066 The dark truth behind the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI)

Fairy shares her personal and painful journey through the troubled teen industry. For many, these facilities are sold as places for "help" or "reform," but behind their walls, children are often taken from their homes, subjected to harsh treatment, and forced into programs that can leave lasting emotional and psychological scars.

Fairy opens up about being taken from her family and sent to a facility where she faced abuse, isolation, and intense discipline. She speaks candidly about the trauma, the broken systems, and how many kids—like herself—are treated as though they need to be “fixed” instead of being supported with love and understanding. Despite the darkness, Fairy's story is one of resilience, hope, and the strength to reclaim her own voice.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:01

Hi guys, Tanika here from Multispective and I'm here to share with you a new episode where I interview Ferry about the troubled teen industry. They talk about in great detail about where it began, the Synanon cult in the 1950s and how that carried forward and opened several different branches. The purpose of this is what they call a rehabilitation residential space for troubled teenagers that may be either drug addicts, alcoholics or experiencing self-harm, weight issues. It could be LGBT or just rebellious children in general, teenagers. This is a really important episode to listen to. You'll be surprised at how many individuals maybe come from this kind of a background and potentially just need to be heard and listened and believed. So stay tuned. Please drop a comment letting me know what you think. And I would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for being on Multispective with me here today. I'm so, so excited to have you here and have you share your story on there with us.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

So glad to be here and I'm so glad that you reached out to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

So, Ferry, why don't you just start off with just telling us about your childhood, where you are, where you're from, and your family. So,

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I'm 34 years old. I was born in 1990. My parents were not married when I was born. I was born in Ohio and my mom was actually married to somebody else. So, there's this whole, you know, had to figure out my paternity and all of that. And then my parents eventually get married. But there was this whole six month period where my parents weren't together. My mom was in the middle of divorcing her husband and my dad got a job in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, which was about five hours from where I was. And I was three. This was the potty training time. So during that time, you and I have talked about before, you know, the concept of bodily functions and decay and also For me, it was control because I didn't understand what was going on. So I developed this condition called encapresis, which is not really understood. A lot of the time it's seen more as like a stool blockage, whereas I would intentionally just not go to the bathroom. And that continued. And even though my parents got back together, it became like a big problem. I developed other behavioral problems. And then we just kind of kept moving on top of that. So by the time we came back to Ohio, I was six. I had a younger sibling. and started at a new school and was heavily bullied. Then, you know, moved to another school, did really well, but the problems kept coming. I met a girl who was like a year older than me, and she, when I was like eight or nine, began sexually assaulting and blackmailing me for about five years. This led to even more depression because my parents weren't getting along for other reasons and fighting all the time, and I started self-harming. It culminated in Me attempting suicide on my school bus and getting sent to a psych ward and then another psych ward and then the troubled teen industry, which is a thing that's been around for a really, really, really long time, longer than I knew then. And it's still going and it's still going even in my state. Back then, I was sent to, depending on how you look at it, I went to confirmed four programs and a boarding school. And those were not in my state. but there are programs in my state. So I've been doing my best to raise awareness about the things going on in my state because, you know, I can really only be here right now. I can't unfortunately fly out to Utah. It's kind of far. But Utah has, you know, and every state has its own different legislation that makes certain things fly and other things not fly. So it's always going to be an uphill battle with not a lot of support from the government because in my particular situation, Mitt Romney, the state senator from Utah who ran for president, profited off of my

