I have been watching the documentary “The program”.. which has truly horrified me, but is something Ive watched many documentaries about.

My dad is a retired RN who I just found out worked at vision quest AZ as a nurse for maybe a year during this time.

He was abusive at home, in a few ways. My mother just casually informed me of this and I had NO IDEA he worked there. She also stated the program even told her “you know he has serious issues himself” over a phone call. This makes me wonder what my dad may have contributed to.

Now I am curious if anyone was there that may have known him. Idk I feel crazy.

Im sorry to all survivors of institutions like this and I can’t fathom the experience you have had.

This is like finding out a crazy family secret…. My mom swears she told us about it but I know she never did.

ok somwone plzzzz tell me why its a thing to glorify treatment. im not sure who has gone to treatment and would reccoment it to anyone else but that is what is happening because when my parents told me they wanted me to go to treatment i was thrilled i genuily thought it would be a chill place where i could sit around with a bunch of kids and humor mask lol oh how stupid i was

Hi i curently go to alpine academy and am in oakridge. alpine is the complete wrong place for me I am not a toruble teen yes I have some disobedience issues at home but i do great at school and almost all other aspects of my life I have pracitcally completed alpine academys program in 6 months yet my parents still wont take me home any ideas on how I can convince them

I thought my program may have been an outlier because the director held the title of Reverend with zero education. I just watched The Program on Netflix and apparently that's a common thing.

I (30’s, “graduated” from my program in 2009) just had a huge epiphany about why I feel so anxious talking in groups of people. I have a lot of friends and am very social and I’m a confident public speaker as well. But put me in a group of people? I get sweaty and anxious and clam up. And if that group of people is standing in a circle? Or worse sitting down in a circle? I am absolutely silent. If someone tries to engage me in a conversation I answer as minimally as possible and then deflect the attention somewhere else.

I just made the connection between my anxiety speaking in a group and my experiences of attack therapy when I was in the tti.

I attended the Oakley School + Elevations in mid to late 2010s. I am currently seeking a settlement, at the very least. Suggestions of any cutthroat lawyers with experience in this industry?

TW >!death!< . . . . . We recently lost a cousin who was sent to a school as a teen. It was very clear for years before that he was struggling and we offered to take him in ourselves or to pay for a military school we were familiar with (this kid desperately needed structure and connection). We knew the school they chose was terrible and we told them and told them. They told us that it changed and was “therapeutic” now. It wasn’t.

He came home and tried for a few years to make a life for himself. Ultimately, he became addicted to narcotics. Again, we offered to take him in or pay for rehabs and his parents blocked us every time. Now he’s gone and I’m so angry. His parents are acting like martyrs, like they’re not the ones who caused this.

I was wondering if there’s a database of kids who have died from addiction after going to a T school or camp? I was thinking if parents were confronted with overwhelming statistics that maybe things would change.

I decided to write a testimony about my experience with the TTI for somebodies' class project, and I wanted to post it here as a warning to parents that are thinking about putting their kids through this. DON'T DO IT!

WARNING!! THERE ARE ACCOUNTS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND RACISM IN THIS TESTIMONY!

It goes back quite awhile. When I was 2 years old I was molested by my babysitter multiple times. I was able to tell my parents about what she did to me in my own 2-year-old way and they decided to put me into therapy. Idk if it was the therapy or what happened to me, but I always saw myself as different than the other kids. Sometimes I would act out because I felt soo different and misunderstood. My mother also suffered from her own mental health challenges, so it became a kind of toxic environment as a child.  I did not do well with her and with home life. Throughout my childhood, my mother and I would fight a lot. There were times it got physical, she and my father would punish my for my outbursts in all types of way. They would drag me around the house by my earlobe, hit me with objects, and make me feel horrible about myself. My outside of home life was a lot better. I had began to make friends and I would try to spend every waking moment outside of my house with other kids as a form of escape.

