Category: Troubled Teen Industry
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Life After a Behavior Modification Program
In my junior year of high school, I was woken up in the middle of the night at about four in the morning by two strangers who escorted me to the airport. From there, I was flown from Houston, Texas, to La Verkin, Utah, to a place called Cross Creek Programs, also known as Cross…
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Supporting Someone Who Has Survived Seclusion or Restraint
I first started experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder around a month after being restrained for the first time. I was at a long-term residential treatment center (i.e., a “troubled teen” facility) in Utah at the time. I noticed feeling anxious around the staff who had restrained me. I started avoiding the places where a restraint…
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The Lost Years of “Treatment”
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…
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How I survived and helped shut down Freedom Village U.S.A.
Upstate New York was like nothing I’d ever seen. The single road rose, fell, and rounded every curve of nature’s course. As if to say that, at any moment, nature could swallow it whole if she really wanted to. Despite the horrors that led me here, it was absolutely breathtaking. A shimmer of hope fluttered…
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We Warned Them
The We Warned Them campaign is an intersectional grassroots campaign pushing for regulation, oversight, & ultimately an end to the “Troubled” Teen Industry or “TTI”. In order to provide lawmakers and other organizations with a clear sense of the issues youth experience within this industry, we created the following questionnaire. Our goal is to gather statistical information…
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The Places That Stole Me
have a unique way of leaving reality behind them. A child playing dress-up puts on a cardboard crown holds their plastic staff, does a royal wave, and becomes a queen or king. A child opens a box of crayons, colors the green of jungle leaves, the blue of a running river, the yellow of a…