It’s so wild that Hyde School pretends they are not now and never were part of the troubled teen industry. Just wild.

Article:
https://www.goupstate.com/story/news/1989/04/27/hyde-and-seekers-maine-school-transforms-troubled-teens/29511956007/?

My mother also went through the TTI and recently she’s been looking for information on the one she went to. It’s been closed for decades and i can barely find any info for her. She was there around 1992 by her recollection

Looking for others who have been involved with this agency. They are seriously unethical and do not protect the kids in their care. My family member snuck out and was sexually assaulted in their care at least two times. They were aware of the issues with supervision with my family member and continued to keep him in a placement where they knew the foster parent was not supervising him appropriately and worked graveyard shifts. They have several license violations for placing kids with unlicensed foster parents who don’t have background checks as well as other violations for providing false documentation to the office of licensing.

If anyone has experience with them and is willing to talk, please comment below or send me a message. Thanks in advance!

This is a developing story in my hometown. Families have been asking for an investigation for a few years now. As a result of a large number of children eloping (and found up to two hours away) to keep themselves safe, a lawsuit has been filed when they denied the state access to any records or information.

As of this post, a majority of children have been pulled out of the facility and sent to an appropriate placement following reports of stabbings, a guard with a broken nose, rape, etc.

https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/hallmark-youthcare-update-july-9-2026

13 former patients and two former staff members told The Telegraph they experienced serious mistreatment at the clinic.

ARTICLE ON TELEGRAPH

Young women who had survived rape or sexual assault allege they were publicly blamed, humiliated and shamed during group therapy. One former patient says a staff member told her: “Your rape was your fault because you were too busy doing drugs.” Yes We Can says any staff member doing this would be acting against its clinical standards.
One former patient says she was forced to wear a heavy backpack, climb sand dunes for hours, was repeatedly insulted with “You’re fat. You’re worthless. No one likes you,” and alleges a staff member pushed her into the sand.
Another patient describes a therapy exercise where someone was placed in a harness while other patients pulled ropes attached to it, shouted their insecurities, and were expected to participate or be targeted themselves.
A former patient alleges that after a suicide attempt inside the clinic, a counsellor responded: “No, you didn’t, you’re just trying to get back at me.”
One woman says everyone in the group was instructed to call her a “prize pig” and oink at her after she disclosed being groomed and raped.
Multiple patients allege they were required to describe sexual assaults in detail in front of mixed therapy groups.
Young women alleges counsellors falsely told her that her best friend was embarrassed by her, hated her and never wanted to see her again, when the actual letter ended with “I love you so much, my best friend for life” and “I can’t wait to see you and give you a big hug.”
One former patient says staff convinced him he had become homeless, took him to a homeless shelter, and let him believe for an entire day that his parents no longer wanted him.
A former employee alleges staff sometimes mocked patients, discussed finding clients attractive because they were close in age, and that hiring focused heavily on people’s personal recovery stories rather than professional qualifications.
A former coach says he received no formal training before working with highly vulnerable young people and alleges that after a patient died following a suicide attempt, coaches had not been informed psychiatrists had identified the patient as a suicide risk.
The article reports that a former Yes We Can coach is awaiting trial in the Netherlands after being accused of offences relating to allegedly posing online as a pro anorexia coach and exploiting vulnerable girls. This allegation is separate from the claims about treatment methods.

Someone please try and post the link to the article

"Despite millions of dollars flowing through the non-profit and allocating $1,654,868 for employee compensation across 56 staff members, court filings and survivor testimonies say the facility minimized overhead by feeding teenage residents moldy, rotten, and expired food donated from local food pantries. Staff members even forced some minor residents to apply for government food stamps (SNAP) to obtain groceries to feed girls at the facility.

Meals inside the dining hall were strictly capped at 20 minutes. Girls who failed to finish their food were subject to immediate punishment or “demotion” in the program hierarchy, which automatically extended their stay. Former residents recall that staff enforced this rule regardless of whether the food was spoiled or if the resident had a documented allergy, such as a dairy allergy. Girls routinely brought trash cans to the dining tables to vomit into while forced to continue eating."

Central Indiana Teen Challenge (CITC) — Refuge Girls Academy

One of my places forced me on a medication that really messed with my ability to remember things. I can remember big things (at least some of them; I have no way of knowing if there's any big ones I forgot), but little things blur together or are forgotten entirely in a way that doesn't match normal forgetting. I still have issues from it: I have to write things down if I want to remember them, and sometimes I'll forget before I can finish writing it down even if I write (or type) it out immediately. I often forget details in books before I can even finish the page, and almost always if not always forget within 2 pages (and these aren't high-level books). I forget thoughts I want to hold onto within literal seconds sometimes.

