The Troubled Teen Industry: We Asked the Experts

Interviews with Marissa Y. Linderman and Kimberly A. Renninger, survivors and advocates

In my last post, I told you about my experience sending my daughter away to a therapeutic boarding school.  In this post, I’ll share with you my interviews with two experts in the field: Marissa Y. Linderman, a Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) survivor and Director of Advocacy at Unsilenced, the leading organization advocating for the shut down of Troubled Teen Industry, and Kimberly A. Renninger, a survivor who is a professional in mental health advocacy and peer support with fifteen years of experience.

First from Marissa Y. Linderman, Troubled Teen Industry Survivor and Director of Advocacy at Unsilenced: 

Unsilenced is an organization of survivors and allies, who are committed to promoting appropriate, healthy, and effective alternatives to programs within the Troubled Teen Industry. The Troubled Teen Industry, or TTI, is a network of under-regulated and powerful congregate care facilities that claim to reform youth struggling with mental health or educational challenges but use “tough love” and other non-evidence-based interventions. These programs include but are not limited to: therapeutic boarding schools, behavior modification programs, foster care facilities, residential treatment centers, boot camps, conversion camps, religious facilities, wilderness camps, and juvenile detention facilities.

Youth find themselves in congregate care placements at the hands of child welfare and juvenile justice systems, school districts, medical and mental health providers, and private placement from legal guardians. The programs use deceptive marketing to present themselves to desperate parents, therapists, state and judicial agencies, and insurance companies as treatment providers for almost every problem. They market normal teenage behavior such as talking back, breaking the rules at home, internet addiction, skipping school, and sexual exploration as abnormal and a problem that can and should be solved.

To foster better health outcomes without placement in the largely unregulated and exploitative industry, Unsilenced advocates for constructive alternatives that circumvent institutionalization for children and youth who are struggling with mental health and educational challenges. Utilizing education, awareness, community support, and policy change, Unsilenced aims to protect the civil, social, and human rights of youth. Our mission is to stop institutional child abuse by empowering self-advocates to create lasting social change. Our vision is a world where youth are free from institutionalization and the voices of young people are respected in the development of their mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

Unsilenced understands that sometimes very short-term stabilization is needed, such as when a person needs acute detox, acute care for a suicide attempt, or other imminently life-threatening situations. However, institutionalization for more than two to four weeks is developmentally devastating to a teen.  They don’t know how to assimilate when they come out of long-term institutionalization, and they have severe trauma from having their autonomy stripped away and from the various types of abuses within the TTI. The TTI takes away a teen’s autonomy over how they drive their medical care, their identity, everything.  They’re not learning the adult skills of advocating for themselves because when they try to advocate for themselves, they’re punished. Many survivors leave the TTI very distrustful of any mental health professional. As a result of their trauma from the TTI, they never seek out evidence-based, trauma-informed care after the program. 

Kids are sent to programs within the TTI for a myriad of reasons. These programs are not specialized in one particular thing. They claim that they can “fix” anything.  They pathologize normal teenage behavior, such as talking back, breaking rules, not wanting to do homework, smoking pot once, or drinking at a party once as behaviors that require long-term institutionalization. This is due to a profit-over-people model that the TTI thrives off of. A child drinking a beer at a party is not a reason to send them away for long-term institutionalization, let alone in such a punitive environment.  Kids are also sent away for things that do NOT require being “fixed,” such as being LGBTQIA+ or having consensual, safe sex with a partner. Sometimes parents send their child away simply for being themselves.  These programs say they can “fix” or “reform” any behavior - even ones that don’t require “reform.” 

It's normal for teenagers to want to explore their identity, which may look like talking back to parents or partying. Missing out on the valuable teenage years is a hindrance to childhood development and creates future struggles into adulthood. In the middle school and high school years, youth learn conflict resolution, how to socialize and make friends, how to get along with teachers, and other valuable life skills. In a TTI program, youth are not learning these critical life skills. Instead, they’re unable to talk about anything except what they’ve been told is “wrong” with them, under penalty of harsh punishment. It puts them at a disadvantage socially, academically, and developmentally.

