WNPC Phoenix Youth and Therapy Spaces
The Youth Lounge, Group Therapy, and Music and Creative Therapy spaces at Doc Weston's West Side serve the youngest and most culturally diverse patient population in the WNPC network.
The Youth Lounge connects teenagers from seven or more cultural communities through the shared experience of chronic illness -- an Iraqi teenager with epilepsy, a Somali teenager with chronic pain, a Mexican-American teenager with POTS, a Burmese teenager with a developmental neurological condition, finding each other in a lounge in Maryvale and discovering that their medical experiences have more in common than their nationalities. The peer connections cross every cultural and linguistic boundary, mediated by the universal language of being fifteen and sick and tired of explaining your condition to people who do not understand.
Group therapy adds refugee-specific programming: trauma processing groups for patients whose chronic conditions intersect with war and displacement trauma, groups addressing the particular stress of navigating chronic illness as an immigrant or refugee in a system designed for people who were born here, and cross-cultural grief processing that holds space for mourning traditions from seven different cultures.
The music therapy studio includes instruments from each community's musical tradition -- oud and darbuka from the Iraqi community, Burmese harp, drums from multiple African traditions, guitar and piano from the Western tradition. A patient can make music in their tradition, and the recording capability allows them to take something home.
Related Entries¶
- WNPC Phoenix
- WNPC Baltimore -- Youth Lounge
- WNPC Baltimore -- Group Therapy Rooms
- WNPC Baltimore -- Music and Creative Therapy Room