Online IOP for College Students and Emerging Adults in MA & VT
Is Riggs Right for You?
That question is worth taking seriously. Most people who find their way here have already tried treatment—sometimes for years. Something hasn't been reached. That is not a failure of effort or intelligence. It is a clinical problem that requires a different kind of setting.
Riggs Is an Open, Voluntary Residential Program
You are not managed here. You are expected to engage—in therapy, in the community, and in the daily life of the setting. That engagement—not management—is the treatment.
The question of fit is real, and the admission process is designed to answer it honestly—before any commitment is made.
Who Comes Here: The People Who Find Their Way to Riggs
There is no single presentation. But there is a recognizable situation.
You may have been in therapy for years—good therapy, with a clinician who knows you well. Something still hasn't shifted. The same things keep happening. The same feelings overwhelm you or disappear entirely. The same patterns play out in your relationships, your work, your sense of yourself.
Or you may not have had much treatment at all—but you know that what you've tried hasn't reached what needs to be reached.
Some people arrive after hospitalizations that stabilized a crisis but didn't address what was driving it. Others come because outpatient treatment, however competent, works only on what you bring to the hour—and what actually needs attention happens everywhere else.
When Riggs May Be the Right Fit
- Treatment that hasn't produced lasting change
- Patterns that repeat despite gaining some insight into them
- Depression, trauma, suicidality, or personality difficulties that haven't resolved
- A sense that something important hasn't been found
- Repeated hospitalizations without sustained improvement
- Some curiosity about yourself—however uneven—and willingness to engage
Why Residential Treatment: What Outpatient Treatment Cannot Reach
Outpatient treatment has a structural limitation. The therapist can only work with what you bring to the hour. You may describe your experience; the therapist responds to the description. Symptoms, behaviors, and relational patterns that organize daily life remain largely out of reach—they can be reported but not observed.
You may describe how you withdraw from relationships. Your therapist may understand when it happens and why. But the withdrawal itself—how it occurs, what it communicates, how others respond to it—is not visible in an outpatient office. You gain insight into the pattern, but the setting cannot engage with the pattern as it is lived.
Residential treatment at Riggs addresses this differently. Because you live in the setting, each form of intervention can reach what outpatient treatment cannot. The therapist listens—and observes. What is usually described after the fact becomes available as it happens, and can be understood before it disappears or is explained away. The community reflects patterns back as they occur. In the Activities Program, you're known for who you are, not your diagnosis.
The result is that you gain perspective on what you are struggling with—not only what you can articulate, but what your behavior, relationships, and daily life communicate.
Four Areas of Work, in Relation
One of our core principles, applied to every aspect of treatment is: relationships are central in human life.
Individual Psychotherapy
Four times per week with the same clinician. Patterns of thought, feeling, and expectation emerge here—not only as topics, but in how you experience the relationship itself. Learn more about individual psychotherapy.
Psychopharmacology
Medication when indicated—but integrated with the psychological work, not managed in parallel. How medication is taken up, what it represents, and how it is used are part of the treatment. Learn more about our approach to medication.
The Therapeutic Community
Daily life in an open residential community—meetings, meals, relationships, shared responsibilities, conflict, and repair. What develops here in real relationships becomes part of the work. Learn more about the Therapeutic Community Program.
The Activities Program
Visual arts, theater, woodworking, ceramics, fiber arts, horticulture, the nursery school—real teaching of arts and skills, where you are encountered as a capable person, not a patient. Staff here do not know your clinical history. The work has its own value—and what shows up in these settings often illuminates things therapy alone cannot reach. Learn more about the Activities Program.
A Setting Built on Responsibility
No locked doors. Real expectations. Riggs is an open, voluntary setting. There are no locked doors, no privilege systems, and no external controls on movement. You are not managed here.
This is not a matter of policy alone—it reflects a clinical judgment. The work depends on your capacity, however limited at the outset, to participate in your own treatment: to make use of relationships, to reflect on experience, and to take some responsibility for what you do. External control can interrupt this process—and can repeat the very conditions in which a person's capacity to take charge of their own experience was compromised.
You are expected to engage—with your therapist, with the community, and with the opportunities the setting provides. Difficult states—despair, rage, suicidal thinking—are addressed through relationship rather than coercion. Over time, this strengthens the capacity to manage your own experience rather than relying on external structures to do it for you.
The work is not to remove parts of your experience. It is to understand and use them differently—so they no longer have to operate outside your awareness.
What the Setting Requires
When a person requires a setting in which safety and daily functioning must be externally controlled, this model cannot hold. The admissions process is designed to determine whether this is a workable fit.
Participation
Willingness to attend therapy and participate in community life
Safety
Capacity to manage your own safety in an open setting
Reflection
Some ability to reflect on your experience — however unevenly
Conversation
A working agreement to bring difficult states into the open rather than act on them unilaterally
What This Asks of You: An Open Setting Means Real Responsibility
Riggs is voluntary and open. There are no locked doors, no privilege systems, no external controls managing your behavior. You are free to leave. You are also expected to stay and engage.
That expectation is not incidental. The work depends on your willingness to speak honestly—about what you're experiencing, what you're avoiding, and what is difficult to say. Not perfectly. Not immediately. But genuinely, over time.
This means attending your therapy sessions. Participating in the community—the daily meetings, the groups, the shared life of the setting. Making use of the Activities Program, where you will be known as a student or co-worker, not as a patient. Bringing what happens there back into the therapy room.
It also means tolerating uncertainty. The six-week residential evaluation and treatment unfolds for a reason—you will not know, at the outset, what you will understand by the end. That is part of what the work is.
A Direct Word About Suicidality
If you are living with suicidal thoughts. Many people who come to Riggs are living with chronic suicidal thoughts—sometimes for years. This does not disqualify you. It is one of the most common presentations here.
What Riggs requires is that you be able to work with your safety in the open setting—which means bringing suicidal thoughts and impulses into conversation rather than acting on them unilaterally. This is not a guarantee of safety. It is a commitment to making your inner life available for treatment.
If your safety requires a locked facility right now, Riggs is not the right setting at this moment. The admission process will help you understand whether this is the right fit, right now.
If You Are in Crisis Now
If you are in immediate danger, please call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room.
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day by calling or texting 988.
Once you are safe, the Admissions team is available to talk about whether Riggs is a useful next step.
What the Six-Week Evaluation and Treatment Produces
You complete the six-week residential evaluation and treatment with a shared account of what has been driving the difficulty—and a clear recommendation for what comes next. At the end of the six-week residential evaluation and treatment, you leave with something concrete.
A shared formulation
A clear, honest account of what has been driving the difficulty—developed by the full clinical team who have observed you across every setting: therapy, community, activities, family meetings, and daily life. Not a label. An understanding.
A direct recommendation
Not a vague suggestion—a specific next step based on what the evaluation actually found. Some people return to outpatient treatment with more clarity. Others are referred somewhere better suited. Most choose to stay at Riggs, where the work has already begun.
A different relationship to your experience
Most people leave with a clearer sense of how their mind works—what their symptoms have been communicating, how they function under pressure, and what has organized their difficulties. That understanding is what makes change possible.