SPEAKER_02 4:03

abuse. Did your parents ever try to stop and talk to you and try to figure out what was going on and why you were having such difficulty with self-harm and suicide?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Yes and no. My mom did find out about the sexual abuse before I got sent away. And I was no longer seeing that friend by the time I got sent away. So she did believe me. And that's the only time in my life that she's believed me about being sexually assaulted, and it is not the only time I've been sexually assaulted. The program didn't believe me, though, or at least it felt like that, because homophobia is like a really big part of that. One of my friends was literally sent partially to try to make her straight, and I just found that out, that even though we had the same therapist, we had very different treatment standards. And that's a problem, right? If you consider somebody's sexuality to be a character flaw that they I need to be abused into fixing. But if a kid is doing some sort of maladaptive behavior, if you feel like your child is being manipulative, consider that manipulation is a maladaptive technique to try to communicate something that they don't understand how to communicate. I'm not even really sure like what it was that I was trying to communicate other than the fact that I was deeply unhappy. I mean, I was being bullied at school. My parents were fighting all the time. And on top of that, like my mom was not a person with boundaries. So I became her confidant very, very early on, not like in a parentified way. In fact, it's more so like I was raised to believe that I needed to be taken care of because I'm not I am disabled, but not to the extent that I have needed somebody to take care of me since I was a child. and as an adult and blah, blah, blah. So there's, you know, all of this other stuff going on that the troubled teen industry helped reinforce. And I don't even think that like, it's not like parents go in with a list of, okay, this is how I want you to brainwash my child and make them perfect. I want you to make my child believe that they're sick and will always need to be taken care of. Like, nobody really does that. It just somehow happens. And not having understood this, like, I think the most under, disgust aspect of the troubled teen industry's long-term effects. Here in America, Paris Hilton was working on something called the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which, like every other freaking piece of legislation, gets passed with all the votes, except then it goes to somebody else's desk who needs to actually approve it and nothing happens. So that one wasn't even about regulating it. That one was just about research and seeing what's going on for like two years. It even eliminated some of the, you know, currently existing protections in the sake of trying to understand what's going on in the industry. How many kids are in programs right now? No one can tell you that. There is no way to find that out. But we also, I mean, how many of my friends are dead now that I went to programs with, right? That should say everything that these don't work, especially if you send a kid to a program for a drug addiction and they're dead within 20 years of an overdose. Obviously, whatever you're doing is not working. And it's been proven that congregate care, that's what that called, you know, this group care concept. It doesn't work, especially when you have the kids abusing each other. You know, you have this level system where you have to, I had to earn shoes. I had to earn shoes within the first 30 days. And that's normal. You know, you earn the right to talk to your parents while people are watching you. You earn the right to eat sometimes, like sleep. It's crazy. So, of course, that doesn't work. So, it's basically like you're

SPEAKER_02 8:15

guilty until proven innocent in a Like

SPEAKER_00 8:18

everyone is going in guilty. Even now, you go and look at the reviews of any program, any given program, and some review somewhere that you'll run across is going to say, well, you know, they said not to believe these reviews because these are just problem kids. Like they have their built-in excuse right there. They're manipulative kids. They're pathological liars. They're troubled teens. No one wants to believe the troubled teens. They're just lying to you when they say that staff are abusing them.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

And I guess they've gone in because they were troubled to begin with, then it just means that the effect hasn't quite...

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Well, my story is not the worst story I've heard. And it takes in a lot of different aspects that other people's stories have. But the stories of people that I met along the way in my other programs, things that I didn't know were happening to them, it could have been worse. And out of every program I went to, every single one, now three out of the four are closed. The first one I went to is still open and is considered one of the worst in the state of Utah now. But out of every single program, especially that one, every program had somebody sexually assaulting kids. And of course, physically as well. I experienced that. But the whole thing, I don't think I got sexually assaulted despite the fact that I was incredibly groomable from my family of origin having really dysfunctional ideas about a lot of stuff. I think the only way that it didn't happen to me is because honestly, I was the I was the shitty kid. So that's also, you know, I was super naive. I'd never even like seen drugs. I'd never done anything sexual. Like I would get on the internet and talk to grown men on AOL instant messenger chat rooms and stuff. And I was definitely not a good thing and definitely unsafe. But I learned all sorts of things in the troubled teen industry that I wouldn't have learned in my very sheltered life in Ohio. You know, I just want to pause you there. I want

SPEAKER_02 10:15

to begin from the very, very beginning. Sorry, but what I'm also kind of interested in going right back to the very beginning of the story is, do you know how they even managed to reach your parents? And not only your parents, but how would they seep into the awareness of parents that are having difficulty with their kids? What... pathways do they sort of like, enter