Fast forward to when I was 14. My life at home had deteriorated and there was one incident that led to the choice to send me away. I got into a screaming match with my mother (I can’t remember what it was about) and I picked up one of their antique wooden chairs and slammed it into the ground out of anger. The legs shattered and the chair was destroyed. They immediately called the police and had me committed to a psychiatric hospital on a 302 involuntary stay. I was there for 2 weeks and while I was there, I was referred to a partial program where group therapy and psychiatric counseling would be provided to me.

While I was in the partial program, my parents were referred to an educational consultant named Andy Erkis. Andy specialized in having kids sent away to faraway treatment centers and pushed for children to be transported against their will to these programs. He first referred my parents to a “summer camp” called Wediko. I was signed up to go there in the summer. My parents lied to me and told me I would be staying with my cousin in Maine for the summer. We flew up to Boston, then drove to this camp. When they dropped me off I said “this isn’t Taylor's house” They pushed me out of the car and left me there.

This summer camp was nothing like the summer camps you would expect. It was a “therapeutic” camp where all types of children with behavioral problems were sent to. This place was a living hell and my introduction to the behavioral modification industry. This is where I was first restrained. Counselors at this camp were young and had very little experience with mental health, but they had a lot of experience with grabbing a child and holding them on the ground in a very uncomfortable position for extended periods of time. I remember one restraint that was done on me, in my bed, where the counselor grabbed the back of my neck and slammed my chin into the bed while keeping his knee on my back for what seemed like an hour. I thought I was going to die. My brain went into fight or flight mode and I struggled trying to free myself while yelling “get the hell off me, I can’t breath.” This camp was also very negligent. They never gave out bug spray and just did not care about the well-being of the kids. My arms and legs were covered in bug bites, and I mean COVERED. I had 100s of bites and nothing was done about it. I suspect it was a combination of mosquito bites and bed bug bites because the place was filthy. After getting through Wediko it was on to the next step in my “treatment” process.

Andy and my parents had been talking and he said I needed more intensive care. It was decided that I would attend Gateway Academy in Draper, Utah. I was told all types of lies about how fun this school was. How everybody got along, and it was some sort of outdoor adventure school where I would get to learn how to kayak, rock climb and raft at. I went willingly but I was deceived.

When I got to Gateway, I realized everything I had been told was a lie. This “school” wasn’t a school at all. It was facility made to crush kids spirits. They had level system. You start out on orientation and work your way through the levels being brainwashed in the process. I never even attempted to work my way through the levels. Each level had rules and privileges. On orientation, you were not allowed to talk to anybody but staff and upper-level students. I never cared about the rules and would talk to whoever I felt like talking to. I saw their system as wrong and authoritarian and as a result I just didn’t care.

After 3-4 weeks of not working the program, they told my parents to start looking for other options. Andy suggested Second Nature, a wilderness program, to them. The next night, I was awakened in my sleep by 2 large Samoan men and told I’d be going with them. They pulled out a pair of handcuffs and said “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.” After all the restraints I was put through at Wediko, I knew what they meant and came willingly instead of being put through more physical abuse. We drove into the mountains for hours and I eventually fell asleep.

When I woke up, I had arrived at the Second Nature Base Camp. The first thing they did was strip me of all my items, strip me naked, and put me inside a nurses office. Inside the nurses office an old lady came in to give me an exam. She did all the normal nurse stuff, but then came the weird part. She had to do a testicular cancer examination. She spent 2 minutes thoroughly rubbing on my testicles and then touched my penis and started rubbing on it as well. I immediately felt violated. It was a terrible start to my 2 and a half month long stay in the mountains and desert of Utah.

After being completely violated by the nurse, I was made to fill-out a few surveys and then loaded into a truck to be transported to my group. At this point, everything became a haze and I can only remember certain details. I remember coming into the group and being introduced to one of the staff members named “Poncho”. I think Poncho was an alias he went by to keep kids from using his real identity in future testimonies. Poncho wasn’t actually a bad guy, but he worked for an abusive program.

