No longer brainwashed...
The Troubled Teen Industry: My story
Before I start, I really want to say I don’t blame the 80% of direct care staff. They were told to do things by people with a higher degree and the ability to fire them if they didn’t comply. They were overworked, underpaid, and undertrained. A handful of them follow me on Instagram, and I consider them people who helped me along the way. My problem is with the industry as a whole.
The troubled teen industry (TTI) refers to a network of private youth programs, therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment centers, religious academies, wilderness programs, and drug rehabilitation centers and it dates back at least 50 years.
I spent roughly 40 out of 60 of my teen months in the TTI (this number includes psych wards, residential treatment centers (RTCs), and therapeutic boarding schools; if you count alternative boarding schools, partial hospitalization programs (PHPs), or intensive outpatient programs, the number will be around 48 months). I wasted 2/3 of my teenage years in an abusive industry. What I have seen in this time is what I will be writing. I can’t speak for the experiences of those I haven’t met. I use teen, child, patient, and client interchangeably. This isn’t polished, that’s not my goal. I hope I can put some of the things I and many others went through into words in such a way where you’ll have a window into the world of the TTI. I’ll start now.
So, what can get you sent into the TTI? Anything from suicide attempts, eating disorders, self-harm, substance abuse, running away, various mental illnesses, violence, making an inappropriate joke at school, doing something on a dare, playing too many video games, isolating, using social media too much, being anything but heterosexual and cisgender, anxiety, depression, having ADHD, academic underachievement, family problems, social learning disorders, attachment disorders, PTSD or other trauma disorders, or not performing to parents’ liking. I got most of these by simply googling what issues various RTC’s, PHP’s, and inpatients I went to take and I got a handful from what people I met went through.
The roles they force the clients into is inappropriate. You’re supposed to go there to help yourself, but you usually end up as a therapist to other clients and occasionally staff. I’ve been in such positions and have joked about being the staff’s therapist.
I remember a night where one girl ran away. The staff put us all in a room without a staff. They had a staff sit directly outside of the door, she wasn’t helping us, she was just preventing us from leaving. It was terrifying, being locked inside of that room. Most of us were crying. Two people were in flashbacks hitting their heads, one against the wall and the other against the floor. It became our responsibility to stop them. We were in that room for almost an hour, without any help from the trained professionals.
I’m still afraid of being locked in rooms or not having easy access to an exit, and often count the number of exits if something happens, or just when I’m somewhere new. I’ve restrained so many of my friends, usually while they’ve been in flashbacks. I got hurt in the process, but I didn’t want them to break their hand. There weren’t enough staff to help. I usually was the one to get my friends out of flashbacks. We were treated more like staff and less like teens...or we weren’t treated like people at all. Sometimes we felt like animals, locked in and left to fend for ourselves.
The safety issues posed are obvious. We’ve been handed keys, knives, and bottles of medication. We’ve been put in charge of enforcing each other’s treatment plans, and you can get in trouble if someone else makes a decision (as an example that pissed everyone off - if one person doesn’t wear a seatbelt, everyone who’s sitting in that row gets in a lot of trouble, because they didn’t tell them to put it on).
One of the things that bothered me from the start was the use of information control. There could be major world events happening and we would have essentially no knowledge of it. It took me months after COVID started to find out it was serious. We weren’t told about other current events, and things happening in our families could be hidden. Rules in the programs weren’t readily available, and I remember I usually had no idea what to expect going in, and you could get in trouble for that.
Whenever there was abuse that would finally be acknowledged at another unit, we would be kept in the dark, even if it immediately threatened our safety. Parents were also kept in the dark. If you were allowed to write letters (it depended on the program) they would be read and if there was anything too negative you would have to re-write them. If you spoke too negatively about the place, you could get in trouble and/or lose the ability to call your parents (the amount of call time was very dependent on the place, sometimes you were allowed 2 15-minute phone calls a week, sometimes 10 minutes once a day, sometimes up to 40 minutes a day. Also, some places allowed contact with friends and extended family, others didn’t. Some didn’t even allow any contact with parents).