SPEAKER_00 10:39

back 20 years ago, the troubled teen industry was more of a rehab, beautiful brochure thing where it's like, we're gonna send your kids to horse camp, and they're gonna go to spas and like, they're gonna feel so good at the end of this and not emaciated and bruised and dying of dehydration in the woods, right? Except, you know, that's exactly what it is, is emaciation and bruises and blah, blah, blah. So there's something called an educational consultant. And those are still barely regulated, not really regulated at all. Educational consultants are, they sometimes work with the schools, they sometimes work with the child psychiatrists, and because they're an educational consultant coming from a place that you already trust, that already has interacted with your child and knows who they are, of course you're going to trust them. But the educational consultants get kickbacks from the programs that they send your kid to. I believe it's Oregon passed a law And they're the only ones about educational consultants having to disclose that if they get kickbacks from any program and if they are recommending Program X, they need to disclose any instances of abuse, of restraints, of death, of any of that stuff that happened at Program X within the last two years. No other state has anything like that. So the educational consultants can also network with these different programs with X external companies called transporters. Goons is what a lot of the survivors call them. Goons, the people that your parents slash ed consultants recommend that your parents pay to kidnap you and take you to a program.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Well, shouldn't that be the very first massive red flag? Like, we're going to send your kid to this lovely spa hotel, you know, place where they get this beautiful experience, but we're going to kidnap your kid first.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Right. And so like Oregon also is one of the very few states to specifically try to regulate the transporters as well. Very basic things like you can't put a black hood over a kid, you can't put a kid in handcuffs, you can't sedate a kid with medication. And if you're driving a car as a transporter, you need to have working turn signals and lights and seatbelts and things like that, right? And they act like Oregon is such a hard place for them as transporters to work now. Like, it's really that hard to make sure your seatbelts are working. Wow, okay, it's really that hard to not, you know, sedate a child. Sounds like you might be bad at your job, bro. But so I think it's also there's this intentional misdirection and manipulation of parents that still goes on today. But like I said, 20 years ago, the and back, you know, the origins of the troubled teen industry, it's all about the money. And so back then they were looking for rich parents with these beautiful brochures to say, hey, your kid's got problems. That's how they got a Kennedy to go to a crazy wilderness program all by like the origins of wilderness guy, Steve, whatever his name is. The parents are manipulated then, but now, you know, the income disparity and all of that, like they're like, okay, we don't have as many rich parents that we can tap to bring in their troubled kids. But not everybody can be Tom Hanks. Not everybody can be a Hilton. So now they're using the foster system. They're using kids that are, you know, literally removed from their parents. And then they're put into group homes. Like, I was in. That was honestly probably still going on back then because it was more like a placement for juvie. If you mess up as a teenager and your state doesn't have, because of the regulations that your state has, like California was one of the first states to actually start passing things to make sure that their kids are protected. We had a lot of California kids in Utah because California didn't have as many options. I did end up in a program in California specifically It was

SPEAKER_01 14:38

the first of its kind. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

I also, there's also this aspect of propaganda. I have, so it's called a home visit when you get to earn, you've earned the right to finally go back and visit your family for like a week in your home state or wherever it is that you end up going, right? So throughout the history of the troubled teen industry, there's been this, you know, you're trying to bring in new people. So you got to, you know, propaganda, you know, oh, does your child's best friend also have problems? Well, why don't you send them to a program and one of my programs there was a girl who like her actual best friend got sent in but we had a red group and green group and they were on separate groups naturally because you know negative friends or whatever and they were not allowed to talk to each other at all no no notes no no looks no no nothing um and obviously her best friend showed up there because her parents referred her best friend's parents and it's yeah and it's like it's a it's not like i think you get i don't think the parents necessarily get kickback Maybe like a

SPEAKER_02 15:44

discount

SPEAKER_00 15:48

on their own kids, you know, admission or something. Mm-hmm. having routine surgery that she didn't need taken. This place is hell and I'm sleep deprived and put on medications that I should not be on as a child and starved and all of this stuff, right? But I was not to say that. So, still haven't heard back from him though. You know, and one of the questions they asked, I was a cutter, they asked, my mom says, I remember the very first day my daughter cut and she listed it as April something Well, for what my parents told me that I was, I was the youngest one at my program, because legally, I couldn't go in until I was 13 and a half. So my half birthday was in March of 2004. And that's when I entered the troubled teen industry. So how could my first time of cutting happen in April of 2004?

