My experience in the troubled teen industry began when I was 12 years old and was unnecessarily sent to rehab. There, I was regularly interrogated and pressured into admitting to drug use and forced to identify as an “addict.” Despite knowing that I didn’t belong there initially, with everyone around me telling me otherwise and no one believing me, I felt trapped in that identity and eventually began to doubt my reality.

A little over a year later, I was in a house fire while visiting a friend I had met at that rehab, resulting in being in critical condition on a ventilator for several days due to carbon monoxide poisoning and anoxia. Due to the trauma and brain injury that resulted from the fire, I ended up in the first of many psychiatric hospitals a couple of months later.

Despite not meeting the clinical criteria for any psychiatric diagnosis, I was told that I had a “mental illness” and was sent home on a cocktail of medications, which they said I would likely need for the rest of my life. The medications caused numerous side effects, including exacerbating a lot of my symptoms and causing new ones, and the diagnostic labels influenced the lens through which everyone involved in my “treatment,” including me, began to see all my thoughts, emotions, and behavior. I felt like I ceased to be a person and became instead a collection of symptoms, which led to feeling both scrutinized and worthless.

In the hospitals, I continued to be overmedicated and was repeatedly physically, mechanically, and chemically restrained.

I never got any therapy to help me deal with everything happening. Instead, when I got overwhelmed, I would be strapped down and forcibly injected with a drug that would sedate me. This happened frequently enough that I trained myself to consciously relax my muscles as soon as I saw the needle so that I could later sit and walk without pain.

After several suicide attempts, more hospitalizations, and a psychotic episode that resulted from a psychiatrist’s error, things began to go downhill even faster. Shortly after, I was rejected by my best friend at the time. I felt isolated from my peers at school, lost other supports, and was shortly thereafter thrown out of school for a trivial incident.

As I felt my life falling apart and felt I had no control over it, my emotions and behavior got more dangerous and out of control.

As things continued to get worse despite, and, as a result of, multiple treatments, my parents felt increasingly scared and desperate and consulted with an educational consultant who sent me directly from another inpatient hospital to a Residential Treatment Center on the other side of the country, where I was a resident for the next year and three months. While there, I was completely isolated from the outside world and experienced verbal, psychological, and physical abuse and medical neglect.

Upon admission, I was restrained, strip-searched, cavity-searched, and forced to shower naked with staff watching. All phone calls, even with family, had to be approved, were very limited, and were monitored by staff, and all mail was screened. If we spoke negatively about the facility, communication with our families would be limited to only “family sessions” with our assigned therapist. We had to “earn” visits, so I did not see my parents unsupervised for six months. By the time I finally did, they had been taught to disregard anything negative I had to say about the facility as expected “manipulation” and evidence that the treatment was working.

By far, the most traumatizing aspect of the program for me was the restraints.

I was put in “5-point” prone physical restraints every day for months on end, which were primarily used in a punitive way. In total, I must’ve been restrained over 200 times during my stay, and that’s a conservative estimate. The vast majority of the time, I was restrained; I was not a danger to myself or others. I was angry about being trapped there against my will. The response to my anger was to literally smash me into the ground with five grown adults holding all four of my limbs and one on my back holding my head.

Sometimes, I experienced verbal or physical abuse while being restrained. On several occasions, staff screamed verbal insults at me while I was restrained. One time, a male staff member held my arm so hard that I was in tears from the excruciating pain, but when I asked him to just loosen up a little on that arm, he said he wouldn’t until I calmed down, which of course I couldn’t in that much pain. Afterward, I had no muscle control of that wrist for almost two weeks, although I can’t explain why because I was never allowed to see a doctor about it and was told that I was making it up for “attention.”

Every time, even when the staff instigated or escalated the situation, I was blamed for “getting myself into it” and told that I needed to “work my way out of it,” which sometimes took hours.

Despite being the one with the least power, I was the only one who bore any responsibility, and this seemed to be the ideology that the entire program was based on. They convinced us that we deserved this “treatment” and that we brought it on ourselves. The goal seemed to be to break us down, and, though I put up a good fight, in the end, I learned to also see myself, my emotions, my thinking, and my reactions as the problem, which followed me into my adulthood.

I graduated high school there and was discharged “successfully” less than a month before I turned 18. A year later, I signed myself back into rehab for the last time, and since then, I have not returned to any inpatient facility in almost 20 years and have been off all psychiatric medication for over 15 years. I am now happily married with a child of my own and am getting my master’s degree in Critical Psychology and Human Services.

However, as a result of all the treatment in my adolescence and the beliefs about myself I learned from it, I spent a decade in my adulthood in a highly fundamentalist, cult-like group, along with other unhealthy friendships. It took me another decade to be able to speak my truth about what happened to me. I know now that neither of these is uncommon. I was misdiagnosed and gaslighted by the teen treatment industry, and I now have C-PTSD as a result. Despite that, I know I’m one of the lucky ones. Some of my peers are no longer with us to tell their stories due to overdose or suicide. I feel it is my duty to them to speak my truth, and my hope in telling my story is that we can, as a society, begin to move away from treatment services that cause so much additional harm so that years from now, others will not have to recover from the treatment itself!