The Helix Center is founded by Mark Sakran, MD, and Jennifer Weaver, LCSW, in response to the growing mental health crisis among adolescents and their families. We bring a combined experience of over 50 years evaluating and treating children, adolescents and young adults in the Washington metro area.
Welcome!
We have been professional collaborators, working with adolescents and their families for many years. We specialize in various fields of mental health care, psychotherapy, and psychiatry. We have frequently joined forces to help families who may need more than one discipline to help their adolescent function and feel better.
During these years, we have felt frustrated with the few programs - and long waiting lists - for our clients who were starting to need more than a once a week therapy session (this would be too small an intervention) but did not yet need to disrupt their lives and relocate to an inpatient program (this could be a counterproductively large intervention).
And of the more intensive services that are locally available, few use the combination of treatment approaches we know are effective or provide the Gold Standard treatments we often recommended at places such as McLean Hospital in Boston.
Our clients and their families needed short-term help and increased safety; intense enough to help teens make changes fast, but not so intense they have to leave school; synthesizing the most effective, cutting-edge treatments; truly coordinated professionals in different disciplines that work seamlessly together; and a place that would also prioritize parents, wrapping them into the fold so they too could get the support they desperately needed. That’s when Helix Center emerged – we would build what we have been looking for ourselves.
Our synergy helped make our vision a reality. Helix Center is a truly evidence-based program that integrates cutting edge therapeutic approaches, along with comprehensive assessment and excellent psychiatric management. At Helix, teens can receive short-term intensive therapeutic help with minimal disruptions to their everyday lives. It is a place for teens to pause, reset and return to their lives equipped to move forward on their own intentionality and self-belief.
Helix is also a place where parents can get compassionate, effective support so that whole families are able to move forward into a better, more balanced, less fearful family life. We are parents ourselves, and we see parents every day who are scared, worried, frustrated, and exhausted. Parents are also prioritized in our program – to also give parents the tools to pause, reset and return.
And we know that teens do best when their care is carefully and frequently coordinated among different professionals in a healthy, supportive environment. We bring mutual respect to one another’s specialty and truly enjoy working in concert, taking our time to collaborate so each teen and family can be treated with truly individualized care. Mostly, we bring a sense of hope and joy to our work, which we hope will translate to everyone who walks through our doors.
We are happy to bring Helix Center for middle and high school teens to the DC Metro area, and we look forward to expanding our services to young children and young adults.
Warmly,
Mark & Jennifer