Welcome

Veritas has been undergoing exciting changes this past year to enhance the quality of services we provide and to address the evolving needs of the populations we serve. Veritas understands how powerfully addiction impacts not only the individual, but also the family and the community.

Veritas’ goal is simple: heal the individual, not just the symptoms, and make the family whole again.

Positive connections heal. Veritas offers residences for recovering substance abusers and for recovering women and their young babies. We reunite children in the foster care system with recovering parents who have become responsible members of the community. Positive family connections are re-established. Dangerous cycles are broken.

Veritas offers treatment programs, job training, continued education, vocational skills, and ongoing individual and family support for healthy re-entry into the community.

Veritas saves lives and saves tax payer dollars. The Legal Action Center’s 2009 study of the financial repercussions of Drug Law Reform reports that New York saves $42,168 a year for every person who is charged with a second felony drug offense and diverted from prison to community-based treatment. Everyone benefits.

Veritas' admissions office receives an average of 100 calls a week from the District Attorney’s office, homeless shelters, the New York City Administration for Children Services [ACS], hospitals, other substance abuse programs, social service agencies, family members and people in the local community.

We hear from people in trouble: men and women who have lost everything, families in despair, parents worried about their children's futures. Their children are in the foster care system. Unemployment, domestic, sexual and physical abuse, prostitution and crime are common components to their struggle.

Veritas’ Treatment Programs:

Trauma group therapy, drug education and relapse prevention, residential and outpatient family counseling, onsite child care, parenting skills training, continued education and vocational counseling, job training and work readiness preparation, VESID referrals, addiction prevention programs for client families and middle school students, and medically assisted services including holistic treatment. Veritas keeps families together and keeps children out of foster care.

Residential Programs

Lucie Rudd House, Barryville, NY

Residential treatment for over 160 men and women age 16 or older starts at Rudd House on 100 acres in rural Sullivan County, two hours north of NYC. For six to nine months this becomes their home. They confront their addictions, accumulate "clean time" and prepare for a responsible, clean and sober life. Rudd House is known as a “pressure cooker” where men and women must learn in a short time the life skills they failed to learn growing up...or forgot at the onset of their addictions.

In an emotionally rigorous process with the help of our excellent professional staff, Rudd House residents replace addictive behaviors and self-loathing with openness, trust, responsibility and self-regard. Behavior change is the focus of the first phase of treatment. Next, residents learn to communicate more effectively, to handle problems and manage responsibilities more skillfully, to socialize more appropriately. The focus of the final phase is to understand oneself and prepare for re-entry at Veritas' Harlem based Re-Entry program. Residents accomplish so much during their months at Rudd House: They become part of a family of peers and commit to daily demands and discipline with group and individual therapy, seminars, workshops, meetings, GED and vocational classes and work assignments, all balanced with healthy recreation.

Re-Entry House, Manhattan, NY

At the Re-Entry House in upper Manhattan, residents complete the treatment process begun upstate at Rudd House.

The emphasis at Re-Entry is preparation to live independently and to gain the skills they need for a clean and sober, self-sufficient life. Residents get the help they need to successfully return to vital roles in their family and community during a six to twelve month stay.

Most men who complete the Veritas program reunite with their children. Virtually all of the women regain custody of their children from the foster care system.

The majority of the young men and women who graduate from Veritas stay drug and alcohol free, stay employed and blend into the community. They are models of what is possible.

To complete treatment, residents work towards three objectives:

Establish a support network that will encourage their continued sober living.
Wherever possible, find an apartment, further their education and earn a high school diploma through the GED program, obtain a job and prepare for independent living and open a bank account.
Whenever possible, re-establish contact with family members and address unresolved family issues that affected their addictions.

The Young Mothers, Infants & Toddlers Program (YMP), Manhattan, NY

The Young Mothers, Infants & Toddlers Program houses over 40 formerly homeless women and their children. The women become drug-free and healthy, learn skills to become good parents and responsible, employable adults. Integrated treatment modalities address the many issues young mothers face. Residential treatment runs from 12 to 24 months, followed by six months of aftercare.

Veritas was the first drug treatment program in the country to incorporate a federally-funded Early Head Start program for children from birth to age three. Children at Young Mothers receive early intervention education in partnership with Los Niños Services, an award winning multilingual agency serving the developmental needs of young children and their families.

Most women who come to the program have dropped out of school and have little work experience. Mothers develop an employment plan that usually includes continued education and vocational training, in addition to their substance abuse treatment and parenting skills development.

Prevention Services, Manhattan, NY

Veritas is one of the few substance abuse programs to offer both treatment and prevention services.

Prevention strategies, based on proven success, include family and children's programs, prevention education and programs supporting positive lifestyles.

Veritas Prevention services help to identify adults, teens and children-at-risk of substance addiction, and reduce that risk. We successfully serve hundreds of young people annually in prevention workshops and hundreds of families in crisis on an ongoing basis. The families of residents also participate in treatment at Veritas through family therapy and interventions. Family members become part of a long term solution.

Outpatient Services

Veritas’ Family Outpatient Program is uniquely designed as a family-focused program preserving families and reuniting parents and children. We target families in the child welfare system – parents who have lost their children to foster care and those at risk of losing their children due to substance abuse. We provide after-care treatment and support services for clients who have completed residential treatment. These continued services allow our clients to have a far greater likelihood of remaining clean and sober after residential treatment.