Imagine you are sleeping in your bed one night when you hear unsettlingly rapid footsteps outside the door — a little too loud for a regular occurrence at 2 a.m. Suddenly, two men dressed in black break in, putting you in handcuffs and ripping you out of bed. You scream for your parents, certain that they can hear you, but they are nowhere to be found.

This is the experience of many of the 200,000 teens who are kidnapped from their homes each year, with the approval of their parents, and sent to recovery facilities. These programs are what make up the troubled teen industry (TTI): a network of programs, typically in the wilderness, where struggling adolescents are sent for recovery and rehabilitation. 

These facilities are primarily targeted at youth, typically aged 11 to 18, and are marketed to parents as therapy and treatment. However, this is far from the truth. 

Inside the industry: Life in the programs

Leanne Roberts, a 20-year-old from California, is one of the many people who spent years in the industry as a teen. From ages 12 through 17, Roberts was in and out of these “recovery” programs. She was originally sent by her parents to Trails Carolina, a North Carolina wilderness camp for troubled adolescents, to protect her from the “messier reality of divorce.” 

“There’s a lot of miscommunication and really good marketing that these programs have. I was told that I was going to a camp. My dad fully believed that he was sending me to a camp,” Roberts said. 

Liam Miller*, a Bay Area father of two, also made the decision to send his 10th-grade son to Ironwood, a recovery program in Maine, during the COVID-19 pandemic out of concern that his son was not on track to graduate from high school.

“My son understood it was important was for him to do well in school, and one of the agreements we had was if he finished high school, I would take him out of that program,” Miller said. “But it’s almost like a dark side of his past that he doesn’t want to talk much about, which I understand.”

Upon arrival, Roberts was quickly confronted with the truth that this was not a recovery camp. In fact, it appeared as the complete opposite. According to Roberts, some of the program’s practices mirrored the structure that the military goes through. Communication was extremely restricted — kids could not speak to others without a staff member listening. Speaking and eating were “privileges” that had to be earned.

“The program will filter what it will and wants to. Let’s say I write a letter that there are pinworms going around. The therapist, staff member, or admissions person might reach out to my dad prior to sending it and say, ‘Look, your kid is lying about this,’” Roberts said. “It reinforces this weird trust with the parent and the program, because the program is able to predict the kid’s manipulation tactics to just go home.”

The industry also attempts to keep its adolescents isolated by disabling access to all external connections.

“I would send him some articles that I thought he would be interested in reading. He loved sports, so I would send him sports. Then the school was like, ‘Hey, we don’t want you to do that.’ And I know he was waiting for those — that was his connection with the outside world,” Miller said. “I had to fight with the head of school to say, ‘This is too much. You’re doing too much. I want my son to be in touch with what’s going on in the world.’”

According to Roberts, consequences can range from less severe ones, such as less time to talk with friends, to more severe ones, such as food restrictions, forbiddance from speaking, or “Pee Parties,” where, if someone has to use the restroom in the middle of the night, everyone would be woken up to shame that person. 

“Their narrative was ‘Nothing is given to you. You’re entitled to nothing in this life,’” Roberts said.

In some instances, consequences can go beyond just emotional abuse. According to Unsilenced, there are records of over 350 child deaths in these facilities. In fact, in February of 2024, a 12-year-old boy was killed in his first 24 hours at Trails Carolina — the same camp Roberts was sent to — after being suffocated by a bivy sack, a waterproof sleeping cover, according to a police report released by the Transylvania County Sheriff’s Office. 

The ultimate goal of each adolescent at these camps is to return home. However, the industry is structured to prevent such occurrences. Many programs charge by the day or week, making it their incentive to keep children for as long as possible in order to maximize profit. 

“I’m sure the first thing parents want to ask a program is how long their kid will be going there for. So they’ll initially set a duration anywhere between two months. However, personally, I’ve never met a child who’s actually only been in a wilderness program for two months,” Roberts said. “They’ll say, ‘It depends on your kid’s success. It depends on the work, it depends on the progress.’ But really, they’re going to keep them there for the maximum amount of time that they possibly can.”

Through this, many of these programs capitalize on families’ desperation, according to Miller.

“The clientele that they have is a wealthy clientele. I feel sometimes they take advantage of that, because they understand that the parents are desperate for the child,” Miller said.

Combined with a fractured relationship with their parents, these programs can become prolonged separations rather than temporary solutions.

“The parents have lost trust in what their kids are saying. So they’re at the mercy of the institution. There’s no recourse,” Miller said.

Picking up the pieces: The path to stability

Youth in the industry often spend many of their teen years in these facilities. According to the National Library of Medicine, these years are crucial in all domains of development, as they are when individuals undergo profound changes both physically and psychologically. 

“When you think about, developmentally on a psychological level, the things that happen between the ages of 12 to 17, you’re having really big jumps, right? You’re having this new independence. You’re learning how to drive. When you’re 12, you’re being dropped off at the mall for the first time by yourself with your friends,” Roberts said. “Those things cannot exist in the current state of programs that we have now. Everything is chosen for you. There are no opportunities to practice autonomy, to practice choice.”

Saralyn Ruff, an associate professor specializing in youth psychology at the University of San Francisco, warns of the potential lasting effects of these abusive practices during this critical stage of growth.

“What is happening here is institutional-level traumas. When it is a whole system that is traumatizing somebody, it is a whole group that sends a unique message to an individual around how they can access services in the future, how they can make sense of things, what is trustworthy, and how they can lean on support systems,” Ruff said. “I think it creates a larger distrust of how to ask for help when they do need it, which is a significant barrier to seeking services for anything that they need in the future.”

Upon finally returning home, Roberts then faced the challenge of finding stability and adjusting to life outside the camps. After years in these wilderness programs, Roberts was conditioned to live in fear of losing privileges.

