The Manternach Therapy Centre (CTM) is unique in Luxembourg: it is the only facility that accepts parents struggling with addiction while also providing care and therapy for their young children under their Parent-Child project. For many of its patients, it represents the last chance to keep their family together before a child is placed in foster care.
Conceived as a pilot project, the CTM is now being forced to consider reducing its capacity for struggling parents from four beds to two due to a lack of resources, even as demand outstrips what is currently available. RTL spoke to patients at the centre, as well as members of staff.
Nikita, whose name has been changed by RTL, has been at the CTM for 18 months. When she became pregnant, she had been homeless for three years and was consuming crack and cocaine. Wanted by the police in connection with a criminal matter, she was faced with an ultimatum. "They gave me two choices: either prison or drug withdrawal and keeping the child", she said. Today, she is grateful for the wake-up call it represented.
The Parent-Child project has officially been in place since 2022, though the CTM had already been taking in pregnant women and parents with young children before that. The project is aimed at adult parents whose children are aged between 0 and 4. The length and timing of each stay depends on each case, with therapy hinging on two concepts : addiction therapy for the parent and joint therapy with the child..
Children being able to stay with their parents brings enormous added value, but also enormous complexity. Psychotherapist Annick Hanck described the challenge from the perspective of an addicted parent in therapy. Already confronted with themselves and expending enormous energy working through their own problems, parents must simultaneously attend to the needs of their child. The two demands are, she said, genuinely difficult to reconcile, and the additional burden of caring for a child during what is already an intensely demanding process should not be underestimated.
The centre's annex has the theoretical capacity for four parent-child units, but in practice the project has long been pushing against its limits. The current staffing levels do not allow for overnight care of parents, something that is considered essential, particularly in the early stages of treatment, director Andreas Krzykowski explained. He was frank about the situation. "We are at a point where you have to ask yourself: is the ministry prepared to continue the pilot project? If so, it will have to come with different resources."
