It is likely that you have heard of Paris Hilton. Paris has in recent years become famous as an advocate for reform in what is known as the “Troubled Teen Industry.” The Troubled Teen Industry is the collection of for-profit schools, treatment centers, and wilderness programs predominately located in the USA that parents are able to send their children to. These programs promise therapeutic change to “fix” whatever is wrong with the child or teenager. Paris has made a movie about this experience which you can see below. She has also successfully lobbied the Utah State legislature and the US Congress to pass laws to try and reform the industry. Those laws have not been very effective not because of Paris’ and others efforts but because of the lack of teeth the lawmakers are willing to put into said laws. What you may not know is that I am also a survivor of the Troubled Teen Industry.
Starting from age 11, between 1996 and 2003, I was sent to Charter Peachford Hospital, Laurel Heights Hospital, Three Springs Outdoor Therapeutic Program, San Marcos Treatment Center, Hill Country Place Therapeutic Boarding School, and The King George School. Across most of these programs I suffered a wide and creative variety of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. I will spare you the description of these abuses here. These abuses deserve the light of day so that light may shine into this industry that makes money abusing children. But they are for a different venue.
I have long kept these experiences silent not knowing how to even describe my childhood to others. It was amazing to find an ally in Paris Hilton. I hope that I can help contribute to reform in some way and that these programs, which I describe the history below, can be reformed or shut down. If you are reading this and want me to talk about these experiences, or you know a way that I can support reform, please reach out to me.
In the United States it is legal for parents to have their minor children committed to a mental health institution without any hearing and without evaluation by anyone independent of the hospital. The Supreme Court held in Parham v. J.R. (1979) that the only check required was a doctor’s judgment, and that a doctor on the hospital’s own staff was good enough. The Court wrote that “a staff physician will suffice, so long as he or she is free to evaluate independently.” In Georgia and Texas, where I was committed, the child has no way to object. Justice Brennan, dissenting the 1979 decision, wrote that children “are entitled to some champion who can speak on their behalf.” They got none. Parham removed the last legal obstacle and what followed was a business.
Through the 1980s, with insurance paying for inpatient care and for-profit chains hunting for admissions, juvenile admissions to private psychiatric hospitals rose more than fourfold, from 10,764 in 1980 to 48,375 in 1984. It is estimated that there are approximately 120,000 children in such places today. Many of the children committed to these facilities were what the legal scholar Lois Weithorn called “troublesome youth,” committed by their parents without a diagnosis of serious mental disorder because their parents had health insurance that would pay for it. A North Carolina jury found that Charter Hospital of Winston-Salem had a policy of discharging patients when their insurance expired, and in 1994 National Medical Enterprises paid $379 million to settle federal fraud charges over its psychiatric hospitals. Charter Medical, founded in Macon, Georgia, grew on that model into the largest psychiatric hospital chain in the country, with 98 hospitals by 1995, eight of them in Georgia. I was eleven when I was admitted to one of them. Beyond creating a business focused on absorbing parents’ insurance benefits, many of these businesses also used practices that had been developed by a cult called Synanon.
Synanon was founded by Charles Dederich in 1958 as a drug rehabilitation program in Santa Monica, California. Its method was the Game, a session in which one member talked about himself and was then attacked by the rest of the group. Dederich himself described the Game as “brainwashing”. Synanon declared itself a religion in 1974 and renamed itself the Synanon Church in 1980. Dederich was its founder and unchallenged leader. In 1980 he pleaded no contest to conspiring to murder a lawyer who had sued the group, after his followers put a rattlesnake in the lawyer’s mailbox. It was a cult.
Synanon’s methods spread first through people who had been inside it, and then through copies of copies. Mel Wasserman, a Synanon participant, founded CEDU in California in 1967 and modeled its therapy on Synanon. Daytop Village was founded with Synanon members, and a Daytop graduate, Joe Ricci, founded the Élan School in Maine in 1970. The Seed in Florida copied Synanon for teenagers also opening in 1970. Straight, Incorporated copied The Seed in 1976. In July 1998 the Brown Schools of Texas bought CEDU for $78 million, and six weeks later a former CEDU staff member opened The King George School in Vermont for them. Maia Szalavitz counts at least fifty programs that trace their philosophy to Synanon.
These programs share a set of practices that no licensed therapist would use. A 1974 Senate investigation compared The Seed’s methods to the brainwashing techniques used on American prisoners in Korea. Attack therapy, workshops (which CEDU called propheets) that run for days, punishment and isolation, and staff and older students acting as mentors. Attack therapy is presented as group therapy. The children are encouraged to attack and humiliate each other. At CEDU these sessions were called “raps,” at the King George School they were called “Communication Classes.” They ran multiple times a week for three or four hours and were led by untrained staff. The stated purpose was to break down the child’s defenses so that he could be remade. At the King George School these were institutionalized further expecting students to have completed a number of credit hours in Communication Classes in order to graduate. CEDU’s own brochure from 1973 said the process of these classes “almost invariably functions to break down defenses.”
