The Tervalampi Manor Rehabilitation Centre, maintained by the City of Helsinki Social Services Department, is a 163-place substance-abuse care facility offering quality substance-abuse care services to men, women and families.

The activity of the Tervalampi Manor Rehabilitation Centre is to support clients’ resources for life management and for a substance-free lifestyle. The manor offers opportunities for practising self-supervision, the discussion of issues and a more healthy lifestyle. These goals are supported by a community-based rehabilitation method as well as a caring, accepting and confidential setting.

Rehabilitation services have been built on the basis of clients’ needs. Using various rehabilitation programmes, we ensure that clients’ rehabilitation needs are fulfilled in an appropriate way. Effectiveness surveys strongly indicate that rehabilitation according to the client’s needs and objectives is successful. Positive results are obtained with community-based rehabilitation that also includes individually tailored methods. A good-quality client relationship, a confidential relationship charged on an emotional level, a rekindling of the client’s hopes, positive expectations, and clearly explaining to the client the principles of the rehabilitation methods used have been shown to be particularly important factors in predicting a good outcome. We pay particular attention to these factors in our rehabilitation centre.

Our rehabilitation services are divided according to clients’ needs into three groups, which include seven different rehabilitation programmes. The rehabilitation programmes incorporate various methods that have proved to be effective and these are combined with discussion of issues as well as working together within the community. While in rehabilitation, clients have the right and obligation to participate in decision-making that concerns themselves and their community. By participating in their rehabilitation, clients are training themselves to make decisions towards their rehabilitation and to acquire the resources for a meaningful and substance-free life.

Rehabilitation services developing resources for life management offer rehabilitation with the aid of three different rehabilitation periods:

The Basic period aims to orientate clients into rehabilitation and to motivate them to work towards their goals. After the basic period, clients have an opportunity to continue their rehabilitation in other communities or to continue their substance-abuse rehabilitation in out-patient care.

The rehabilitation period based on group work is a one that encourages clients to act differently and take responsibility. The programme is a six-week long period of intensive rehabilitation consisting of changing themes. The objective is to identify and strengthen those practices that will facilitate a meaningful life.

The rehabilitation period based on work activity strengthens clients’ resources for employment and follow-up rehabilitation. Involvement in rehabilitative working tasks increases clients’ persistence and their capacity to accept responsibility. Clients come to perceive experiences of pleasure and success in terms of work and personal competence as important.

Rehabilitation services aimed at restoring identity encompass drug rehabilitation as well as rehabilitation for women. In both communities, rehabilitation is based on intensive group working.

Drug rehabilitation consists of a gradually proceeding rehabilitation programme, the aim of which is to encourage clients to find new ideas and actions that support a substance-free lifestyle and thereby to achieve a positive, substance-free life. Clients are encouraged to abandon their unfavourable marginal status in society, so that after the rehabilitation period they are able to take responsibility for their own actions as a member of society.

Women’s rehabilitation examines clients’ problems particularly from a female perspective. The resources to resolve substance-abuse problems are created by restoring self-image, self-esteem and female identity

Rehabilitation services developing skills for everyday life encompass family rehabilitation and the rehabilitative accommodation service.

Family rehabilitation explores what opportunities the family and its networks have of guaranteeing secure conditions for the upbringing of the child. During the rehabilitation, families are given support to face the challenges of an everyday life free of substance use. The rehabilitation consists of family and community group sessions. Rehabilitation is intended for families in which the parents’ use of intoxicants causes problems, and support in the challenges of everyday life is needed.

The goal of the rehabilitative accommodation service is to safeguard the resources for an active and meaningful life. The community’s programme has been created to maintain and enhance clients’ physical, psychological and social capacity so that everyday life becomes meaningful. Rehabilitative working activities and joint everyday tasks are facilitated by homely accommodation and a caring atmosphere.

Community-based rehabilitation

Community-based rehabilitation (Therapeutic community, TC-method) is the method guiding all of the rehabilitation centre’s activities. We believe that only by clients’ discussing issues together and by raising both difficult and easy issues can they assess their own and other community members’ modes of behaviour, which can either lead to action that provides support in substance use or to the creation of substance-free operating models.

