychiatric assessment, and medication review to understand the whole person—not just the diagnosis.

People Usually Arrive at Riggs from One of Three Positions

Individuals

You may know something is wrong but not know exactly what keeps repeating. Or you may have some sense of the pattern and still not be able to change it. Riggs offers a setting where those patterns can be seen, named, and worked with as they happen.
What sets Riggs apart?

Families

You may have been carrying worry, crisis, cost, and uncertainty for a long time. Riggs works with families not to assign blame, but to understand the whole situation and what might now make change possible.
Is residential treatment the next step?

Referring Clinicians

When a patient has some insight but remains stuck, or when crisis keeps interrupting the work, a residential setting can provide diagnostic clarification, a supportive and engaging community, and a treatment environment strong enough to hold the work.
Information for professionals

Online Information Series: Understanding the Austen Riggs Center Treatment Approach

Join an upcoming online information session to see if Riggs is the right fit for you, a family member, or your patient. Sessions are offered from 5:00-5:50 p.m. (Eastern) on multiple dates throughout the year.

For Prospective Patients & Families

Choosing a residential psychiatric treatment program is a meaningful and often complex decision. These free online sessions are designed for individuals and families who are trying to figure out if residential treatment is the right choice. Our Director of Admissions and Director of Psychological Testing will walk you through how Austen Riggs works, who it tends to help most, and what the process of getting evaluated looks like.

There's no pressure and no commitment. Just an opportunity to learn more and ask what's on your mind.

Learn more and register for an upcoming session.

For Referring Clinicians

These sessions are designed specifically for clinicians and referral partners who want a clearer picture of what Austen Riggs offers, which patients tend to be the best fit, and how the admissions and evaluation process works.

If you're working with someone whose treatment has plateaued, become cyclical, or hasn't held across multiple levels of care, this is a practical opportunity to explore whether a Riggs referral makes clinical sense.

Learn more and register for an online information session.

Admission to the Austen Riggs Center starts with a conversation.

Start with a Conversation

A first call is not a commitment. You, a family member, or a clinician can call to describe the situation, ask questions about our model, cost of treatment, or other things, and begin to consider whether Riggs may be the right setting.

Learn About Admission

Life is harder to get through alone.

Many people who come to Riggs have a painful sense of this loneliness—that even when others are nearby, something makes it hard to reach them, lean on them, or let them actually help. The suffering is real. So is the isolation inside it.

At Riggs, treatment is designed to help patients begin putting words to what has been driving their suffering, understand recurring patterns in relationships and emotional life, and take greater charge of their lives.

Daily life in the therapeutic community is where learning and engagement happen beyond the therapy room—in meetings, relationships, shared responsibilities, conflict, and repair. What emerges in community life can be brought directly into the work.

Riggs changes the conditions under which treatment happens.

There comes a point when the problem is not the amount of treatment, but the conditions under which treatment is taking place.

Riggs changes those conditions by bringing treatment into an open residential psychiatric setting where psychotherapy, community life, family work, and daily responsibility all become part of understanding what has kept a person stuck.

The Activities Program is often particularly valuable—providing structured engagement in work and creative settings where social demands are different, capacities that aren't visible in social situations become apparent, and the person is known for what they can do rather than what they find difficult.

The open treatment setting at the Austen Riggs Center.

An Open, Voluntary Setting

Riggs is not locked, and patients are not managed through behavioral privilege systems. Patients come voluntarily and live with real freedom and real responsibility. That openness is central to treatment. Patterns of withdrawal, dependency, conflict, avoidance, and repair become visible in daily life and can be understood rather than simply controlled.

Austen Riggs Campus

Patients meet four times each week with the same psychiatrist or psychologist throughout treatment at Riggs.

Intensive Psychotherapy with the Same Clinician

Patients meet four times each week with the same psychiatrist or psychologist throughout treatment. The continuity matters. It gives the psychotherapy enough depth and consistency for longstanding emotional and relational patterns to emerge and begin to change.

Treatment Experience

At the Austen Riggs Center, your dedicated multidisciplinary treatment team works with you to develop an individual treatment plan.

A Whole Clinical Team Thinking About the Whole Person

At the end of the six-week evaluation and treatment period, the full clinical team—psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and activities staff—meets in a formal clinical case conference. The concentration of clinical expertise involved in understanding a single patient is unusual in residential psychiatric treatment.

Riggs Staff

Complex Psychiatric Problems We Treat

Many people come to Riggs with more than one diagnosis and a long history of serious prior treatment. Diagnoses help organize care, but they rarely explain the whole difficulty. At Riggs, the question is not only what diagnosis fits? It is also: how did this person come to suffer in this way, what keeps the pattern going, and what capacities can now be developed?

Depression & Depressive Disorders

Bipolar Disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder

Psychotic Disorders Including Schizophrenia

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Anxiety Disorders

Suicide & Suicidal Ideation

Self-Harm

Substance Use*

Riggs Treatment Approach

*Although we don’t offer treatment to people whose substance use disorder (SUD) is active or primary, many of those struggling with mental disorders have co-occurring SUDs.

Hear first-hand from Austen Riggs Center Alumni about their experiences before, during, and after treatment at Riggs.

How Riggs Worked for Me

Riggs might not be the answer for everyone. For Kate, however, the psychodynamic approach and the community experience opened the door to significant personal growth. It was the solution to the problem.

Former Patient Stories

Patient Outcomes & Results

94%

of discharged patients were satisfied with their individual psychotherapy

I attended a recent reunion and felt so proud to be able to bring my family, a family which itself was unthinkable before my time at Riggs. There can be life on the other side of a grueling process."

- Peter G.

Patient Outcomes

96%

of discharged patients developed a clearer understanding about their difficulties

A First Call is Not a Commitment

You do not need to know whether Riggs is the right answer before you call. The first step is a conversation about what has been happening, what has already been tried, and whether this setting may be useful now.

Contact Admissions

800.517.4447

Accreditation

The Austen Riggs Center is accredited by the Joint Commission and licensed by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH). The Center’s Continuing Medical Education Program is accredited by Joint Accreditation for Interprofessional Continuing Education. As a jointly accredited organization, the Austen Riggs Center Inc. is approved to offer continuing education by multiple accrediting boards. The Austen Riggs Center Inc. is also recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0843 and is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0115. Read the full accreditation statement.