They tried to hide medical issues from parents, or major changes to care. Some places (I haven’t been to any, so I really can’t speak on it) have parents sign a waiver giving all rights of guardianship over to the program, so even if your parents wanted to pull you or change some aspect of your care, they couldn’t. There’s also transport programs where parents sign over rights to the agency and it’s essentially legal kidnapping where two people you’ve never met wake you up at 3am (you’re not told beforehand) and drive you off to the middle of nowhere. Many people who this happens to end up with PTSD just for this part, not to mention the rest of the abuse. With other programs, they try to imply to your parents that they have more control.
They medically neglect people, and I’m not talking they didn’t put a band-aid over a cut. Just off the top of my head: ignored a girl with an infection until she needed to be admitted to the ICU. ignored concussions, ignored joint injuries (including those that required surgery). told a girl (who hurt her shoulder off campus and had a medic there tell her it was likely fractured or dislocated) wait for a day to see a doctor, and ignored her requests to see them, ignored patients with other serious illnesses and don’t let them tell their parents about what’s going on, and they usually ignore asthma attacks ‘just in case they’re faking it’ (while the teen is wheezing and clearly unable to breathe and being refused an inhaler).
They just usually ignore physical conditions and accuse you of making it up. People who have debilitating period cramps are meant to go on as if nothing’s wrong. I have a friend who almost broke her ankle multiple times at one place, and they repeatedly ignored it. I’m trying to remain vague on details to avoid identification, but there’s a lot more specific ones that could be traced back to the facility it happened in, which is not my aim today. The medical negligence isn’t like the school nurse telling you to put an ice pack on it; you never go home at the end of the day. You have to deal with it until you finally convince someone that you need to go see a doctor, or just wait until your parents come (usually weeks to months, if they ever do) to get it checked out.
The medication management is awful. One of their favorite things is to up medications or add new ones for every small problem. They would put people on such high doses of meds for issues they didn’t need (I don’t have bipolar, psychosis, schizophrenia, or anything along those lines but I was repeatedly put on anti-psychotics and meds specifically for bipolar). I was put on a dose of a med most people only take 50mg of, and the person I met who was on the second highest dose I’d seen was 400mg. I was on 700mg. This med was an antipsychotic with a heavy sedative side effect. That’s why I was put on it: they wanted me to go to sleep.
I, along with everyone I knew, was repeatedly given the wrong med or incorrect dose. They always gave me the wrong day on birth control. One time I had a med upped from 7.5mg to 10mg, and the nurse read the order incorrectly and gave me 17.5mg. Instead of taking people off meds that have bad side effects, they just put them on a med to counteract the side effects. Since I was tired after the massive amounts of two sedatives they gave me Adderall (I don’t have ADHD). My blood pressure was too low to be measured standing due to the meds, so instead of lowering the dose they gave me a med to raise my blood pressure. My heart rate was still in the 170’s standing (normal is below 100), I felt like I was running a marathon sitting down.
They would put me on meds to control the side effects of my other meds, resulting in me having to take meds 7 times a day. Most of these could’ve been avoided if I hadn’t been put on ridiculously high doses. I am not alone in this. There were also many cases of people being given the wrong meds.
They also tend to take people off meds cold turkey, which can have detrimental side effects. They took me off my meds to control my blood pressure and heart rate, so I was constantly dizzy, and they were always surprised at how high my heart rate was, but refused to help me lower it. In order to escape the side effects from our meds (I had multiple friends be put on meds that made them lactate, and it took a long time for them to be taken off, they didn’t care about mild allergic reactions, nausea, extreme sedation, dizziness, and these are just a few side effects). Almost everyone ‘cheeked’ a couple medications to avoid all the horrible side-effects, and we were never caught actually ‘cheeking’ (pushing the med into the corner of our mouth instead of swallowing it) even though they were supposed to check our mouths to make sure we weren’t. Once in a while we’d get caught later with the actual meds in our possession or in the trash, (or when they realized people were snorting them). This is standard operating procedure.
