Guest Profile
David Rotenberg, MA, MBA, CAC Diplomate
David Rotenberg, MA, MBA, CAC Diplomate, a leader in the field of behavioral healthcare and former Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Caron Treatment Centers, joins Turnbridge.
David Rotenberg is a passionate clinician and leader uniquely able to identify and address the needs of individual patients and entire populations. With more than 28 years of direct clinical care and executive leadership experience at one of the nation's largest and most storied nonprofit behavioral health organizations, Rotenberg possesses unusually broad insights into the practice, management, and growth of effective treatment services. While helping steward Caron's 70-year mission, Rotenberg cared for thousands of individuals and families, trained hundreds of clinicians, and orchestrated the development of numerous new and needed programs.
Rotenberg's many contributions to patients, colleagues, and the field have garnered countless service and leadership opportunities and recognitions, including the Pennsylvania Certification Board's Addiction Professional of the Year Award. An immediately apparent and disarming conviviality and bedside manner make Rotenberg a cherished confidant, colleague, and friend to many. The fact that Rotenberg perceives his work helping individuals and families as an honor and privilege is evident to all who know him.
As Turnbridge's Chief Clinical Officer, Rotenberg will be able to focus on his primary passion — helping adolescents, young adults, and their family members. A father of five living in open recovery since age 23, Rotenberg understands the complex personal and family challenges posed by behavioral health conditions firsthand. He believes addressing addiction and mental health disorders with effective treatment, support, and education at the earliest age can profoundly improve long-term patient outcomes and thwart cycles of addiction that can affect families for generations.
In Turnbridge, Rotenberg finds a program aligned with his calling, values, and absolute quality commitment. Turnbridge was established in 2003 to provide unprecedented young adult behavioral healthcare designed to overcome existing treatment deficiencies and deliver the best treatment experience and outcomes. What started as a single program is now one of the country's most sophisticated adolescent and young adult behavioral health systems, employing over 400 specialists and offering gender-specific residential, intensive outpatient, and outpatient levels of integrated care. Distinguished as a Yale Medical School training site and by treatment innovations, including non-arbitrary lengths of stay, phased programming, gradual exposure to real-world triggers, use of behavioral metrics to objectively gauge clinical progress, and a care model that addresses every aspect of client life, Turnbridge is a leading choice of referring professionals nationwide.
Rotenberg's decision to join Turnbridge is also motivated by the dire realization that specialized adolescent and young adult treatment capacity is alarmingly shrinking as the need for it grows exponentially. Rotenberg sees numerous vectors, including perceived existential threats, problematic social media use, normalization of legal high-potency cannabis, continued pandemic-related impacts, and more conspiring to make young people profoundly anxious, depressed, and feeling the need to escape. Rotenberg believes the best way to meet this problem head-on is to help Turnbridge continue innovating and expanding.
Rotenberg looks forward to immersing himself in Turnbridge and spending time on one of the most rewarding aspects of his work, training clinicians. Decades of clinical experience teach Rotenberg that building a productive therapeutic alliance with young people requires deeply understanding their culture, establishing authentic trust-based rapport, and helping to lead change within their family systems. He also believes in fostering a clinical culture that gives care teams the latitude needed to meet individual needs effectively, something he finds at Turnbridge. Lending his years of clinical and supervisory expertise to help Turnbridge clinicians develop these nuanced skills is one of the opportunities Rotenberg relishes most. Helping the program expand to help even more clients and families is another.
"Since our inception, Turnbridge has been where people who care most about the health and well-being of young people have the environments, resources, peer caliber, and freedom to do their best work. We could not be happier David has chosen to join us, and for our clients, families, and colleagues whose lives will be made immeasurably better through David's incredible intellect, humanity, and skill," says Turnbridge CEO David Vieau.