The basic idea of community-based rehabilitation is mutual respect and the treatment of others as individuals with their own characteristics. We consider the principles of trust, openness, honesty, fairness and equality as well as physical and psychological integrity as prerequisites for the functioning of a safe community. Furthermore, everything that happens in the community must be justifiable with common sense.

Events affecting the everyday life of the community and its members are discussed both in the rehabilitation programmes’ own community meetings and in joint forums of the whole rehabilitation centre. Underlying the discussion of issues is the utilisation of peer support and the objective assessment of phenomena related to problem use of substances.

In terms of the community’s activities, every person is considered to be equally a significant individual needing and deserving help in the same way. Every member of the community produces for joint assessment phenomena and actions which can be comprehensively discussed in a safe environment and which promote the building of operating models that maintain abstinence.

By utilising and applying the community-based rehabilitation method, community members’ interaction skills can be developed, they learn to take responsibility for there own and others’ actions, make decisions and bear responsibility for them, and increase understanding of issues that happen in the environment by studying various perspectives. A safe environment facilitates a meaningful, abstinent life precisely when it is needed.

Activities

All rehabilitation programmes include a range of activities. The objective of substance-abuse rehabilitation is to offer clients opportunities to rebuild their own lives and to facilitate the experience of substance-free living in their lives after the rehabilitation period. During the rehabilitation period, clients are provided with a safe environment for learning unfamiliar activities from which it is possible to obtain meaningful experiences while being sober.

Our view is that clients in substance-abuse rehabilitation must engage in new activities and do things other than those to which they have previously been accustomed. Accordingly, experiences of living a substance-free everyday life are reinforced and clients are able to make useful choices for themselves independently in their own lives also after the rehabilitation period ends.
The substance-free activities practiced during the rehabilitation period may focus on issues taken from a working life perspective or on substance-free leisure-time activity perceived to be rehabilitative.

The centre has long traditions of rehabilitative work activity. Substance-abuse rehabilitees participate in rehabilitative work activity supervised by professional staff according to their own abilities and needs. The various rehabilitative work activity points include food services, a garden, a basket workshop, technical maintenance, maintaining the area of the centre and its buildings, creative activity, a laundry, cleaning work, stand-by duty services and the Toverikunta cafeteria.
Rehabilitative work activity increases the substance-abuse rehabilitees’ interaction skills and ability to bear responsibility. Through the experiences of success provided by work, self-esteem grows and clients learn to give and receive feedback. Rehabilitative work activity supports and improves clients’ physical, psychological and social prerequisites and promotes the maintenance of working capacity.

Alongside rehabilitative work activity, we have developed rehabilitative leisure-time activity, and particularly fishing and wilderness rehabilitation is actively pursued and developed within the centre.
The rehabilitation centre is located in a beautiful manor setting surrounded by unspoilt nature, close to the Nuuksio National Park. All of the manor’s rehabilitation programmes make use of the opportunities offered by nature to enjoy substance-free leisure time and discover new and experiential activities as an alternative to ordinary routines.

Through fishing and wilderness rehabilitation, those with substance-abuse problems are given the opportunity to spend a meaningful and healthy leisure time while sober, by taking advantage of the resources that nature offers. This form of activity has been developed based on the principles of recreational fishing and wilderness hiking, so that substance-free experiences may also become part of clients’ leisure time after the rehabilitation period.
Such activities are employed to teach fishing and wilderness hiking skills, everyman’s rights and the different elements of nature pursuits. What is learned is assessed from a substance-free and rehabilitative perspective and an attempt is made to find for the client meaningful ways of spending an abstinent life close to nature.
The most significant elements of fishing and wilderness rehabilitation are considered to be the experience itself, the learning of new things, the evaluation of life values and the examination of substance-free leisure pursuits.

In addition to rehabilitative work activity and fishing and wilderness rehabilitation, clients also learn in the rehabilitation centre to embrace a substance-free everyday life through many other kinds of activities. The centre’s rehabilitation programme includes, for example, outdoor pursuits, exercise, creative activity and common everyday chores.

The objective of our services is to encourage the client to see the possibility and meaningfulness of a substance-free life. Changing life habits and embracing a substance-free life are facilitated by teaching new modes of behaviour as well as by participating in a rehabilitation programme.