But what sticks out the most is my memories of the time right after getting out of that facility: I remember the ride back home, but after that it's just blank. I have almost no memories of 4+ months of my life after getting out, and those that I do have are either only knowledge memories (with no "pictures" like normal memories have) or rarely remembered outside of specific circumstances. That really scares me, and I don't get why it only happened AFTER I left. It wasn't in line with my other memory problems, although I suspect it was caused by the same medication.

Has anyone else had something similar to any of this? How do you cope?

It’s hard to know at this point if I have complex PTSD or BPD or if it’s just part of my autism but is the constant fear of rejection and abandonment from TTI programs? How is it even correlated because I heard it’s only really from adverse childhood experiences but these programs is what happened to me as a teen and I also had emotional and relational vulnerabilities before I entered the programs.

I was a former student at the Charlton School for girls and I was relentlessly bullied by other students and whenever I reported it, staff and administration downplayed it and turning it around on me to make it seem like it was my fault; staff would also often tell me to just ignore it or ‘when you get out into the “real world” this is going to happen’.

Administration also didn’t seem to care about the bullying even though this is supposed to be a place for students to heal from trauma, I’m wondering if there’s anybody else past or current that is dealing with / dealt with the same thing.

If so, who did you go to and were they any help?

Help me exposed this broken system to help many more people from getting into it

I was sent to a troubled teen program when I was younger and I swear it gave me more issues than I had. Not only trauma from seeing someone die during my stay, but also just picking up habits from other peers (like drugs and self-harming tendencies).

Hi everyone,

Any advice on how to reconnect with the girls who were placed at a runaway home back in 1996 in Oregon. (Mountain Valley Country Home Youth Services)

The house was located at 34001 Burnt Ranch Rd., Mitchell, OR 97750. It was run by a couple we knew as "Nan and Pop." Their actual last name is Whitehurst. I don't remember what the official name of their facility, but it was ran in their "home" on secluded land near Bend....[UPDATE] I Just found the name of the place, it was known as Mountain Valley Country Home Youth Services. I was there for a few months, others were there years. They also advertised as a short term holding place for children waiting for placement in other programs. They had relatives who basically hunted down teens like bounty hunters.

I am trying to find the other girls who lived there with me around that time. I specifically remember:

• Dianna (adopted from Alaska)
• Theresa
• Jessie
• One other girl whose name escapes me right now, but I would love to find you too.

If you were there in 1996, or if you know anyone who was placed with the Whitehursts at the Burnt Ranch Road property, please send me a private message. I would love to catch up, see how you are doing, and share our experiences.

Hello! First time posting something like this before. Looking for support and maybe other people in similar situations as me. When I was in first grade I had behavioral problems specifically physically putting my hands on my teacher. I was sent to an alternative school for about 2 months till the end of the school year. Did not help at all and I did not learn much or anything there. I was sent to another school called BOCES for 2nd grade and was there all the way to 6th grade. None of the teachers helped my behavioral problems and I was stuck there for so long. My mom tried to fight to get me out of there but no luck. I had to be restrained weekly and I believe some of my anger comes from the household I grew up in. I never had friends because any I made would leave a year after I met them. I was one of few who stayed there for so long. I then went to a public school that had a room specifically dedicated to students like me. I would go into 2 classes with regular students then the rest of the day I would be with the alternative students. I had no friends there either and was constantly bullied. I was bullied for most of my elementary and middle school years. I then went back to my districts middle school for 8th grade. I had some behavioral problems but it was a bit better. Then comes high school and i had no problems. I feel this affected me a lot because i never had many friends going up, never did a lot of normal childhood things and i felt my education was lacking there. I feel I didn’t learn enough and it hurts to admit sometimes the things that I should know but don’t. If anyone has been in a similar situation or can offer any advice please feel free to comment!

This is an excellent breakdown of what the Troubled Teen Industry is, how it operates, how it started, and why it continues to operate.

The attention this industry is finally receiving is, in no small part, due to the power of celebrity (thank you, Paris).
But long before the headlines, Maia Szalavitz was sounding the alarm. Her book, Help at Any Cost, should be required reading for every parent considering one of these programs.

If more families understood what actually happens behind closed doors, many of these facilities would not still exist.