Second Nature, like Gateway, used a level system. The initial phase was called Earth phase. In earth phase, you are separated from the group and not allowed to speak to any of the other kids. They make you write a testimony about why you got sent there and you are not allowed to interact with the group until you complete the testimony and have your initiation ceremony. I took 2 days before I even started writing it. I was still in shock. Shock that my parents would put me through this, shock that I was sexually assaulted by an old lady, just shocked. I started writing after receiving some encouragement from the staff. Being told “Your life will be sooo much easier once you get this done.” When I finally thought I completed it, I handed it to a staff member to go over. It wasn’t good enough. I was made to write more and so I did. I admitted to everything my parents wanted to hear and more. Even some things I didn’t do like “smoking pot with my classmate.” They finally accepted it after about 5 or 6 days and that night we had my initiation ceremony. Btw during all of this we had to go on several grueling hikes with 70 lb packs on our backs as we went from campsite to campsite.

During the initiation ceremony I got to introduce myself to the group by going over all the traumatic and shameful things that happened to me leading up to me being sent there. I cried in front of 6 other kids I had never met before. I felt very uncomfortable, and then a nuclear bomb was dropped. I was told by staff that my parents had also sent in a letter and they would be reading it to me and the entire group. My heart sank into my chest. I did not want to be publicly humiliated anymore but there was no getting out of it. They were already reading the letter. My parents blamed me for my bad behavior and shamed me throughout the entire letter. They took no responsibility for their mistakes and put all the blame on me. I was heartbroken and wanted to be alone.

After the ceremony, I moved up to Fire phase. In fire phase I got to be part of the group and I got to participate in activities such gathering wood, digging a latrine for us to go to the bathroom in, setting up camp, Laying out tarps which we used as tents, and creating fire kits. Fire kits consisted of a dry fireboard (usually carved from the stump of a sage bush), a bow, a spindle (also made from sage wood), and a top rock. I, after being traumatized the night before, wanted no parts of it. When I woke up and saw the kids doing busy work, I bolted. I made it about 100 yards before one of the staff members caught me from behind and tackled me into the dirt. I was restrained for the 1^(st) time since wediko. Idk if this restraint wasn’t as bad as the ones I faced in wediko or if my brain just went numb to it and told me to stop fighting it, but this restraint didn’t impact me as severely down the line as the other ones. I was dragged back to the campsite and put on “run watch”.

During run watch you always have to be within an arms reach of the staff and you have to sleep under a tarp weighed down by 2 adults on either side of you. There was no privacy. I couldn’t sleep because I felt sooo restricted. I stayed up all night the 1^(st) night and sobbed. The next morning, they brought me to the side and told me “There’s a time and a place for crying and that’s not when we’re trying to sleep.”

I got out of run watch after about a week and I was back to being able to do chores. There were also assignments for us to do, but I honestly didn’t care about progressing through their level system so I disregarded them. After multiple group therapy sessions, my embarrassment increased, and I started to have suicidal thoughts. I told the staff "I’d rather be dead than have to do this bullshit!” I was put on suicide watch. Suicide watch was almost identical to run watch except I wasn’t allowed to have sharp objects.

This is where things really start to get hazy, I remember I was doing sooo badly that I had to be taken on an isolation mission at some point. This is where they come pick you up from the group in a vehicle and take you to a separate campsite by yourself with a staff member. I just remember talking to her (the staff member) and doing a few hikes for a couple of days and then being brought back to the group.

It was near the end of my stay with second nature. I was told I would be taken to a more long-term facility called Logan River Academy. Where I would complete my treatment. I was excited because I thought my nightmare was over. Little did I know, this was just the beginning.

I was transported to Logan River Academy in early November, 2006. When I arrived it was like Deja Vu. I went through the exact same steps I was put through at the base camp of second nature. I had a medical check-up, only this time I wasn’t sexually assaulted. Then I was taken up to the 3^(rd) floor to a unit called Devo. I was put into a room and once again strip searched. This time a male staff member inspected my entire body, looking for contraband and tattoos or birthmarks. I was made to spread my butt cheeks apart and cough as the staff continued to watch me. All my clothes were removed from my possession and I was given sweats. I was told I would be on “suicide precaution” because of what happened at second Nature.