For discrimination, I can’t speak on racism or transphobia but I will say (from an outsider’s perspective) what I have noticed, and I can’t really speak on sexism as most of my places were for people assigned female at birth (AFAB). For racism, white people seemed to get out a lot faster at one of my inpatients, an issue brought up and ignored. POC who had different hair types were required to treat their hair the same way as a white person would. As for transphobia, dead names were often used, but they’d call cis people by a nickname. My full name is Catherine, but I go by Cate. They always called me Cate and put it on almost all documents (they also did it for people whose nicknames were very different from their given names).
For trans kids, they’d put their dead name everywhere, and use the wrong pronouns. I’m not talking about slip ups, I’m talking about doing it on purpose. Some places require parents to approve being trans, even if you had been out for a long time prior and could take weeks to get around to asking.
For homophobia, that one was common. You could easily get in trouble for mentioning ‘girlfriend’ as a girl, but you’d be fine if you said ‘boyfriend’. Dating guys was fine, liking girls was taboo. I wasn’t allowed to mention I’d only kissed girls, but it was fine to say you kissed guys. There were a lot more specific things, from limiting clothing with gay symbolism or just the rainbow in general, but I don’t want to give away the program too much.
These places also have a tendency to over diagnose. If you’ve ever gone on a diet you have an eating disorder. If you like YouTube and playing video games, you have a screen addiction. If you’ve ever used drugs or alcohol or smoked/vaped, you have a substance abuse disorder. If you’ve ever had mood swings you are bipolar. If you’ve been to the industry there’s a pretty high chance you’ve been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Part of the reason this is done is because most of the therapists and psychiatrists aren’t competent.
Part of it is because the industry will cause you to act crazy. Part of it is probably subliminal: if a person is here, they must be crazy. There’s a study called “On Being Sane in Insane Places” done by David L. Rosenhan, where 8 non-mentally ill people go to a hospital and give a different name and claim they’ve been hearing voices. As soon as they were admitted they claimed to stop hearing them, and all were convinced the doctors would realize they were normal right away. They were instructed to give all accurate information about their life except the original ‘symptoms’. It took them an average of 19 days to be released because the hospital kept diagnosing them with random disorders. Another part of it (I suspect a large part of the reason) is then the industry can tell parents they’ve ‘solved’ an issue, which is when you hear parents say “I never knew my child had [disorder], but thanks to [program] they no longer do!”. No matter why they do it, you will be convinced you’re crazy and the gaslighting drives you to be insane.
Places will be owned by the same parent company so they have incentive to send the client to another place afterwards. Dr. Phil is sponsored by the places he sends the teens on his show to. My first time getting sent to an RTC I was sitting in the waiting room and it turns out the RTC I was going to was affiliated with the psych ward I was coming from. I went somewhere where most clients came from wilderness programs, and the staff’s paychecks were from wilderness therapy. At the end of the day, where you get sent is rarely what's best for you, it’s where whatever pays the best. It has significant consequences.
When I was 14, my only real issue was bulimia. It was getting better, but still wasn’t great, so when I was sent to a clinical diagnostic and they asked me what issue I thought was most important I told them my eating disorder. They did not send me somewhere that treated eating disorders at all, even after I met with their eating disorder specialist who told me I needed to be somewhere that specifically treated them and was extremely concerned with how severe it was. I was never properly treated, and I’m dealing with rumination syndrome (my diaphragm was trained to spasm when I ate, so now when I eat I involuntarily throw up and am in pain, and I can’t eat out in public and generally have to spend 2 hours alone after I eat) because it took me so long to recover because I was never treated. I was even told by a therapist to ignore significant research about how, while you can be healthy when your above the average weight, certain weights significantly increase your chances of getting cancer, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, strokes, heart disease, heart attacks, sleep apnea, joint injuries, infections, death at a young age, etc, and she told me to listen to her instead. I have friends with other disorders who have never been somewhere that specializes in it because that's not where the money leads to.
