Eli

TW: mentions of suicide, institutional abuse, kidnapping, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse 

A new day, a new Troubled Teen Industry post

But first, what is a “TTI.” The troubled teen industry is an umbrella term to refer to ‘For Profit’ residential treatment centers, boarding schools, and wildness therapy programs. I would like to preface this by saying that most psych hospitals are NOT under the umbrella term.

It is estimated that around 120k kids in the US are being housed in these facilities every year. Due to the lack of oversight, it is hard to fully pin down the exact number of facilities. Many of these facilities, however, are in Utah since Utah is a pretty remote state with almost no regulation on keeping troubled youth safe in these facilities. In Utah, kids have 6 rights that could fit on a singular piece of paper

What makes TTI as problematic as they are is the ‘for profit aspect’. It is a multi million dollar industry that market themselves as therapeutic treatment for a wide range of problems. When kids do not have a diagnosis to their behavior, programs also promote the treatment of normal behavior like braking back, internet addiction, or homosexuality as a need for treatment. This means that kids who need highly specialized medical care are housed in the same home as kids who are just there for bad grades at school. It also means that kids could be going through agony from drug withdrawal and TTI is not equipped to support them. The extremely diverse treatment leads to kids traumatizing each other by their behaviors.

These programs are run similar to pyramid schemes to keep children within the system as long as possible by providing financial compensation to individuals who refer others to the programs. Due to many kids going through many programs (with most of them being owned by the same parent company), many survivors or TTI refer to this as a variation of human trafficking as well as institutional abuse. While I was there, I personally knew many kids who had been in treatment for a few years and once they were discharged, they were just discharged to another program.

The programs also advertise themselves to parents as the only option to families. When parents feel scared about their kids behavior, these programs will tell the parents that they (the program) are the only option or their kid will end up dead or a failure. Parents will dig through their children’s college fund, life savings, and even sell their house to afford to keep up with the rate of treatment. While some states do cover the cost in entirety, this is not a blanket statement. Since it’s advertised as “treatment,” insurance companies do usually cover some of it but will eventually cut, this is when programs will beg parents to still keep their kids in the programs.

Going back to a person antidote, by the time I was getting ready to discharge, my parents had blown through their savings and my siblings and I’s college fund. My dad was working doubles and occasionally triple shifts every single day to make ends meet, my mother also (my parents aren’t together) eventually ended up having to sell our house due to the debt my family was put in but it wasn’t enough for the program. The program refused to let me go home until my parents harassed them enough to let me discharge. Without an offical discharge and only given me a withdrawal, I would not have been able to get out necessary accommodations from out of treatment like a therapist recommendation, an IEP set up, PHP or IOP.

Now how much are these programs? The program can range from 5k to 30k a month.

Now let’s get into one of the most controversial parts of TTI. Gooning also known as legal kidnapping. These services have little to no government regulation similarly to the rest of the industry and is very traumatizing to the kids. The transporters often use handcuffing and forceful seizing the child to obey what they are doing. Normally, transportions is done during the night so the kids are woken up to two strangers telling them they have to leave ASAP and they will get in trouble if they disobey.

Instead of delivering evidence-based treatment, many of these programs deliver a mix of maltreatment such as physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, isolation, forced hard labor, chemical sedation, sleep and food deprivation, attack therapy, aversion therapy, etc. This abuse is further compounded by the program’s function as a “total institution” where the students live under the authority of the program, have contact restricted to the outside world, and are forbidden to freely leave the programs for months to years.

Sexual abuse also runs rampant in these facilities. There are currently thousand of sexual abuse cases and allegations against staff members who face no punishment for their actions.

Attack therapy was created by Charles E Dederich for his drug addiction treatment program Synanon. Attack therapy is a controversial and largely discredited psychotherapeutic technique that uses highly confrontational, aggressive, and often verbally abusive methods to force a person to change their behavior. It involves verbal abuse, humiliation, shaming, and denouncing of the client by a therapist or by fellow clients in a group setting. The central theory behind attack therapy is to "tear them down in order to build them up.” The idea of attack therapy was also used in Dedriches cult as well which makes it even more controversial. As mentioned before, psychologist believe this therapy style is unhelpful to clients and makes mental health worse; However, it is commonly still used in residential. Most notably, the Elon school which got shut down after a post was made on reddit about the abusive practices that took place these

Here’s a link to a comic that a survivor of that school made about attack therapy: https://elan.school

Many facilities use a level system which requires kids to follow certain rules to earn “privileges”. These privileges are usually normal human rights including going outside or even talking to your parents. If kids do not follow rules then they get punished.

These punishments include

isolation

No food or sleep deprivation

Restricting social interaction

Depriving normal human bodily functions like the need to pee, poop, water, and occasionally requiring the kid to have “accidents” on themselves

Another traumatizing thing that occurs in residential treatment is the use of LOS. Line of sight is the use of requiring kids to be watched in the bathroom, shower, or when they are changing since the program has deemed them as a harm to themselves. On top of that, strip searches are common practicing and are occasionally done by th opposite sex.

There are currently many deaths attributed to TTI programs which include suicide and medical neglect. While the deaths not tracked, thousands have also committed suicide following their completion to the program.

To learn more about the troubled teen industry, unsilenced is a great resource and the hashtag on social media is #breakingcodesilence

The troubled teen industry is overlooked. It requires people to talk more about it. Kids are being abused every day. For these kids to receive justice, we need to advocate.