My heart breaks for all his loved ones, especially his parents.
MOO, the troubled teen industry in this country was designed to prey on loving & desperate parents who already feel like they’ve failed their child.
The parental desperation is absolutely targeted for exploitation, MOO, and mostly only anemically (at best) regulated.
Our kids, troubled or not, deserve so much better.
It is. When you've taken all the steps the kid's school has suggested (individual therapy, family therapy, meds, PHP daytime mental health programs, gotten an IEP/504 plan, week long inpatient stay) and your kid is still not going to school/or is failing/or is in trouble constantly with the school or the law, you start to feel desperate. There's short term residential therapy, but there aren't a ton of them, they have loooooong waiting lists, and insurance often doesn't cover them fully. Plus--most of them only accept kids who agree to go, no involuntary. And if you have a slightly older teen--you've got a time limit. About age 17 is when suddenly a lot of places don't consider your kid a teen any more but they aren't 18 so they can't be in adult programs. So you have a year there where you still have full parental rights--but few places that will work with that age group. If your kid is using drugs or alcohol, it's all even more complicated. You feel like you have a ticking time bomb in your hands, everyone around you is telling you that you must fix "the problem" immediately, but no one and nothing is actually helping in a concrete way. And you are terrified for your child to the point where you can barely think of anything else.
And that's when these wilderness programs get you. Heck, they even pop up in Psychology Today's results when you use their database to look for residential programs. And once you've searched online for anything regarding this topic, you'll get ads for the places everywhere. Schools or therapists recommend them when they feel like you've gone through all your options, but often don't have direct experience with any particular one. And if someone has heard even one success story from a relative or a friend of a friend or even on a message board, a parent is a lot more likely to hold onto that as a truth and be willing to ignore all the negative reviews and personal anecdotes. Because at that point, parents feel like there are no options left.
Luckily for my son, we didn't have to go past short term residential--and even that was a gut wrenching, highly researched decision, esp during the first months of a freaking pandemic. But I remember that places like these wilderness camps were suggested to us by well meaning but uninformed people.