The punishments we could receive included (but weren’t limited to) scrubbing garage floors with toothbrushes; writing letters to your family or various other people apologizing for your actions and wasting their money; being sent to a hospital actively under state investigation and having failed the previous two investigations; not being able to talk to anyone for hours, days, weeks, or sometimes months; being switched to a different unit; losing all contact with family and friends; having groups where your peers were encouraged to talk about how you were ruining everyone else’s progress, and if they refused they were accused of enabling (you could also be accused of enabling for any jokes made or refusing to snitch on someone who you know will get in a lot of trouble or will beat you up if you tell on them); not letting you eat certain things or eat where everyone else is eating; occasionally restraints (chemical, mechanical, or physical) would be used, but that deserves a whole section of its own, and so many other ones, anything you can think of involving humiliation has probably been used.
What deserved these punishments? Things like attempting suicide, self-harming, running away, not taking the absurd amount of meds you were prescribed, pacing, having mood swings, refusing to undress to do a body check, being late, making inappropriate jokes, not completing work fast enough, there being a spot on the floor you didn’t clean (including if there was something wrong with the floor itself which there was nothing you could do to fix), not making your bed effectively enough, mentioning the word gay or transgender (or anything else LGBTQ+), not finishing your meal, talking about politics, not getting up on time, dishes not being cleaned effectively, leaning against a door, talking while doing your other punishments (every previous punishment listed usually went on for an hour and you weren’t allowed to speak unless asking a question directly relating to the task at hand), crying, having an anxiety or panic attack, dissociating or having a flashback, getting scratched or bruised without reporting it, anything someone else does they claim you could’ve done something to prevent (even if you couldn’t have), knowing about other patients rule breaking and not reporting it, knowing about other students breaking rules and reporting it (because you shouldn’t have been there to find out, or some other excuse), drawing mushrooms, wearing inappropriate clothing, not turning in ‘contraband’ (even if you didn’t know it was contraband), being sexually assaulted (because you could’ve done something different or they don’t believe it wasn’t consensual, but this will be a section of its own), or anything else that doesn’t fit what you’re supposed to.
You could get restrained for anything. I went somewhere that restrained essentially because they felt like it. I was restrained 4 times in 24 hours, their reasoning generally being I was acting suspicious (crying). If you walked out of a room without consent you could be restrained. If you weren’t doing exactly what they expected. If you’re pacing there’s a good chance you’d be restrained, either for exercising when you weren’t supposed to or… stressing the staff out. I was threatened with being given a shot in my butt (most kids in the industry call it booty juice, but the staff use its technical name, which is IM shot) to help me calm down because I was pacing. These types of shots are common, and you can get multiples in one day.
The other disturbingly common ways they’d stop restraints was to restrict breathing (apparently always on accident, but they rarely changed positions if you told them) or purposely hurting you (for example, by stepping on your hand or taking advantage of previous injuries, but they were creative in their ability to twist your body in unusual ways that hurt or just finding different parts to crush, with them telling you the only way they’ll stop hurting you is if you stop fighting, when you usually fight when you’re trying to relieve the pain because even when you stop fighting they’ll keep the weight on for another couple minutes). If you are a teen (or really anyone), and being held down by 2-8 people for no understandable reason and you’re having trouble breathing or are in physical pain, most people automatically fight, because you can’t run. The reality of it was terrifying: staff grabbing your sides, chest, or butt, which is all a normal occurrence (side note, even if you were uncomfortable with male staff, they would restrain you and do all of this anyway), being held, fighting for every shot at being free.
Another common thing was body checks. Essentially, they would have you strip down to a bra and underwear, just underwear, sometimes completely naked, (sometimes, very rarely, you’d be allowed to wear shorts and a tank top or a hospital gown, which are things I’m grateful for). They would look for different contrabands. They would also inspect every part of your body for scars, bruises, tattoos, wounds, surgical scars, moles, birthmarks, deformities, which they would mark down on a piece of paper, to keep track. It was cold and harsh. You weren’t treated as a human. They weren’t passive either. It could involve being touched to figure out whether a scar was raised or flat, if something was a bruise or scar, if it was a stretch mark, etc. These weren’t just on your lower arms, they frequently would do these on your chest or upper thighs. It was as embarrassing of an experience as you would guess, particularly when you were completely naked turning around slowly and having someone stare at every aspect of you. Each place has different rules, but generally they’re supposed to have 2 staff to ensure the patient isn’t assaulted, but they would frequently disregard those rules because they felt like it, one of the many ways patient’s safety was ignored. I cried for most of mine, but I was still forced into it.
