Odyssey House Texas, Inc., located in Houston, Texas

Houston, Texas

Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States, and the largest city in the state of Texas. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 2.1 million people within an area of . Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of , which is the ...

 is a private not-for-profit organization established in 1989 to provide treatment and education to youth and families whose lives have been devastated by drugs, alcohol, and abuse

Child abuse

Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...

. At that time, local families who had lost their children to drugs, alcohol and death identified the need for an effective and affordable program.

Odyssey House Texas was founded as a therapeutic community

Therapeutic community

Therapeutic community is a term applied to a participative, group-based approach to long-term mental illness, personality disorders and drug addiction...

committed to providing comprehensive and quality services to achieve lasting changes in the values and behaviors of youth, in order to create healthy lifestyles and healthy families.

The community publishes Odyssey House journey, a bi-annual newspaper.

Odyssey House Texas is one of many Odyssey House Therapeutic communities around the world. The first Odyssey House, in East Harlem, was established by Dr. Judianne Densen Gerber, a resident psychiatrist working at Metropolitan Hospital in New York City who was dissatisfied with the practice of using drug replacement medications such as methadone as the primary therapeutic intervention.

Odyssey House Therapeutic Communities are found across the States, in Australia and New Zealand.