The workshops lasted from twenty-four hours to several days. Survivors describe them as built on restricted food and sleep. At Mount Bachelor Academy, a school run on the CEDU model in Oregon, former employees and parents said in 1998 that students were deprived of sleep, and in 2009 the state suspended its license for child abuse and neglect. In my workshops we were told we would be given amnesty if we admitted to all of our lies before the workshop was over, and the questions ran from “How were you hurt when you were a child?” to “What is it that you can’t tell anybody about?” Lathrop Lybrook, who went through the Truth propheet at the CEDU school Rocky Mountain Academy, recalls the facilitator asking “What’s your ‘lie,’ Lathrop?” and, after each confession, “Doesn’t that feel better? Don’t you feel free?” These workshops were designed to make children feel like the problems and abuses that had been done to them were their fault.
Students could be cut off from the group for weeks or months with no stated end. At CEDU and King George School this was called being on bans. Nobody could speak to you, look at you, or acknowledge that you existed. Students were encouraged to inform on each other.
The staff at these schools were unlicensed and mostly untrained. A CEDU advertisement from the 1970s read “CEDU IS STAFFED BY YOUNG PEOPLE! (ages 18–25) All former drug addicts.” Each student was assigned one of them, often a graduate of the program, who stood in for a parent.
Students in these programs are also exposed to levels of extreme violence. At Élan the general meetings were used by students “to take other students to task,” and sometimes ended in a boxing ring. Wilderness programs force-marched students and exposed them to extreme weather. In-patient treatment centers commonly use holds that can compress airways and cut off blood circulation that can lead to death. They also use seclusion rooms where children can be locked indefinitely inside of. In 2007 the Government Accountability Office told the House Committee on Education and Labor that “There are currently no federal laws that define and regulate residential treatment programs,” that it had found thousands of allegations of abuse since 1990, and that in 2005 alone 33 states had reported 1,619 staff members involved in abuse in residential programs.
George Miller, Representative from California from 1975 to 2015, wrote a bill that would have given every child in a private program the right “to be free from physical and mechanical restraints and seclusion.” It passed the House 318 to 103 in 2008 and 295 to 102 in 2009, and died in the Senate both times. Paris Hilton’s documentary about her own eleven months in a Utah program and her testimony to the Utah legislature allowed the passing of a 2021 law requiring unannounced inspections and reports of every restraint, with no penalties attached. Seven children have died in Utah programs since it passed. The federal bill she carried to the Capitol, the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, was introduced in 2023 with a standing work group and a study. The Senate stripped the work group, and the final bill signed by President Biden on 23 December 2024 ordered a study and created no standards, no inspections, no enforcement and no money. The industry’s trade association welcomed it as “a landmark achievement.”
Since 1971 at least 393 children have died in these programs. From these deaths we can account for causes in 266 cases. We know that 94 died being physically restrained by untrained staff members, 50 by suicide, 31 of untreated illness or medical neglect, 26 in accidents such as falls, traffic and fire, 24 by drowning, 14 of heat stroke or dehydration, 14 by violence, 10 of overdoses of medication, drugs or alcohol, and 3 of hypothermia. There is no federal record or book keeping of these institutions or these deaths. In 2007 the Government Accountability Office could not find a single federal agency or any other body that collects nationwide data on deaths in these programs, and in 2008 it could not determine how many children had died in a single year because states report them in ways that cannot be reconciled. The two congressional investigations that have been made (2007, 2024) produced no count. The figures above were assembled by me and come from lists kept by volunteers (Lathrop Lybrook, 1000 places you don’t want to be, Unsilenced, r/troubledteens) and built from news reports.
In fifty years one person has gone to prison for a child’s death in one of these programs, a boot camp director in Arizona sentenced to six years in 2005. For every other death on the lists the staff were acquitted, given probation, fined, or never charged. No one was prosecuted for any of the five Brown Schools deaths, and the Charter staff member tried for Tristan Sovern’s death was acquitted.
There are many, many survivor stories from these schools. You can find them across social media. Paris’ own film details the experience well. I too want to share my story.
When people have asked me about my childhood I usually respond that I went to boarding school. When pressed as to why I usually say, oh I was a problem child. Then I laugh and change the subject. With some friends I would tell a half story. Something dreadful, nothing complete. Recently I have begun opening up about these experiences with friends. I have begun to process these experiences in therapy. The things that happened to me were heinous and deserve the light of day. But not today.
There have been no consequences to my knowledge for any of the people who participated in the abuse of me as a child nor any of my cohort. I would prefer that to be different.
I am not writing this for sympathy from others. Like Paris says in the video above, I don’t even recognize that person I was then compared to who I am now. What I want is awareness that this industry continues to abuse and murder children. Decades of congressional investigations and court decisions have led to no meaningful change in the industry’s practice of abusing and killing children. Reform is needed to stop killing children. Change is needed to stop making profit from abuse. And never forget, #savethewhales