SPEAKER_04 17:30

Right?

SPEAKER_00 17:32

So I mean, even down to that, like, I can point out just that one error. And you can see how much of it is is untrue. Bullshit. And I've showed it to a lot of my friends and they say the same thing. It's like, wow, it is very, very obvious that like the parents are also brainwashed.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

Can you tell me about that day when you were taken to this troubled teen? How did that work for you? Were you also kidnapped? What do you remember from that?

SPEAKER_00 17:59

So I have been kidnapped. I've had the goons four to five times by my parents' own admissions, but not for the first day. So I did like a Montessori school from first to third grade where I was getting bullied. I had a video on TikTok about like this kid talking about Reaganomics in first grade. It was just a weird school. The next one was like this hippie school where they had like music and stuff and I loved it. And then that ended at sixth grade. So for middle school, which is seventh and eighth grade and like arguably some of the hardest times for kids, they put me to a religious school where everybody had grown up together and this ended at eighth grade. So I was like literally in the last two years and it was the worst bullying I had ever experienced. I hated every second of it. And I kept begging my parents and the principal to listen. I begged my parents to put me somewhere else. So seventh grade, you know, everything was terrible. And my mental health started declining. Eighth grade, I end up in the psych ward. And my parents are like, okay, well, we're going to start looking at boarding schools. I thought I was going to boarding school. So my parents tell me, we're just going to go look at this one. And it's a red eye. I remember the night before that my parents like told me we're going on this trip. But they had tasked my friend next door with babysitting me sort of to make sure that I didn't self-harm. But I still did. And I will never forget going through security because this is post 9-11. So, you know, we had to start doing the wands and all

SPEAKER_03 19:26

that.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

I remember my mom's face when she saw that I had still cut myself despite her best efforts. And, you know, that's haunted me for 20 years. But at the time, I felt very smug. Like, yeah, you can't you can't save me from myself. You can't. to control me, mom. So we get to, we fly to Las Vegas, five hour drive to Virgin, Utah. We start touring this place. And, you know, my parents go off with the staff and I'm still in my regular clothes, which I think I was wearing like teal jeans and a shirt that was animal from the Muppets. They said I looked like Punky Brewster. And I remember the girls and I was like, who's Punky Brewster? I remember the girls saying, so your parents are going to leave you here. You know that, right? And I was like, my parents wouldn't do that. Yeah, nice. Nice try. Yeah, they did that. I remember watching them walk away because like these were doors that I couldn't open. You know, they had like auto locks. So I remember and they're glass doors. So it was really weird to just like literally see my parents walking down this long driveway and just knowing I don't know when I'm going to see them again. I can't believe they did that to me. And then, you know, that first night trying to fall asleep I've always had insomnia, so that wasn't. I still have the nightmare of waking up there, looking out the window and seeing the sunrise across the, I don't know what they're called, like plateaus, cliffs, whatever, but it's very red, the sand out there. Or falling asleep, staring at the sluts on the bunk bed above me, you know, things that you just can't forget. But as far as the kidnappers go, I know there were a lot of other people who had more violent experiences. One of my friends And the same program showed up in

