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 therapeutic residential care along mostly psychodynamic therapeutic lines since 1967. Since 1995 I have also been training foster carers, social care workers and social workers in this approach (see CV). A psychodynamic approach mostly seeks to address and work with the causes of the troublesome presenting behaviour rather than merely suppress it.

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.

I would like to offer this website as a forum for all carers, trainers and providers to share ideas and thinking that would promote better outcomes for all those that we are caring for and concerned about.

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.