While on suicide precaution I was forced to stay up in Devo, which was the disciplinary unit where kids are forced to sit in chair structure all day and if they violate chair structure more time will be added to their disciplinary sentence. I was up there for 3 days and in those 3 days I saw something that forever scarred me and scared me into participating in the program. There was a little kid, he couldn’t have been more than 95 lbs., and he was up there on run precaution after a run attempt that happened before I got there. The staff members, who were big burly college football players and ex-marines, were very intimidating and they had shoved this kid into one of the solitary confinement room across the hall. The kid then proceeded to mock and berate the staff members. Their reaction shook me. They rushed into the solitary room (also called observation) grabbed this little kid and slammed him into the wall so hard the entire room shock. He went through the plaster and then they violently restrained him for what felt like a very long time until he ran out of energy and passed out. At that moment, I knew I had to comply with their bullshit. After those 3 days, I was taken to my unit and learned a valuable phrase from the other kids “fake it til you make it.” and so that’s the philosophy I lived by for the next 7 months.

Soooo many bad things happened there, and my parents were manipulated by the program every step of the way. We also had a level system here, levels 1-8. I never actually progressed all the way through, but I did do very well in school, so they did eventually let me out. I made it to level 5 by the end of my stay. On level 2, though, they start allowing you to have monitored phone calls with your parents. This is part of the manipulation because if we were to tell our parents what was actually going on or tried to tell them about any of the abusive things that were happening, the therapist monitoring the phone call would cut it off. Then they would tell your parents that YOU were the actual manipulator, and they would punish you with a Class III violation called “manipulation” and you would have to spend about 3 days in Devo.

So here I was, emotionally battered, scared into submission, trapped, and finally on my unit. One of the kids in there had told me he was about to hit his 3^(rd) anniversary of being in the program, he also told me that he had tried to run in the past and his plans were foiled. That they threw the book at him, and he ended up in Devo for 4 months and they had to restart his level progression. Now, being even more scared, I figured the only way out was to work their program and progress.

So, I did. I would follow the rules to a T and try as hard as I could to keep myself out of Devo and keep my stay as short as possible.  It worked. I only spent 7 months there. I do wanna highlight some abuses I saw there, though, especially concerning the staff. The staff members would play favorites with kids. I know I received preferential treatment because I rarely gave them a hard time, but other kids weren’t so lucky. On a daily basis, I would see other kids get restrained, put on “chair” (which is basically a timeout where you have to sit on the ground with your hands behind your back starring at wall for 30 minutes or however long it for you to calm down), have their health problems neglected, and there was unpunished racism and antisemitism from other kids. I come from a Jewish background, my father is Jewish, and I have some identifiable characteristics. Kids would target me for that every day. They called me “Judenberg” and “Jewcan Sam” and they would NEVER be punished for it. In fact, some staff members encouraged it. It felt like a massive injustice. I had to endure this my entire stay, and nobody ever stuck up for except 1 other Jewish kid.

There was also one time where another kid in my group was having serious bowel issues. This kid could not go to the bathroom for over a week and kept asking to go to the hospital. They denied his request over and over again and eventually after 2 weeks they brought in an enema and made him use it thinking it would make a difference. It didn’t. His health deteriorated and eventually his parent found out and pulled him out of the program. Thank god his parents intervened because he was on the verge of getting really sick.

Another incident that happened, and idk how true this is but for years I was convinced it was, happened when a former student came back to the program 3 months after she graduated. She said she was talking one of the male staff members via Myspace during the 3 month interval she was at home for. When she came back, her and that staff member became very close, there were times where they would disappear together for an hour+ at a time. A rumor started that they were having sex. I believed it because the whole thing was super suspicious. So, I started talking about it to the other kids. The staff members caught wind of this and came to me and threatened me with a Class IV “program manipulation” violation. It didn’t stop me, though. I felt the situation was too odd and I felt an injustice was being done. Eventually they did punish me for talking about it. Which was the last time I was punished. I spent about a week in Devo and then came back to my unit and was a good little boy for the rest of my stay.