SPEAKER_02 21:18

manacles.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

So when it comes to the programs that I know most about, and there's, you know, multiple kinds, but they really fall into two schools of thought behavior modification, which is what it sounds like we are going to modify your behavior by any means possible. Positive peer culture, your peers are going to also help you modify your behavior by whatever means possible. And they're going to do more of it, we're going to try to use. It's like the opposite of say no to drugs, in a way. It's like we're trying to get your peers to pressure you to not do drugs or whatever, right? So the place that I was first at, the one that's still open, Falcon Ridge Ranch in Virgin, Utah, the owners had a second program called Red Rock Canyon School. That one has been closed for riots. That was a behavior modification program. And my friend that I mentioned that we had the same therapist in my program, she was actually at Red Rock for two months before she got sent to Falcon Ridge Ranch. So Red Rock was also used as a, if you don't get in line, we're going to send you to Red where you will get the crap beat out of you. Like we had people come here from Red Rock to tell us about how they got the crap beat out of them. So like it definitely happened. There's a reason they got closed for riots. So you have these two different schools of thought. I don't know how the behavior modification stuff work because my first program in Utah was positive pure culture. The wilderness things kind of do their own different, they're all kind of different. So I don't, it's not so much like levels with that one. I'll get into that. And then I went to another positive peer culture. This one was co-ed in New Mexico at an old tuberculosis facility, which is now being turned into some like bougie yoga retreat. I wish I was kidding. Yeah. And then I can't remember what the weight loss one was because I feel like the weight loss, I was only there for a few months and I feel like theirs was more obviously like weight based. So like, how are you doing with losing weight? And anybody who's ever tried to lose weight knows that Like you weigh yourself this week, you weigh yourself next week, and you could do everything the same and still gain like a quarter of a pound. But that quarter of a pound would really, really matter. That's also when I learned that men lose weight so much faster and quicker than women and hated hate learning that because it's like they were always losing. And sometimes I get my period and gain half a pound and, you know, there go whatever privileges I might have had. So. Yeah. Okay. So that covers most of them. The positive peer culture one, the privileges that we had. So your first 30 days, you're a flight risk, obviously. So you don't have shoes. You earn sandals to walk around the general area that you're at. And those are sandals that your parents already bought. But you don't really get shoes yet until you've proven that you're not going to run away. You earn things like mascara. At one point, you earn the right to cook, but I didn't really know how to cook. And I remember that's how I learned from somebody else that you can burn spaghetti because she made our dinner and it was burnt spaghetti. Phone calls with your parents, family visits, going off campus with your family when they come to visit, going home for your family visit, going off campus in general, even if it's just for like, we would clean up a cemetery, but you had to earn that right. I think one of the first off-campus things you got like the potential to do was go to Mormon church.

SPEAKER_03 25:06

Oh, gosh.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

I saw quite a few baptisms and Mormon church is fricking weird. And we had to have like this certain way of dressing, which like now, if I touch a long black skirt, I like my body just feels weird. So, you know, there was stuff like that. Uh, but I was never very good at earning the privileges. I think the most I got was like up to mascara. Uh, I didn't, I didn't, I don't think I ever actually technically graduated any of my programs. That's, that's the funny thing to take away from all of this is that one, even after being in it for a year going to wilderness and then from wilderness right back there. I get back there and they take us fucking camping. Like I just spent seven weeks in the woods. Why are you putting me in the woods again? And then my grandma, my grandma had a stroke and my mom decided because my grandma was dying that I needed to be taken out of the program so that I could be there for my grandma to die. They did not think that was a good idea. And that was 20 years ago, you know, but I read a review of an Ohio program where a kid didn't get to talk to his mom for a whole year and then she died and they didn't let him go to the funeral. So it's like, it's just, you know, it's just the cruelty is always there. Also a little bit more about the

