History and vision of Amalgama7

History

From the Drug Addiction Support Service (SPOTT) of the Diputació de Barcelona (Barcelona Provincial Council), professionals who created Amalgama7 worked during the 1980s in the care of young drug addicts. In the mid 1990s came a new subsidiary collective clinical care who couldn’t lace in public services: teenagers polyconsumers of substance abuse (particularly alcohol, derivatives of cannabis and designer drugs), which held risk behaviors in various fields (family, academic, labor, sexual, legal and social) and which could significantly affect their performance in their main activity (academic or work).

In order to provide service to these teenagers and young people, and also attend to their families, in 1997 it was created Amalgama7.

During these 20 years, a special and specialized network of outpatient centers in Barcelona and Madrid and residential centers has been developed, promoting a new specialized device for teenagers and young people with risk behaviors, behavior or dual disorders: the Therapeutic and educative school. An innovative space that offers, in addition to the resident, a clinical, academic and, in a socio-educative sense, a summer camp. Likewise, specific care is offered to families during the therapeutic process of the resident child.

In addition to the clinical activity, Amalgama7 offers a wide range of services as well as prevention, evaluation, research and social awareness activities, coordinating and joining efforts jointly with public administrations, universities, professional associations, scientific societies, professionals and health centres, academics, entities of the third social sector, companies, professional clusters…

Vision

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream —and not make dreams your master;
If you can think— and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings —nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And —which is more— you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)