Therapeutic Care

The Road Less Travelled

Welcome to Therapeutic Care

I’m Damien McLellan and I have been working with children and young people in residential care since 1967, using a therapeutic approach. This means being concerned more with offering healing than control, seeing troublesome behaviour mostly as communication and trying to understand and to meet the needs being communicated.

Since 1995 I have also been training foster carers, social care workers and social workers in this approach (see CV).

My plan is to make all the rich material I find useful easily accessible on this website. I also intend to write, in installments, how I have taught this approach, offering the essential theory and skills that carers have found beneficial over the years.

COVID – 19 is putting great pressure on us all, but especially on those of you working directly with children and people in need of care. I wish you well.

Carlow College

This is a link to Carlow College and to the much revised MA in Leadership in Therapeutic Child & Social Care Course. Peter Kieran and I founded the original MA in Therapeutic Child Care Course at Carlow College in 2004. It was closely modeled on the MATCC course developed by Adrian Ward and his colleagues at the University of Reading who generously shared their ground-breaking template with us.