SPEAKER_02 26:15

wilderness, like how How does that work? What do you do? What

SPEAKER_00 26:18

does Uber like? So the one that I was in is... Every wilderness is a little bit different. The one that I was in was called Outback. Your backpack, you made it with a staff, was like... a u-frame bent wood that you have to bend it and then you have like a tarp that you put all your stuff in so that's like a week's worth of clothes um all of your food which is like ramen tuna peanut butter your supplies for making fire busting a coal is what it's called the stuff to make your tents like your whole life is on your back and it's heavy as crap yeah and you have an algae but you are not allowed to join the group until you bust a coal you can't eat hot food until you bust a hole busting a hole is when you sticks and so you have like this thing here and there's like a little groove and you're trying to make a hole by just doing this and it's hours it's hours so until you learn you learn how to do that you are eating nothing or I ate uncooked ramen with peanut butter on it it tastes like crackers they pick peanut butter because it's high protein the showers we got was mostly them just like pouring water on us and then using soap we had Like at most, I can shower in 10 minutes because of the troubled team industry. Like that's the most time I usually take in a shower because you don't have a lot of time. But even in wilderness, I was like the minimum, like the shortest showers I've ever taken because there's no running water. They just pour water on you and that's disgusting. But because of me and this other girl who came in like a day after me, the program that I was at used to have this rule that you could get help from staff busting a hole. So I had started um for like two hours after a certain amount of time staff can join if you ask so i asked for help and this girl has started busting her coal like maybe an hour after i started mine and then did the same thing so because we both got into the group by asking for help from staff no one should ever ask for help from staff again and sorry to anybody who went to outback that's my bad guys uh and also her bad i don't remember her name though so uh there's you know uh i remember one girl was like getting her she had something going on with her teeth and like she would like do do aura gel but like they'd act like they were getting like messed up on aura gel having done done aura gel now as an adult I'm like girl you were not messed up you were just so so bored in the woods yeah get it the therapist that I had there though I found this out this year so I've got some of the documents my parents have from all of this time my parents had an issue with the wilderness that um They didn't check the ID of the staff from Falcon Ridge Ranch that picked me up. They were late to the drop off when I was being exchanged from wilderness back to the ranch. I could have straight up just been kidnapped at 11 p.m. just outside the West Desert by a total stranger. And my parents signed all those things that said it's nobody's fault, though. So who cares? Yeah. Yeah. While I was out there in the middle of nowhere, I encountered a rattlesnake, a black widow. I got dive bombed by an owl. And the therapist that I had was Like, how is it so hard to prioritize time for like a child who's just on a mountain in the middle of nowhere and you are the only person they can talk to about their feelings? But somehow, you know, he was a crappy therapist, in my opinion. And now he has his own therapy network. Oh, wow. He's licensed. He has his own therapy network that he started a month after I left Wilderness. My last day of Wilderness was two days before the show Brat Camp came out. I didn't even know that Brat Camp existed because I was too busy living it. And I can't even imagine if all of the people who watch Brat Camp, like if that had been me. Because I was a shithead and like nobody wants to be immortalized in some sort of media from the worst days of their life. And wilderness and all that stuff, that's not even like the worst days of my life now. I was touching on this earlier, but the most insidious part of this is that because it's the troubled teen industry started with a cult and brainwashing is just part of every single program there is. The long term effects of that kind of brainwashing that you don't understand, that you don't understand you've been brainwashed. My parents refused to accept that they have been. leads you to just a crappier life. We hear about the fight or flight response, but there's more than just that. There's fight, flight, freeze, submit, flock, faint. There's quite a few. And instead of the fight or flight response, they condition that out of you to be submit, flock, fawn, whatever, because they have control and they don't undo that. So the rest of your life, every situation you go into. I spent two and a half years experiencing daily trauma and being conditioned to just submit to it. How did that pan out for the rest of my life? Multiple abusive relationships, multiple sexual assaults. I became widowed before my 30th birthday because my partner tried to kill me and the cat and hung himself. And that's just kind of like an average story in a way of the troubled teen industry, the long-term effects. You put a kid through trauma for years and then expect them to have a better life. Come on, be realistic.

SPEAKER_02 31:45

How were they beating the fight and flight out of you guys? What were they doing to get that out of you?