There have always been 2 that stuck out to me. My very first body check was after I was admitted to a psych ward after an overdose. I was very unaware of what was happening. I have memories of most of that day, but they were foggy as my blood pressure was extremely low (to the point where, the next morning, I was admitted back to the regular hospital for another 3 days to try to get it back to normal). I was extremely tired and unsure, but I do remember.
I do not remember the body check. I do not remember being told I would do one. I do not remember the actual body check. The next thing I knew it was morning and I was being woken up. I don’t know what happened in between, but I do know one was done because it was confirmed to me later on. My suspicion is I was so confused because I was so out of it and two strange women asked me to take off my clothes, I blocked it out. There is no way I was conscious enough to consent to do something like that, but I was forced into one anyway.
The worst one of mine goes back to April 2019. The staff had previously been aggressive and annoyed with me that day, so I was already upset, adding on to the fact that that was one of my lowest points in my life, with nightmares and paranoia daily. I was told to do a body check and told them I couldn’t. They backed me into a corner away from the door and they had 3 staff demanding I do one. They got more and more frustrated, and I begged them to let me only have 2 staff and be able to change into a hospital gown. They refused, adamant there had to be three (this wasn’t the hospital’s policy) and I had to be completely naked (I’m fairly certain their policy was a hospital gown, and because of my issues they usually let me put on a different pair of underwear and bra while they searched mine). I was sobbing and had been so for 45 minutes before they finally snapped and told me if I didn’t take off my clothes they would bring up a stretcher and strap me down, pull off my clothes and forcibly inspect my body. I ended up doing the body check without the stretcher, but I was not emotionally present for the body check. I have no idea how, but that sort of thing is legal.
I’ll dedicate a whole section to one psych ward which has been shut down because of how abusive it was. The abuse I witnessed there was horrendous. They started off by locking you alone in a room until around 3am, so you were compliant and willing to go up to their unit. [Side note: you said no names, but since it’s been shut down the name is Chicago Lakeshore Behavioral Health Hospital if you’re willing to include it]
The violence there was unlike anything I’ve experienced. There’re multiple newspaper articles on it if you’re interested, but those stories aren’t from me or people I directly know, which is what I’m writing about. However, it has been called the ‘Hospital of Horrors’ by the media due to the severe abuse and neglect. I witnessed blatant disregard for patient safety. You were only allowed water when we went to the cafeteria for meals. This presented multiple problems: if you were good you went down 1-2 times a day. If you weren’t, sometimes you could go days without going to the cafeteria. Sometimes someone would remember to bring you a drink, but that wasn’t every day.
I was only there for 11 days total (once for 6 days and once for 5 days) but I witnessed 4 major acts of violence (there were plenty of smaller ones, but these were the worst):
• A patient beating up a staff in front of everyone.
• Roughly 10 people trying to break down a door (throwing their entire body weight against the door), which they trying to break down to beat up the girl inside while the staff stood by and watched.
• A 17-year-old dragging an 11-year-old down the hall by her hair, hitting her every step on the way.
• A girl being thrown to the ground and being beat so badly that she was knocked unconscious and was lying in a pool of her own blood.
The last one bothered me the most, not just with how violent and disturbing the actual attack was, or how I was 5 feet away from the attack when it started, but the negligence of the staff. The reason she was attacked was because she alerted staff of 3 other patients’ plan to jump a janitor. The 3 patients proceeded to talk about how they were going to get revenge and beat her up. The staff never did anything to protect her. After she was beaten, there were no efforts to keep her safe after she returned from the hospital (an ambulance was called to bring her to the ER and she needed stitches). They weren’t separated. Thankfully nothing else happened.
I remember one day I was upset due to a phone call, and I hit my head against the wall. I was asked to move away from the camera so the staff wouldn’t get in trouble. They didn’t care if I hurt myself, they cared where I did it. I know other people who had the same experience with the same staff. I have no idea why they were concerned, as (according to the investigation reports I read) whenever there was a crime reported the tapes from that time period just happened to go missing.