It was finally time for me to leave in July. I had basically convinced my therapist I was a really good kid and didn’t deserve to be there. He saw how good my grades were and how well-behaved I was for the majority of my stay and he agreed to let me move on from the program, and so I did! I was sooo excited to get to leave and just be a normal teenager finally. On my trip to the airport where I was taken by a staff member. We were on our way and once we got into SLC he pulled into a gas station and said to me “I wanna give you your first taste of freedom.” He pulled out a beer and a cigarette and handed them to me. I took it, we sat there and smoked and drank, but in my mind, I was thinking “this is super weird. LRA demonized alcohol and tobacco to me for months and now this guy is doing this.” Mind you, I was not a smoker or drinker before I went through treatment. This was my first cigarette in my life. When I tried to inhale, I coughed violently because I didn’t even know what I was doing.  We then went to the airport and I was finally free!!!

Pacific Quest, Hilo Hawaii:

(repost because PQ abused me so badly I am scared to speak on it) Also, it's a lie they don't use transporters, they took most of us at 3 am in the night from our beds.

​

Pacific Quest Premises

PS: I went willingly to PQ, I actually complied with the transporters. However, I soon realized that was a mistake. I trusted my parents and thought they would never hurt me, turns out this place would suck any ounce of joy I had left in me.

I am reluctant to even speak about what happened to me here because I feel like these wicked people will come after me and hurt me further, but this program sets out to harm kids. They tackle you to the ground, restrain you, force you to take pills, and make you do manual labor all day. You get 1 letter a week, no phone calls. You are allowed no music, singing, anything. All you do is manual labor all day, no education, and get restrained if you try to escape. You can't call the cops, and your parents don't even know what they are doing to you. I was strip searched every singly night in front of other kids. They line you up shoulder to shoulder for "search a student" and then strip search you, making you shake out your hair, your bra, your underwear, your everything right in front of everyone. I don't feel like a human being anymore. This happened every single night.

​

They think it's an oasis cause it's in Hawaii, it's a living hell. Right in the middle of nowhere off the side of the highway, you have Pacific Quest. Here is where kids stay for 3 months before being transferred to a therapeutic boarding school in Utah or Montana. I love how in all these places the websites lie... You never leave the premise, so all those pictures of Hawaii are cute stock photos, but you are confined to two manual labor yards and a few picnic tables. You can't move without permission, and you need two staff with you at all times so you can't escape. Alarms on every doors, required to ring bells in the outside porta-potty, there is no chance of escape or any privacy. "Fae water on!" as staff watch the bathroom.

​

jail lockdown bunk (you can't move past the dividing walls, you have to beg to use the bathroom, of course you can't talk either)

​

The one true picture is where we slept at night, which was the only indoor space beside moldy showers which we cleaned once a month with drain cleaner that burned our lungs. If we tried to go to the bathroom, they would get on the radio and radio us to the bathroom where we would be watched... Not to mention the nightly jail lineup against a wall and strip search. "Eyes forward to give the other residents privacy." How violating is that? I think that was the most degrading. You can't talk without staff listening, you can't talk in general because you have to be "mindful," and you can't form any meaningful relationships. All conversations are on staff approved topics. Many of us begged to go to prison instead even though we committed no crimes, most of us had just been depressed, or had arguments with our parents. In jail you get recreational time, an education, etc. Here you get nothing, like actually nothing.

Talk about nothing, you aren't even given medical care because there are zero doctors. Kids die there, it's been closed down before, don't send your kid there because the website is pretty. A "therapist" drives in once a week to see you and leaves that parking lot in the picture. That is all you get. The rest of the time your kid will be with 20 year olds who say "get up and move, motherfucker." I was a sweet, well behaved student who was struggling a bit at home. My parents thought this was an oasis because of the website and it being Hawaii, they were wrong. Look at the owners too. I found out they worked as leaders in the Coral Reef Academy, SUWS wilderness in Idaho, and the Oakley School, all of them shut down for abuse. Makes sense since they opened an abusive program right in that image. Go check out their resumes on the website under our staff. They are so dumb they literally advertise the fact that they worked at abusive programs that got shut down by the government. *Is it Pacific Quest, seems more like Death Quest.*