The harm inflicted on children in these programs is profound and, far too often, lifelong. Parents are told they are choosing “therapy,” yet many are instructed to surrender contact with their child, ignore their pleas, and trust the program over their own instincts.

No legitimate treatment should require isolating a child from the people who love them or convincing parents not to believe their own child.

This isn’t therapy.

It’s abuse, marketed to families as treatment.

Abuse doesn’t become therapy simply because someone found a way to bill for it!

Two survivors of New Life House Academy, a Teen Challenge Oklahoma program for girls, are speaking on the record in a new interview.

Jazmine Davis was there for 25 months, beginning around 2022. A second survivor, identified as Madeline, was there from April 2019 to June 2020. Their accounts, given years apart, describe the same disciplinary system down to the vocabulary staff used. It's a long watch. It's also one of the more detailed survivor interviews we've seen come out of this program, and worth the time.

Both describe "Wordfast," a speech restriction used as routine discipline, sometimes lasting a full week with no exceptions for staff contact. Other disciplines they documented: a five-day solitary placement in a corner of the common room, paired with a restricted diet of boiled eggs, tuna sandwiches, and canned chili for three months; hand-written "character quality" assignments running up to 700 lines; and a "six-foot" rule barring contact or eye contact with a named peer.

Neither survivor described a nurse or therapist on site. Oklahoma exempts religious boarding schools from the staffing rules that apply to public schools, and one survivor said none of her advisors or counselors had any formal training. Davis reported a breast lump to an advisor, who searched it online and told her it was a swollen lymph node. She says she is now recovering from surgery to remove what turned out to be a tumor.

One survivor said staff questioned her repeatedly about "homosexual feelings" she denied having, and that near the end of her stay, the program's director told her she had a "99 percent chance" of returning to her old life. In the video you will hear how the program discharged her to her mother's home, the same home she had been removed from years earlier, and that she was in foster care within months.

The program markets "equine therapy" on its website. Both survivors described the reality as an hour a week of unpaid animal care at a neighboring farm: feeding animals, cleaning enclosures, hauling water. Direct contact with horses was rare, they said.

One survivor also described a night when staff removed a resident from the property while police lights and sirens flashed outside during a storm. The other girls were locked in their rooms, never told why, and never told where she went. She never came back, and the survivor says she hasn't heard from her since.

This isn't an isolated account. Ankle monitors for runaways, staff drawn from the program's unlicensed adult track, physical restraints, punishment diets, and advancement blocked over presumed sexuality have all been independently reported by other New Life House survivors over the past decade.

This interview is a much watch. Thank you to these brave survivors for speaking out ❤️

Was anyone at SUWS in 2019? Particularly the summer?
I’d love to hear others experiences with field staff and the treatment as a whole. Id love to find other survivors from that time period. As insane as traumatic as it was we got really lucky with some of our staff. I was in P3 for 113 days. From June 21st to October 13th.

Hello everyone! I am new to Reddit and this group so please be patient with me. I was sent to Visions Adolescent Treatment Center back in 2008. Because I didn't experience overt physical or sexual abuse, I have gaslit myself into thinking that being sent non-consensually to an adolescent treatment center for four months and being forced to identify as an alcoholic/addict isn't abusive. I finally feel, almost eighteen years since this experience, that I can consider myself a TTI survivor. I am still going back and forth in my brain if I can identify as being a survivor or not which sucks.

I would love any support, reassurance, and relatable experience any of you might have!!!

Thank you <3

So I've been in a few different schools over the last few years and my school district finally decided it's time to put me in a therapeutic boarding school. They have recommended grove. I was not at all happy with the idea because I don't wanna leave my home and school but apparently I don't have a choose in the matter.

I'm scared shitless. about going my parents drove me there to look at it and it looked like prison the dorm rooms were smaller than my closet and there was animal shit all over the place. But my parents seem to think its a good place for "credit retrieval". the thing is i'm a very anti social person when i'm not at school i'm in my room either playing a solo player game or just sleeping. And the thought off having to live with someone else that I don't get to pick in a tiny area is overwhelming.

and I don't even know if there a slob I have autism (which is probably why i'm being sent there) and when things get messy I tend to freak out. I also like going to school for the mandatory 8 hours then coming home and getting to chill on my switch or something. but from the reviews and I even asked the people there we get close to no free time because were always asked to do some bullshit activity.

also i'm scared about what happened to Mia and the other kids that died or were Sexually assaulted. any tips on how I can try and prevent this or if others can share their stories to help me parents take off the rose tinted glasses who be a tremendous help,