Veritas Collaborative - Adult Hospital

Abbey B.

If you love your child, please do not send them here. I was admitted three times to Veritas over the past five years. It was a slow mental torture. Seconds felt like minutes and no amount of therapy made a lasting impact. If you have suicidal thoughts before coming here, they will somehow become even stronger. I learned little to nothing in groups. Most things that were taught can be found online (DBT Skills, Dietetic Ed, Med Ed, etc). Time spent with your actual team happens once or twice a week, which I think is not enough. I often resorted to laying on hardwood floors instead of furniture because there was not enough. Most of my time was spent eating, going to the bathroom when I could, laying on the hardwood floor, and enduring groups. The only things this place did "right" was weight restore me (which was also one of the worst parts for me) and connect me to a psychiatrist to prescribe meds since finding one otherwise was difficult. I can genuinely say the vast majority of my time at Veritas was a waste of my life. I suffered immeasurably and my parents did too. My parents clung to a mirage of hope that sending me here would fix things; it was so strong that they sent me here not once, but three times. This is not the place to send your child. I did not want to think of this place ever again, but with the trauma of all three times I have been here, it cannot escape my mind. I felt compelled to write this review, despite my poor writing skills, while remembering how unbearable my experience was. I wish I could forget it all and gain the time I spent wasting my life in this hospital back. For patients that have been through here: I am sorry you had to go through this, and I hope if you choose recovery, that you know there are better places than this that are worth your time. EDIT: I realize this is for the adult hospital .. I am referring to the adolescent one in Durham. If the adolescent program is not the best, the adult one is probably no better imo.

AJ Toler

I was admitted to Veritas Collaborative about a year ago and I think it would be beneficial to families interested in this treatment center to share my experience. For the duration of my stay, I engaged in a lot of eating disorder behaviors without any interruption from staff or my therapist. I would hide a lot of food and exercise pretty frequently. It was pretty apparent that I was struggling with these behaviors because it took quite a bit of time for me to get weight restored. My therapist and I met once or twice a week for a total of one hour per week and she was very inexperienced in the field of eating disorders. The majority of my sessions were spent discussing the issues I had with staff and other patients rather than focusing on how to get myself committed to recovery. There were several staff members that were very supportive and helped me more than my own therapist. They didn't help me with my eating disorder, obviously, but I did receive a lot of support for things I was going through during my stay at Veritas. The night staff however was emotionally and occasionally physically abusive. I dreaded every evening when the day shift would leave because I felt unsafe and uncomfortable around most of the night staff. I engaged in a lot of self-harm and was falsely diagnosed with a chronic skin picking disorder, so I never got help for my self-harm. Once I was mostly weight-restored, I was transferred over to the PHP unit despite struggling to complete my meals entirely. To be fair, I stopped going to PHP after a week which was not recommended. I felt unsupported there and utterly miserable, so I refused to go back. I immediately relapsed and lost all of the weight I gained in a matter of weeks. I fell into a deep hole of depression and ultimately had to go back to treatment. I was blessed to have been able to get into Avalon Hills in Northern Utah. It may sound extreme to go across the country for treatment, but my struggles were very intense and this treatment center is highly thought of by most treatment teams. This was the best decision of my life and I was given an immense amount of support and had a wonderful therapist with a history of family-therapy and eating disorder therapy. I wasn't discharged as soon as I was weight-restored and stayed until I was ready to be sent back home. It may sound like I am portraying Avalon Hills as treatment heaven, and it definitely has its faults like all treatment centers, but it truly saved my life. It may sound shocking, but I was incredibly sad to leave the staff and my friends because of how close our relationships were. There is a big difference between the connections I made in Utah versus Durham because there were about 50 girls at a time at Veritas, where as Avalon had a max of 12 girls. I have been struggling for years and the help I received from Avalon has given me the opportunity to change myself for the better. All in all, I don't recommend Veritas Collaborative. Utah may seem like a big commitment if you are from the East Coast, but it is life changing.

Gary Lon

Do not GO There

Abigail Cole

I first want to say that treatment is a privilege and I am grateful that I had access to the levels of care that I did. Many of the Vtas staff both changed and saved my life and I am grateful to those individuals. That being said, I also left Vtas with more trauma than I came in with. Vtas does not treat every patient the same, some being given chance after chance while others being threatened with discharge after making the exact same mistakes. This is especially true when it comes to their use of ng tubes. Some people get to rely on them and have some grace while others are told that they either eat or they get out. This leads to a clear hierarchy of who is “the sickest”. Weight restoration seems to be the only goal and so as soon I was weight restored- I was expected to be completely fine. I told my team again and again that I wasn’t able to keep myself safe, I was relapsing into other mental health behaviors and that I could not maintain what I was doing. They told me that I was eating so I was fine. They really reinforce the narrative of you have to look sick/be physically unstable/be actively engaging in behaviors in order to be sick/valid/cared for. I also felt like no matter what I did, it wasn’t enough. They say progress not perfection but absolutely do not follow that. The TAs taught me more than any session with my therapist. They were the ones who saved my life, not my team. And it is clear that the TAs are not treated fairly by supervisors: they are understaffed and under appreciated. Vtas would not be running without them. THEY are the ones who save us. Even among the TAs there were still some toxic people though. I saw TAs raise their voices at me and other clients a few times. It felt like a lot of the staff in general did not understand that they got to go home at the end of the day. We didn’t. As exhausting as it may be for them to have to “deal” with us for 12 hour shifts, imagine how exhausting it is for us to have to deal with our illness(es) every second of every day. I also struggled a lot with self harm but I was never put on 1/1. I was routinely left by myself despite telling my therapist I couldn’t stay safe. My parents were horrified at the damage when I came home and couldn’t believe that a treatment center would be so negligent. If you need ip, going to Vtas isn’t an awful choice but for res or lower I would recommend looking elsewhere. Especially if you don’t have an ED that presents in a stereotypical way or if you have other comorbid diagnoses (Vtas does not seem to be trauma informed at all). Lastly, I was with the program for 7 months and it was my first time ever seeking treatment for any of my illnesses. In October of 2020, I was dropped from the program with no warning, just simply told not to log onto IOP anymore. I was set to step down the following week but my therapist and Mem just told me to stop coming. They wouldn’t give me a reason, just kept saying, “we don’t think the program is a good fit anymore”. I begged them to let me finish the week so that I could officially step down but they refused. I didn’t even get to say goodbye or get any closure and ended up hospitalized that night bc of it. I found out later that Vtas had diagnosed me with BPD w/out telling me or my family. They just gave me the diagnosis, labeled me as treatment non-compliant and washed their hands of me. It was extremely unprofessional and irresponsible. I am not the only person that Vtas has done this to and I know very few people who have only had to do their program once- If you have to do the program over and over- does the program actually work? You cannot say that EDs are not a choice and then label the survivors as treatment non-compliant. Perhaps ask yourself, is this person non-compliant or are they the ones who know what works for them and what doesn’t? Are they non-compliant or am I abusing my authority and activating their trauma triggers? Are they non-compliant or are they advocating for themselves and my ego can’t handle being told I’m not helping? Vtas has a lot of work to do to improve.