The meds were almost always given incorrectly and weren’t monitored sufficiently. There were generally 3 staff to 24 kids. The staff almost always came in very obviously hung-over, and I suspect one or two came in high. This place failed 7 investigations in a row before it was shut down. From my understanding, the reason it took so long to be shut down was because they were the only place that would take DCFS kids as DCFS had a tendency to leave kids in any place who took them into care for months after they were cleared to leave, so the government had an incentive to keep it open.
This is also the place one of my RTC’s sent me to, they didn’t send me to the ER and then the ER sent me there, they arranged a private ambulance service to take me directly to the inpatient (this was after two investigations, which I know for sure because they had to remove bathroom doors and replace them with essentially gymnastic mats with magnets, as per the state’s reason for failing them the second time). This was not told to my parents, they only found where I was after I was admitted into the facility’s care. I am lucky, I only spent 11 days there in two stays, there were people who spent literal months there due to DCFS’ inability to find care for them.
Most treatment centers meet Steven Hassan’s BITE model of authoritarian control (aka cults). People who have a weak sense of identity and tend to experience guilt, great self-doubt and black-and-white thinking are more likely to be successfully brainwashed. These are the exact kids that end up in the TTI. For a while I think a lot of us were brainwashed. I believed that a lot of it was in my genuine interest to follow the program guidelines (which was to avoid punishment) but I believed it would help me. I was convinced everything bad they did to me was my fault, and everything good that happened was thanks to them. I believed they were helping me. They never did. It took me a while but I realized I never got better; I just got better at hiding. I know very few people who the TTI has helped, and I know countless who it has traumatized...but for a while most are convinced it worked. If you’re constantly being convinced that it’s helping you (not like most psychiatric problems go up and down, and if they catch you on the up they cured you, and when your mental health goes back down it’s your fault and you’re bad). It took me a while to separate the bad things happening to me from being my fault.
The thing that is hardest for me to think about, even more so to write, is the rampant sexual abuse. I’ve been harsh on the industry so far, and I will give them credit for something: their incredible ability to ignore, deny, victim-blame, and cover up sexual abuse. I’ve come to a half-joking conclusion along with many of my friends: if you haven’t had unwanted touching, or at least unwanted sexual advances while in the TTI, are you sure you’ve really been in the TTI?
The morbid jokes we’d sometimes make about it was our way of coping with our disturbing reality. The way the victims were treated was horrible: they were blamed, got in trouble along with the abuser, and/or accused of lying. The victim usually ended up in a similar amount of trouble as the abuser with the mentality they could’ve done something to stop it, or they also engaged in it. I wish I could say I was joking when I say almost everyone is sexually abused, but I’m not.
The TTI does a lot of hard work covering up the sexual abuse. The vast majority of cases I’ve seen have been client to client, but I do know a handful of staff to client abuse (and they try a lot harder to cover those up, and try to hide it from the other staff too just so word of the abuse doesn’t get out). Some of the things were phrased as accidents, such as a male staff at inpatient who always walked in on girls in the bathroom, but never guys. Our bathrooms were attached to our bedrooms, so if we weren’t in the dayroom or our bedroom, we could only be in our bathroom (especially if you hear the shower running). They always told us he didn’t mean to, he just forgot, but forgetting every day and making comments about not meaning to see ‘naked chicks’ with it never happening to the male residents didn’t seem like forgetfulness.
I learned after catching up with someone after we both had left how they were sexually abused and discharged from the program so no one else found out. I only then realized how much I could’ve missed and still have no idea about. I thought I had a good amount of knowledge of what happened because I knew of so much abuse, but I realized I was off. I only knew the tip of the iceberg. I found out a handful of stories by offhand remarks, or hearing things I wasn’t supposed to, and started asking around and found out the whole story later on.
I remember specifically that at one program their standard for dealing with an abuser was to switch their units. We weren’t allowed contact with other units, but we found ways to communicate anyway. That’s how we’d find out the severity of the abuse that was causing them to switch units, because they could switch you for other reasons (I was switched once after I ran away as an attempt to escape the rampant abuse). We got in trouble if we told the other unit about the abuser and to be wary, because ‘they deserve a second chance’.