​

I watched IVY ridge and although it was horrible, PQ has 0 education, nothing. There is no facility, it is manual labor all day in their "horticulture garden" where you chop down trees and dig holes. There are levels, but as you move up you don't even get any extra privileges. I realized early on as I watched other girls get sent to a therapeutic boarding school that even if you do everything you are told, you still get sent away. There is no way out. None. Once you are in the program attempts to manipulate families into believing their child needs more and more "care." They restrict communication so heavily that you can barely even get a letter out once a week since it has to be staff-approved. Girls and Boys were shoved to the ground and came back at night crying with gashes and blood all over since they tried escaping. Is this treatment, or is it prison? Or sorry, it's 10x worse than prison. Prison is under the government, this isn't regulated at all. I too came back at night with cuts all over after I tried to run away one night to contact police. I will talk more about my experience once I am in a better place and know that I am safe to release more information. I don't want the program to know who's writing this. They are so evil, they told me "here in Hawaii, we can give kids a licking," which I later learnt meant they could physically hurt us? Who says that to a kid? I was scared shitless. Don't fucking do this to your kid, they could die, or at the very least have extreme PTSD and in some cases, probably suicidal ideation. Nobody leaves Pacific Quest okay, nobody does. This is sick, don't do this to kids.

​

Also, please reach out to me if you can offer support. PQ left me feeling degraded, useless, and honestly extreme fear where I can barely move without crying. I am really scared and this is a cry for help, we all need help. Someone get this place shut down kids are currently in there being abuse right now. I am scared for my life, and theirs. Let's do something about this.

It’s odd to me how much of a tie all of these troubled teen ‘schools’ connect back to a Mormon faith. Look at Ivy Ridge and the Lichfields…. They all have a Mormon upbringing. The church has a history of ties to child abusers. Look at the Ruby Franke Case!!! She is a devout LDS member. She sent her son to Anasazi and then created her own concentration camp like environment while abusing her two young children. What do you guys think….

This guy has gone incognito on the web. What is his newest abuse scam?

LinkedIn: He spells his name L Jay Mitchell on linked in, not to be confused with a DIFFERENT (correct me if I'm wrong) someone else with a similar name on that site (LJ Mitchell) that I believe is a trustee for Caedmon and involved with Dalton School.

Can't find anything about what he has done since Greenbrier was shut down. Even the 'Staff List' on Unsilenced.org from Greenbrier Academy in WV is scrubbed. (Also can't find the website archives anymore from GBA)

What happened to the slew of people he took from Alldredge Academy to start Greenbrier. He had many minimum wage employees at Alldredge that became leaders at Greenbrier, none of which I saw had any mention of their prior affiliation with Alldredge on their LinkedIns. Coincidence, or legal advice from LJ himself? As a former student at Alldredge, I recognized so many staff when the Greenbrier site was up and running. Where are these people now? Have they followed him again?

I know the following GBA staff came over from Alldredge after it was shut down, following LJ: Paul Fowler, Mike Beswick, Kevin Frick, Misty Meadows, Michelle Bush, John Grago, Emily Landseidel, RON SCHWENKLER, Rachel Call.. they all came from Alldredge (And some from SUWS) and worked up the ranks under LJ.

I don't see any of them currently working in education. My fear is that they are waiting for LJ to start another program, to follow him.

Because he is responsible for the death and abuse of so many students, I want to keep tabs on him.

I'm looking for people who were at copper hills in Aug 2023-October 2023!

I started a new Facebook page. It’s titled Riverview Christian academy survivors. There is also a Julian use Academy survivor page, but it appears that the students who attended since the name change haven’t found that group if you would like to join the Facebook group I’d love to see you there.

