Troubled Teen Industry

Charles Dederich is credited with a lot of positive innovations early on in his career as a drug rehab guru. He focused on a marginalized group that most institutions wanted nothing to do with. He was said to have coined the phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." He was stern with the people around him, but he believed this tough love was necessary to achieve and maintain sobriety.

But as one might anticipate given that kind of rhetoric, a dark side emerged. Not with one single act, but with many small changes that would enable the organization to evolve into something much more dangerous. What was once a small drug rehab facility in sunny Santa Monica would become a violent, abusive and well-funded cult with satellites throughout California and beyond.

This harsh approach to helping troubled teens has a long and disturbing history. No fewer than 50 programs can trace their treatment philosophy, directly or indirectly, to an anti-drug cult called Synanon. Founded in 1958, Synanon sold itself as a cure for hardcore heroin addicts who could help each other by “breaking” new initiates with isolation, humiliation, hard labor, and sleep deprivation.

Today, troubled-teen programs use Synanon-like tactics, advertising themselves to parents as solutions for everything from poor study habits to substance misuse. However, there is little evidence that harsh behavior-modification techniques can solve these problems. Studies found that Synanon’s “encounter groups” could produce lasting psychological harm and that only 10 to 15 percent of the addicts who participated in them recovered.

Few noticed, but the Synanon mission had been shifting. In 1969 the organization dropped the goal of “graduation.” From then on, addiction could be treated only by keeping addicts within the fold. Synanon began to welcome non-addicts like Ritter, too, and Dederich suggested that he was “getting out of the dope-fiend business.” He created the “punk squad,” a sort of boot camp devoted to disciplining “juvenile delinquents” sent to Synanon by their parents and the courts. And the organization began marketing the Game as a new kind of therapy.

If the first phase of Synanon was about curing addiction, and the second phase was about creating a utopian community for the middle class, the third phase was all about making money.

The amount of money that my parents spent on these facilities is the biggest source of pain for both me and my family today.

My mother had spent all of her life savings — all of her retirement — on trying to get me better because that’s what she was told I needed by programs like his. So if he was going to expel her child because I was too gay for his taste and send me right back to the beginning, then this was not the place for her child. Because the fact of the matter is — she loves her child.

Sadly, this industry has thrived for decades thanks to a systemic lack of transparency and accountability. An estimated 120,000 young people are housed in congregate-care facilities at any given time across the country, many of them placed through the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. But there is little oversight. State inspections are typically minimal, and there is no federal or other organized data tracking placements, reporting critical incidents or monitoring quality of care.

Some information to help you better understand the “troubled teen” industry that continues to operate largely unregulated.

The “troubled teen” industry is 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. Despite numerous allegations of serious abuse that date back decades, they continue to operate in a largely unregulated way. To better understand this issue, here are five facts about the industry.

The methods used at these facilities are arguably traceable to an anti-drug cult in the 60s called the Church of Synanon. Their method was to abduct addicts and then “rehabilitate” them through beatings and humiliation. “I found that virtually all of the programs that exist today using the harshest tactics were either founded by former Synanon members or sent people to Synanon to learn the treatment,” Szalavitz told me.

Former patients have been airing their stories on Reddit and other websites, so I contacted a few of them to find out more. It soon became clear that today’s residential teen treatment centers still have all the trappings of a cult.

Reporting on these places is difficult. Most parents are not interested in talking with a reporter about sending off their kids to such programs — and the programs aren’t either. Springing up without any connection to established hospitals or institutions, the tough-love industry, we also learn, is phenomenally lucrative. Some places are well intentioned but slapdash, while the worst have been driven out of business by prosecutors. But Rosen reports that some 5,000 kids are still admitted into wilderness programs each year. According to him, even the industry’s recognized trade group, National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, doesn’t articulate or enforce standards of care — it just offers what Rosen argues is a self-reinforcing “ineffective accreditation network.”

In the nearly five decades since the first tough love residential treatment community, Synanon, introduced the idea of attack therapy as a cure for drug abuse, hundreds of thousands of young people have undergone such "therapy." These programs have both driven and been driven by the war on drugs. Synanon, for example, was aimed at fighting heroin addiction, its draconian methods justified by appeals to parents' fears that drugs could do far worse things to their children than a little rough treatment could. The idea was that only a painful experience of "hitting bottom" could end an attachment to the pleasures of drugs.

But like the drug war itself, tough love programs are ineffective, based on pseudoscience, and rooted in a brutal ideology that produces more harm than most of the problems they are supposedly aimed at addressing.