There were often no plans of repercussions for the abusers, and the industry took advantage of the fact most of our parents were either abusive or we had a horrible relationship with them. Sometimes they had no plans to stop the abuser unless one client had a good enough relationship with their parents to tell them. Even if you did have someone to tell, it’s something extremely difficult to talk about (even if it’s not you). You need to have a Karen parent who is willing to ignore what the TTI says and listen to the kid in order for them to do anything. I’ve said this many times, but I can count the people I know in the TTI who weren’t sexually abused or the abuser on one hand (and I’ve met hundreds). I wish I was exaggerating. This section was the hardest to write as it’s the main one which has affected me today. I dissociate thinking about an intimate relationship unless I genuinely trust someone with my life. It has affected my ability to enter relationships. I am afraid of being touched and if I don’t know someone, the feeling of being touched (even if it’s a bump or a hand on my shoulder or back), the feeling of it there doesn’t leave me for 10-15 minutes unless I scrub that area in order to cleanse it.
When I think about my time in the TTI, I remember one thing - one feeling: the knowledge that anything could happen to me there and there was nothing I could do about it. Parents are specifically told their child will lie to them, to manipulate them to get taken out. Any horrendous acts of abuse are made up. They’ve even gone as far as to compare it to high school, saying they [the program directors] thought high school was horrible and their teachers were cruel for giving them homework and not letting them skateboard through the halls, but when they grew up they realized it was just structure and that’s what everyone in the TTI is going through too. I didn’t hate the TTI because I had too much homework. I hated the TTI because I knew I could never call 911 or tell anyone when someone was being abused.
Multiple places I went to posted a line to call if you felt there was mistreatment; the line was either disconnected, run by the facility (who had all incentives to cover it up), and/or you weren’t allowed to call it because it wasn’t on your pre-approved numbers list. Many times you were left with nowhere to report the abuse.
I hated the TTI because I was never free.
I hated the TTI because I had nightmares for 3 months straight after leaving the second time, and repeatedly had nightmares during my other stays (often to the point I’d wake myself and others up because I was screaming).
I hated the TTI because I was drugged against my will.
I hated the TTI because I was physically injured and held down.
I hated the TTI because I watched all my friends try to kill themselves.
I hated the TTI because I was lied to and gaslighted.
I hated the TTI because I had no control over what was happening to me.
I hated the TTI because I and all my friends were sexually assaulted and I had no power to stop it.
I hated the TTI because it ruined my life and affects the way I live now.
I am not the same person who entered the industry. I am distrustful of authority. I try to avoid being left alone in a room with an adult at all costs. I count the exits and how I could get past people in order to reach them whenever I walk in a room. I fight if grabbed, and startle when touched. I freak out if I’m blocked from an exit. I still have nightmares from what happened, but since I’ve been free they’ve gotten better. I’m still afraid of being sent back, I’m still in the mentality of every time something is less than perfect I’m waiting to get in trouble, sometimes I genuinely consider and plan ways to run away because I’m afraid of being punished like that again. I don’t think rationally anymore simply because I’m afraid.
I’m not writing this for pity. I don’t want to shut down this industry...it can be good. But there is a lot of abuse, and I haven’t come close to mentioning all of it. I want this industry to be reformed.
I’m writing this because I don’t want anyone to go through what I and so many others went through. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of identical stories to mine, and a lot more whose stories are significantly worse. As disturbing as what I went through was, it is a relatively normal story for people who stayed at the TTI. I know many people who have ended up with C-PTSD after leaving, and 317 teens have died while in the industry. It’s destroyed most of us emotionally. Every month I find out about another one of my friends who I met in the TTI having committed suicide from the lack of treatment and trauma endured in the industry. That’s why I’m saying all this; I’m writing my story for justice, for those who can no longer speak for themselves.
~Cate Young
TTI = Troubled Teen Industry
RTC = Residential Treatment Center
PHP = Partial Hospitalization Program
DCFS = Department of Children and Family Services