“Once you assimilate to the program, because you have to in order to thrive there or to have privileges, there’s almost this fear of you having to be the perfect daughter or the perfect child that you can be,” Roberts said. “When I came out of that, I was kind of tiptoeing around everything. I was appeasing everybody for a little bit, and obviously that’s not sustainable. But I think it really shatters any sort of trust that children have.”

Parents, too, are left to navigate the lasting impact of their decisions. After returning from Ironwood, Miller’s son went on to graduate from high school and attend college — an indication, Miller felt, that his son’s time in the industry helped him break away from negative influences and regain focus. However, Miller recognizes that sending his son to this camp led to conflicting struggles.

“I’m not sure he’s fully convinced that it was necessary. He’s grateful that he was able to make it to college and get out of the situation he was in. But I can tell you that, when he would come back home, he wasn’t hanging out with anybody, he was a bit ashamed of what he had gone through,” Miller said. “So that affected our relationship, in the sense that on one hand, he understood and was potentially borderline grateful for it, although on the other hand, he had gone through so much, and it was very hard to be away for 14 months.”

Some programs in the TTI, such as Ironwood, offer schooling. Yet, most often lack the appropriate education necessary to keep them on track. As a result, many children who go through the industry fall years behind in educational standards, according to Roberts.

“The schooling doesn’t really line up with the California state curriculum, so it screws a lot of kids over academically. It’s a really hard transition to come out of and to then be in any school system. I wasn’t actually getting an appropriate education,” Roberts said.

For many, the challenges don’t end once they leave the programs. Beyond academic and emotional setbacks, survivors are often left to rebuild their sense of stability on their own. To aid in this process, several resources have emerged to help survivors heal and reconnect. Many organizations provide support for survivors, such as Unsilenced and Breaking Code Silence. These programs offer a range of services, including support groups and individual therapy.

“Leaving the programs, the best thing you can do is heal on your own independently and to heal that relationship with what therapy means for you and to process everything,” Roberts said.

Breaking the silence: Advocacy

Teen mental health remains one of the most overlooked issues in society today. According to the National Library of Medicine, over 20% of adolescents aged 12-17 were diagnosed with a mental or behavioral condition in 2023. However, despite how widespread these struggles are, discussions surrounding them often remain taboo.

“I think there is quite a narrative that it’s easy to dismiss this as a topic because it’s taboo,” Roberts said. “You think of the troubled teen industry, and right there, in that verbiage and that name, it’s already dismissing blame onto the child, right? The child is troubled: ‘the troubled teen industry.’”

Children and teens are often misidentified as “troubled,” leading them to be misunderstood and mistreated, according to Roberts.

“Another misconception is that children sent to these facilities must have been ‘troubled,’ when in truth, many were simply neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, or struggling with typical adolescent challenges,” said Nicole Pindur, an executive assistant and community connection manager at Unsilenced.

This mindset is one of the leading factors that has helped sustain the industry for decades. In 2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report that identified thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which resulted in death, at these residential programs. However, despite these findings, there is still little federal and state regulation or oversight of these facilities. Many states completely exempt religious boarding schools from licensing requirements and oversight from education and child welfare authorities.

Advocates like Ruff stress that addressing the root of the issue begins with understanding and empathy.

“I think society oversimplifies it. They try to find solutions very quickly rather than embracing the complexity. I think when we don’t embrace the complexity, we create a divide, because nobody wants to see themselves as something that’s simple or something that can be solved,” Ruff said. “I think life is complex and challenging, and when it comes to adolescents, we need to help them hold all of that.”

Roberts utilizes her platform on TikTok to expose the overlooked realities of the troubled teen industry.

“When the second boy died in the program, it really shook me. I knew exactly what he was wearing. I was wearing the same thing at one point. I knew exactly how he was feeling,” Roberts said. “It was just deeply upsetting. It seemed that nobody was really paying attention or caring about this, and it was the second time that this has happened. This was preventable.”

While advocacy can shed light on the abuse and neglect of these institutions, meaningful change requires rethinking how society approaches mental health altogether. For many struggling individuals, the instinct is to rush toward solutions rather than understand the root of them — a mindset Ruff believes must shift.

“I think we live in a society where we’re always trying to fix things quickly, and we need other people to be okay for us. I’m not sure we are very comfortable just sitting with people when they’re not okay. And I think that’s what we need,” Ruff said.

Organizations such as Unsilenced have taken meaningful action through telling the stories of survivors, spreading awareness, advocating for legislation, and providing support for survivors.

Thanks to initiatives from these organizations and figures, such as Paris Hilton, a survivor of the industry and an advocate for abolishing youth residential treatment, progress has been made in legislation regarding the TTI. Beginning Jan. 1 of 2024, a bill was passed that required many California state-licensed residential treatment centers for youth to comply with a new law that increased transparency and oversight in these programs. The bill requires the California Department of Social Services to publish data on its website about incidents in which seclusion or restraint is used, as well as inform the parents or guardians of that adolescent, according to Governor Gavin Newsom.  

Advocates continue to strive for change in the unethical practices operating in the industry. 

“Unsilenced is further developing educational and advocacy material to inform the public about the TTI. These include presentations, trainings, and collaborations. We are also continually expanding the ways we can support litigative efforts against TTI programs,” Pindur said. 

Although the fight for accountability in the industry remains ongoing, progress has slowly begun to take shape. Survivors are reclaiming their voices through advocacy, and organizations are building momentum toward reform. 

“To young people: you are not broken, and you never need to be ‘fixed.’ Healing is possible, and your voice has power,” Pindur said.

This story was originally published on Scot Scoop News on November 20, 2025.