He has gotten suspended, leaves without permission ( I don't know where he goes most the time) smoking weed, and hanging with kids who break the law and are up to no good....how can I veer him in the right direction? What should I do and what shouldn't I do as a single mom?? I need help seriously

Which airline was used to facility your cross state transportation

I don’t want to mention everything I went through at CALO. But I will mention one of the worst parts.

I Got pulled after 4 months at CALO (an embark program in Missouri) I was pulled after being beaten by a staff member during a restraint after I finally had the strength to fight back when being cornered during ptsd attack. I swung, missed and then I was pinned to the ground by 6 staff (all full grown men, I am a girl who was 115lbs at the time) I fought back and ended up biting a staff member on the finger and held down tight, hoping he would let go of my head so It could stop hurting. I was screaming for them to stop…I was trying to get them to stop. I begged, I pleaded but I didn’t know the worst part was to come. The same staff member who was pushing my face into the asphalt let go (I was still holding onto his finger) I was brutally punched by the male staff member countless times until I was black and blue and bleeding. I remember them holding me in what I call “the Jesus Christ position” which is where the hold you flat on your back with your legs crossed and arms out the sides. I got a concussion they never treated me for. My “therapist” gaslighted me that I was lying and I was faking the fact that I was beaten to try to get my mother to take me home and that I was attention seeking. I remember loosing consciousness for a second as I lifted up my head and was punched so hard the back of my head slammed into the asphalt. My vision went black and I came to a few seconds later. My ears were ringing and I saw double. After all the horrible experiences I had witnessed there, I was a lucky one to get out that soon. Knowing I if he had hit me just right, I could’ve gotten a brain injury and died. I could’ve ended up like the countless kids who died at these facilities. But I didn’t..and now I’m here to fight back.

Anyone else have experiences at CALO? I’m currently suing along with 4 others and planning to shut them down. Dm me if you’d like to talk and get involved or with any questions you might have.

i understand this is kind of asking people to reach out in dms so if this is against the rules im so sorry and i will delete this post. But im in highschool and im doing a passion project on the troubled teen industry. I am required to have an interview but i dont know anyone personally whos been in troubled teen school/camp.

edit: I got a lot more replies than I was expecting , but I would really love to put everyone’s stories into my project. Anyone who’s really interested feel free to email me everything you can about your experience with the TTI or ask me for the list of questions i have if thats easier for you! Please dont make yourself uncomfortable though! My email is umuh9823@gmail.com

How come that section was shut down? I was there in 02, curious how it changed over the years, we had a girl come in from one of those wilderness programs that had frostbite so badly they had to graft skin from her ass to her arm. It looked miserable, I felt lucky that my mom was only robbed by dual-diagnosis treatment in Oregon, not far from home. Never even got a day out other than to have my nose looked at after knocked nearly sideways (literally) then returned to spend a week in the quiet room because some Newby want to cut in line. Sadly I designed their logo they used temporarily. Owners went down for tax evasion? Got out of prison by saying they were needed for day to day? I never met them and I was there for longer than their program at the time progressed. Only smoked weed and drank, honestly was afraid of other drugs until it spent time in treatment, but I did smoke about an ounce a day at 16, yeah I know I have to be smoking all the time and essentially I was. I was high so much, my mom thought I was high when I was sober. Kinda funny to be accosted on a day I hadn't smoked, plus I was taking $300/day outta her accounts for weeks before the bank got suspicious of $300 pulled out almost every midnight and alerted her. All it did was make me spin out of control through my 20s.

And honestly I just want to watch a cartoon and not be triggered. I want to watch media and not start bawling in the middle because I’m reminded of the TTI. I’d like to watch a new episode of something before bedtime and know I’m not going to ruminate about it.

But it was a good depiction of an institution setting and someone trying to escape, repercussions, how “staff” interact with “subjects” and how the lights turn on and off and how the kids were just expected to be pliant.

To the outside observers who don’t understand why this is hard for us to watch, maybe have some empathy.

Edit: the episode is called Identity Crisis and I highly recommend it. The Clone Wars, Rebels, Bad Batch seem like they’re for kids, but they’re very much for adults too. My partner is really into them, so I started following along, and I think they’re great media, not just cartoons.