SPEAKER_00 31:49

Well, of course, there's the restraints. My 14th birthday, I loved Evanescence back in the day. I still do. But they were like my favorite band. And for whatever reason, I was a shithead and not getting with the program. So they put me in the special needs room where they restrain you. If you don't just stay in the position the whole time, like if you stay in the whole position the whole time, they're not going to touch you. But you have to be your face on the ground. your arms out, your legs out for hours, days. You get to ask to go to the bathroom and stuff like that. And they do bring you food. And I was lucky, I guess, because it was my birthday while I was in there. And this would not normally happen, but they let my parents call me. And they held the phone up to my face. And my parents told me that they took my sister to an Evanescence concert for my birthday while I was face down on the rug. What were they thinking that you would be... And that's the thing. I don't, I don't think they knew necessarily. Like they heard that I was in special needs or whatever that I'd been acting out. But like another example of acting out, they had me on so many meds. Um, I have found out since that I had mono at some point in my life and I'm pointing out probably my second time at Falcon Ridge ranch that I was either, I either had mono or on all these meds and I just could not wake up in the mornings. They flipped my mattress, they vacuumed my face. They like, um, and, and And some of these were, you know, other girls. Some of them was sometimes it was said the staff would encourage that, you know, I was being disobedient, but I probably had fucking mono. I probably was, you know, I don't know, on 200 milligrams of Seroquel at 14 that no one needs to be on unless they just need to sleep. Because I had an ex-boyfriend who was like 25, and he told me he was on just about the same amount just for sleep. So if they're giving me 200 milligrams of Seroquil to sedate me and keep me in line. So that's part of it, the submit responses. A lot of it, meds, if nothing else. But getting in your face and screaming, a lot of the staff were big, big Polynesians. I learned about the history with specifically Samoa and the trampoline industry. But we had a lot of Samoan staff and there was this really big linebacker type guy. And he would get in your face. I can still see his face wobbling while he's screaming at me. And the people that do that don't really face anything. I know that with the election and everything, convenient timing that there was a kid who died in a wilderness program. His name was Clark Harmon. I'm pretty sure like in a sleeping bag and like no pants on it was all really bad and he was small and he was maybe 12 and that turned into a court case and you know we've been waiting for the results of that court case which came out the day after the election so they got drowned out by other results and like every other freaking case there was no fault no fault nobody's fault that a kid died restrained in a sleeping bag somehow right so It's it's this feeling of hopelessness is part of the submit response and seeing that, yeah, I could get hurt and it's not going to change anything.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

Which one would you say was the worst for you? I mean, they were all bad, but which one would you say left the most impact?

SPEAKER_00 35:18

I mean, I spent the most time at Falcon Ridge Ranch. So definitely Falcon Ridge Ranch. But I think the thing that stuck with me about all of them and followed me the rest of my life because my parents also, when I was 18, took me to court for trying to kill myself and had me sort of put under a conservatorship for like a few years. So more mandated medication, more the More that, more no control, more no say. Yeah. I think that really stuck with me, I think, throughout all of these is nobody listens. So

SPEAKER_02 35:51

what do you think needs to be done on a wider scale for this to be completely shut down or at least just completely changed?

SPEAKER_00 35:57

I don't think so. You know, a lot of survivors have different ideas and feelings about the concept of a complete shutdown. But overall, the facts are facts. You can't deny the facts done by trained professionals. Convert hair is not going to work. Concrete care is just not an option. Even if you try to send your kid to a boarding school, I went to a boarding school for two and a half months and I got kicked out because you have a problem child. You think I'm going to send him to boarding school. Someone else has a problem child. They're going to send him to boarding school. You don't know that guy, that guy's kid. What are his problems? Well, I got sexually assaulted twice in two months, started cutting and got kicked out because of other people's problem kids. I wouldn't have started cutting if I hadn't been sexually assaulted. So, you know, it's like reinforcing. So there's really no way to know what kind of kids your kid's going to going to end up with. Community supports. We need to invest in more programs that keep kids home or at least near their families. Because why the hell, if your kid is having problems, would you want to send them four states away with people that you know nothing about? I mean, yeah, you know about the people that you talk to every day or however often they answer the phones when you want to talk about your kid. But the people who are there every day with your kid, you don't know their names. You don't know anything about them. So why would you do that? Community supports. It's like, I saw a place for developmentally challenged kids on the spectrum. It's a day program in the middle of kind of nowhere, which is what a lot of treatment programs are. It's the concept that they're not staying there overnight. They're not staying there for months, for an undetermined amount of time. They're doing a lot of the same things that I did, building skills like sustainable agriculture and stuff like that. Because I do feel like at the end of the day, when you're going through stuff and the world feels so big and you feel so insignificant because as a teenager, everything feels severe and impending and urgent because your brain's still, it's all hormone soup, right? You need a reality check. My fiance does construction and I'll drop him off at a new job site and pick him up at the end of the day. And there are the bones of a building at the end of the day. He can look at the end of the workday and be like that is what I did today he has the proof of that personal growth is so hard because you don't have that you don't have that measure of okay well you know I had a really hard day you know working on this stuff but here's what I can say I got out of it at the end of the day especially as a teenager you really don't have those tools so community supports that invest in those kind of skills that provide a reality check but also a distraction at the same time and some therapy like that that's what I think but But to actually shut the industry down, I don't know if that's going to happen. My concept for that is just death by paper cuts. If every state has slightly different legislation that costs each program so much money, maybe, maybe we can nickel and dime them to death like they did us.

