Mountain Youth Academy is a trauma-based residential treatment facility located in the rolling hills of Tennessee. Our treatment center is located 13 miles from the Virginia state border. Mountain Youth Academy exclusively treats children and adolescents, both boys and girls ages 5–17. It is very important for youths that suffer from trauma to seek trauma treatment in order to lead a healthy and happy lifestyle. Our trauma treatment offers individual, group and family trauma therapy as well as other treatment methodologies to help youth deal with traumas they have experienced.

Our mission is to provide mental health and educational services to enhance the quality of life for at-risk youth and their families through service excellence, compassion, integrity and respect.

Mission Statement

Mountain Youth Academy is committed to providing individuals and their families the hope of recovery through an environment conducive to wellness, strength-based programming, and highly competent staff.

Vision Statement

Mountain Youth Academy recognize that people with mental illness and substance use disorders can and do recover. With this in mind, we will lead the transformation of the mental health delivery system by removing barriers, eliminating stigma, collaborating with consumers and their families, and championing hope at every level of care.

Our highly motivated and well trained staff will provide culturally competent services with a constant awareness that recovery is a process that is consumer driven, provider supported and individually unique. The cornerstones of treatment process will be the implementation of an integrated care system that is trauma informed, multi-systemic and empirically based. This treatment will guide individuals to shape and reshape their lives as they define them.

Service delivery practices throughout the continuum of care will help ensure the safety of all individuals in our care by striving to provide the warm and nurturing physical environment conducive to healing.

Our full spectrum of services will utilize outcomes data to derive a ‘best practice’ approach to detect unseen inefficiencies, prioritize opportunities and develop goals for improvement that establish mission-driven benchmarks and provide integration with the facility’s strategic plans.

Our commitment extends to the community as a whole as we endeavor to maximize collaboration with our community partners and have a positive impact on the ever changing needs of the community. We will be recognized as a center for excellence, constantly striving to provide compassionate, comprehensive behavioral healthcare.

Message from Our CEO

Hello Friends of Mountain Youth Academy,

What is unique about Mountain Youth Academy, is that we allow for youth to be transitioned from the community to keep the child safe while they begin the process of addressing their trauma history. Many programs are geared toward placing at-risk youth from the community in order to keep the community safe but our students are those that are vulnerable in the communities. We focus on the trauma that the youth has encountered and how it is affecting their life. This is to say that we work more on addressing what the youth has experienced rather than what they have done. We use an array of services on this journey with them while continuing to support them in their recovery.

Mental health treatment has been subject of great misunderstanding, stigma and parity concerns since its inception. We all recognize that in no reality would a healthy person with a broken bone hope to be prescribed pain medication indefinitely without ever repairing or treating the actual injury yet our society often addresses mental health as only focusing on the symptoms and not the injury. We believe that this is rarely if ever the solution for the youth that we encounter. We are mindful that when students are admitted that they often arrive on numerous medications and to some degree their symptoms are being suppressed rather than resolved. We work to reduce or eliminate these in order to better understand not only the symptoms but also the baselines of the person that they were prior to the trauma, who they currently are and who they want to become.

We recognize and celebrate the resiliency of youth and base their recovery on this strength. As we learn more about the brain we understand the effect of trauma and how to appropriately work to address this injury rather than just the symptoms. We work to heal the brain and address the emotion in order to see more successful individualized goal achievement. This helps the children find their way back to who they want to be rather than proceeding with the injury in an induced “fogged” state that allows them not to experience the trauma as much. The reality is that trauma can be recovered from and that you can find the person that once was lost to trauma. It is a difficult process but the result is undeniable.

We are grateful for the trust that is given to us to treat those in our care and take great comfort in knowing that together we can make a difference for the child, the family, the community, the payer and our other stakeholders.

Best Regards,
Eric Dunkerly, CEO/Managing Director, Mountain Youth Academy

Mountain Youth Academy provides individualized, trauma-focused treatment to boys and girls ages 5–17. We strive to provide mental health and educational services that enhance the quality of life for at-risk youth and their families. See what Mountain Youth Academy can do for you and your family, call us today at 423-727-9898 for a confidential, no-cost assessment. You may also reach us by email at [email protected] or fax at 423-727-9899.