Families Note Greenbrier's Role in

L. Jay Mitchell and his team at Greenbrier Academy for Girls in West Virginia provide adolescent women with a rigorous academic program and individualized treatment to address a variety of non-acute conditions. The therapeutic boarding school creates plans to help students cope with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance use. In addition, L. Jay Mitchell has built Greenbriar around methodologies designed to help heal students’ strained and broken relationships with parents, peers, and themselves.

The testimonials posted on the school’s website offer a glimpse into the ways that students and their families have received assistance.

One former student noted how many aspects of her life have changed for the better since she attended Greenbrier. She described her former self as someone who experienced difficulties with alcohol and drugs, as well as a history of destructive relationships. Toward the beginning of her time at the academy, she put up barriers between herself and the staff and students that recreated past unhealthy interactions in her life.

It was during a Greenbrier Village Retreat that she was able to confront her baseless feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. She overcame ingrained habits of thought that had conditioned her to always feel in competition with her brother. Her relationship with him became easier and more secure, and she went on to succeed in college.

A mother of another Greenbrier student wrote that she will never forget that staff consistently said that they were going to love her daughter until she could learn to love herself. This mother witnessed her daughter’s growing maturity and ability to develop a sense of purpose and integrity that exceeded the family’s initial expectations.

Numerous other students and families have shared how Greenbrier’s team invested themselves in students’ healing journeys and the extent to which programs bring out students’ authentic selves in constructive ways.