Imagine you find yourself, as a teen, getting caught having consensual, safe sex with your partner. Then a month later you get caught with a little bit of weed on you by your parents. You’re a good kid. You are simply being a normal teenager. Now you find yourself placed by your parents into the TTI because your parents went online and Googled these highly-pathologized behaviors. The TTI has Google advertisements everywhere that are designed to scare parents and caregivers. Now you’re stuck in a punitive and abusive program against your will, far away from home, cut off from the real world completely, and stripped of your autonomy and voice. This is a common experience of TTI survivors and it is traumatic. Even parents are victims of the TTI’s fear-mongering and deceptive marketing that says, “Come give us all your money and we will ‘fix’ your child.”

I believe kids are inherently good. Many who are labeled as “bad” are not “bad” at all. They just have unmet needs. As a neurodivergent person managing bipolar I disorder with over three years sober and in eating disorder recovery, I am no stranger to the hardships that come with acute episodes of mental illness and the discrimination that comes with neurodivergence. I learned to cope with the difficulties of life. I learned to self-regulate. I live a happy, stable life today. But this was all learned and achieved through an outpatient, individual trauma specialist. The TTI, however, does not address the unmet needs of youth. They do not teach youth how to self-regulate or self-soothe. My life is as good as it is today despite the TTI.

Some youth enter a program with no previous drug-use history and no previous desire to use drugs. But they find themselves placed in a TTI program surrounded by kids who are already addicted to hard drugs, like heroin. None of these youth are “bad kids.” As I said earlier, they have unmet needs due to a broken mental healthcare system, a broken juvenile legal system, and a foster care system that was never designed to help youth at all. The problem is, many of the kids who never used drugs before get out of their program and all they want to do is try the drugs they heard about in the TTI. This is a major problem and is due to how the TTI uses shame and humiliation tactics and does not address addiction properly.

We hear many reports of youth placed in TTI programs never having tried hard drugs prior to the program, coerced into lying about doing drugs in order to fit in and receive favoritism from program staff. These youth come out traumatized, often suicidal, and many times, seeking out the hard drugs they heard about in the TTI. The TTI approaches drug-use and addiction in non-evidence-based and harmful ways. We have seen so many survivor deaths from suicide and fatal drug overdose that we can’t even keep track of how many survivors are dying.

I wish I could tell you there’s a perfect, one-size-fits-all answer to alternatives to the TTI. But it’s not that simple. Everyone is incredibly different and treatment should be truly individualized to every person. We all have different brains, bodies, and needs. At the core of this issue, every viable alternative is community-based and NOT residential.  Utilizing the community options that currently exist, even if you have to exhaust them, would be better than sending your child away to a TTI facility.  An estimated $23 billion in public funds are spent sending youth to the TTI, where over 360 youth have died.  If we took that money and poured it into communities, we would find that our youth would be a lot happier, more stable, and we would likely see a reduction in any mental health symptoms. 

At Unsilenced, we have a monthly support group for survivors led by licensed mental health professionals. We recently expanded our groups to a neurodiverse survivor support group.  We plan to expand our support groups to survivors struggling with addiction, eating disorders, and more. We also plan to expand our support groups to parents and families. 

Some other projects Unsilenced is working on are Project SPEAK and The Survivor Empowerment Initiative in our Advocacy department. Project SPEAK (Survivor Prevention through Education, Awareness, and Knowledge) is our effort to enter communities to re-educate the decision-makers in communities to interrupt the community-to-institution pipeline that currently exists. The decision makers are: caregivers, school and judicial systems, child placing agencies, healthcare professionals, and insurance companies. The Survivor Empowerment Initiative consists of Independence Packs and the above mentioned support groups. Independence Packs are given to survivors who have aged out of a facility and are re-entering society after leaving the program that contains a laptop and extensive resources surrounding education, careers, reintegration into society, mental health, and life skills.

In our IT and Tech department, our goal is to educate and raise awareness through our groundbreaking Program Archive, which has over 3,500 different programs and over 100,000 DHS reports, lawsuits, media, and survivor stories. In our Investigative Research department, we conduct comprehensive, program-specific surveys to collect data and metrics to better understand the impact of institutional child abuse and to help streamline the process of survivors reporting their programs. We are conducting IRB approved research in conjunction with The Menninger Clinic and Baylor College of Medicine.

