The Wave Youth Clinic Opens, Putting Families Back Together in Asia and Beyond

We are excited to share about an international teen and young adult treatment center who just opened their doors this past month in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Wave Youth Clinic, or just The Wave for short, has a far-from-new team behind it, though. The leadership has a breadth and depth of experiences in treating individuals and families affected by alcohol and drug abuse and mental health disorders.

I had the opportunity to speak to one of the co-founders, Fiona Yassin. It’s hard to sum up Fiona’s accomplishments in a one-sentence intro. She’s both highly skilled and incredibly compassionate. (Read more about The Wave Clinic here.)

Great Need for High-Quality Care for Youth

Fiona mentioned “a massive hole for this age group.” She’s right. For luxury, international treatment dedicated to adolescents and young adults, the selection is quite limited. We recalled The Edge (Thailand), who serves only young adult males, and then, Yes We Can Youth Clinics (Netherlands), who serves adolescents and young adults, both female and male.

Complex issues can leave a family feeling hopeless. Teens and young adults are struggling with high levels of anger, anxiety, fear, isolating; they’re failing or have dropped out of education, abusing drugs or alcohol increasingly, and are often considered a letdown. Parents feel like they’ve done everything and there’s nowhere else to go. They’ve given up and, in a sense, start grieving for the outcome of death or prison rather than a pursuit to medical school for their child, yet weighed down by immense guilt.

This led Fiona and her team to start The Wave—to provide a place where young girls and young boys can go, especially when they seem to be failing other treatment options. Fiona believes it’s the other way around, “Treatment is failing them, not them failing treatment; treatment has to move with them.” She adds, “There has to be someone at some point who’s going to sit with that; they have to have hope.”

Putting Families Back Together

Not only does The Wave offer high quality and individualized care for the youth themselves, but also for the family. The program has a family week every 5 weeks, so mid-way and at the end of the 10-week program.

“We’re keen on taking the whole family. We want to offer as much family space and time as needed,” says Fiona. Often, complex issues mean a complex family with everything very intertwined.

She enjoys “putting families back together when everyone has had enough and seeing families being able to re-function.” Fiona shares a story of one family who had sent a little thank you. They were able to go out as a family on a Sunday—something that was not possible a year ago.