In 2022, Unsilenced was awarded Ally of The Year by Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) for our work in protecting neurodivergent youth from abuse in congregate care facilities. Unsilenced is also working on policy change with Disability Rights California and is partnered with Big Brothers/Big Sisters Orange County and many other organizations fighting institutional child abuse. We are expanding our network of allies and policy change efforts daily.

Anyone is welcome to email info@unslienced.org to navigate their way to help their teen receive evidence-based, trauma-informed care, free from long-term institutionalization.

From Kimberly A. Renninger, CPS, Troubled Teen Industry Survivor and long term professional in mental health advocacy and peer support: 

The bottom line is that in any type of institution, when you isolate kids away from their family and where adults who are strangers have ultimate power, it’s ripe for abuse, in the best of circumstances.  Most of these places are not the best of circumstances.

I understand that sometimes parents feel like they are at the end of their rope and have no other option, but there is no truly safe program.  There are only more abusive vs. safer programs.  Unsilenced has a list of Red Flags to look for if you are considering sending your child to one of these places. If people feel like there is no other option, look at the red flags.  But know that there are no totally safe programs.

I wish more parents knew what these programs don’t want you to know: sending your child there will make it highly likely that they will live through restraints, severe medical neglect, and/or extreme emotional and physical abuse.  Knowing the connection between trauma, substance use, and suicide, a parent would not knowingly send their child to a place that will cause severe trauma.  Even in the best of circumstances, sending your kid away from home to live in an institutional setting is in and of itself traumatic.   

When parents are really terrified and desperate and scared their child isn’t going to make it, I would say to them:  Listen to your kid.  Listen to them and believe them and take what they’re saying seriously.  Don’t just write it off as “Oh you’re just an addict or you’re just an alcoholic, or you’re just that.”  Listening to kids and finding out what is really going on is the opposite of what will happen in these programs.  

I was in a residential treatment facility many states away from home.  We only got one phone call a week with our families and all calls were supervised. If we started to stay anything negative about the facility they would end the call. All our mail was read.  While I couldn’t communicate freely with my family, my “therapist” was communicating freely on a very regular basis.  

It was six months before I was allowed to talk to them on a day pass without staff hovering over.  By that time my parents had started to trust the staff and believe they were doing the right thing.  The “therapists” would say, “Well kids say things that sound bad and that’s expected manipulation.  The fact that they’re trying to get out of here is only proof that the treatment is working!”   My parents were taught to ignore anything I said.  That’s one of the Red Flags that Unsilenced has put together: if you can’t talk to your kids without staff overhearing, it’s a danger sign. 

At these facilities, they tell us that we’re screwed up and they pressure us to admit more and more things.  Eventually, it’s easy to end up buying into it yourself and it becomes your reality.  You add in the trauma and look for some way to cope with it all: many of us came in without a real substance use disorder and got one after we left.  It’s a recipe for creating exactly the thing that we were probably sent there to avoid. 

Everyone there has been labeled with a disorder.  Everything is seen through that lens.  Normal teenage behavior gets seen through this pathological lens.  Then you put a bunch of kids who have their own trauma, behaviors, and issues together in a group setting.  As you can imagine, first there’s a lot of drama, you learn all the wrong things. 

 It’s not based on healing.  I think that my parents and even some of the people who worked with me were imagining I’d be out in the desert and in nature and would be taking this time to heal.  Once I got there, they literally smashed me into the ground every day.  I learned not to trust myself and my own experiences.  That sets you up in adulthood for situations where you will be further victimized because you believe that’s what you need.  

Here is what I would want parents to know: a lot of times the assumption is if you know your kid is struggling with drugs but maybe you don’t think it’s so severe, then you put your kid into one of these programs and the staff are telling you, “Your kid is doing way worse than you ever imagined.”  Parents think or are told, “Wow, my kid was so good at hiding it.”  They assume the story after treatment is the truth and before is a lie.  But often, it’s the other way around.  The story your child was telling before treatment is closer to the truth.  The story they’re telling after treatment is what they’ve been coached to say.  I wish that my parents would have trusted their gut over trusting “professionals.”  They knew but they didn’t trust themselves; they thought that other people knew better.

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