SPEAKER_02 39:01

Yeah, I think ultimately, like, financially, as well as like, it's another thing, right? If everyone is motivated by, you know, their, the money, then that's going to drive people to do some pretty crazy things. But if you start, if you take away money or commission from the equation, then people are doing it for maybe slightly better reasons. Or if you if you tax them more, or you put money in the right areas, you know, the things that are really acting in the best interest of the child, as opposed to in the best interest of the corporations, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Right. Well, and it's the regulation, it's the The lack of regulation, the lack of reporting, like we don't know how many kids are in any program. But there's another thing. You know, there's also the fact that senators, you know, take other politicians take money from these industries. The guy that got elected in my state as our state senator took seventeen thousand dollars from Universal Health Care Solutions. It's one of the big three. They have a subsidiary of Foundations Health Care Solutions. They have eight programs here in Ohio. They donated seventeen thousand dollars to him. Eighteen, no, nineteen thousand to the guy who won for president. The vice president is from my home area. So, you know, seeing all this stuff is incredibly discouraging.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

Yeah. It's just like a really wide scale. It starts really from the top down. It

SPEAKER_00 40:16

does. It does. And it doesn't help when you've already got the trust issues.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Yeah.

UNKNOWN 40:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Just one last question before we do in the interview. I do want to ask like sort of what kind of message can you share with our listeners today? And this can be, you know, a little bit about sort of what, how your life has been like after all of this. What are the things that the ways that impacted you? I know you mentioned a little bit about the submission, but I want to know like sort of how did your kind of latter years turn out because of it? And what message do you think our listeners should be taking away from this interview?

SPEAKER_00 40:50

Yeah. So I came back at 16 and I've been processing this stuff 20 years later because I wasn't allowed to see it as traumatic. I wasn't allowed to really question any of this. Not only that, I didn't have any qualified professionals that were willing to. I was failed at every turn for most of my life by professionals and it hurts. So I came back and I was in this thing called a wraparound thing and it hurts that I had a great psychiatrist or I thought I had a great psychiatrist until I realized this week that he never once asked me for two years about the programs that I was in. I thought was a great psychiatrist. And then, you know, I tried to kill myself. And one of many times, my parents took away my rights and I was threatened with more programs for all of my life. I got engaged and my parent, my mom and my case manager said that if my partner and I conceived a child, they would immediately open a case with CPS before I was even in my second trimester. So I am never going to have kids because of that. I made that decision a long time long time ago, because I was so scared. Eventually, I did get my rights back. I have not really been able to work. I have chronic PTSD or complex PTSD, which is not just because of the troubled teen industry, but the troubled teen industry definitely had the worst part of it, I think, for the way that my brain ultimately became shaped. I also have fibromyalgia. I had my first pap smear in the troubled teen industry. There was something physically wrong with me and they didn't tell me. And that has impacted every gynecologist I've been to because I was crying in pain and they called me a baby. And then that happened again outside of the troubled teen industry because nobody explained what was wrong with my particular issues. So, you know, that's more health issues that came up later, the submit response, so many abusive relationships and so much sexual assault. It's a lot. And then on top of that, going to places where they said that you can't be diagnosed with PTSD and unless you were in the military, specifically like active duty, front lines, stuff like that, which I wasn't. So my trauma never mattered. And the doctors didn't listen to me about it. So I didn't actually get diagnosed with PTSD of any kind until I was 28. I got my degree in women, gender and sexuality studies. It took me 10 years. I did mostly part time until the end. And it was finding that program because I had initially been a few different things. I wanted to be a history teacher. I wanted to be a music teacher. I wanted to be a psychologist until I sat in a front row and heard them talking crap about some of the things that I was diagnosed with in the troubled teen industry, which were wrong. I was diagnosed with like nine different things. And my current psychiatrist was mentored by Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score. So we have been going back and undoing all of the wrong diagnoses that actually prevented me from getting quality help, that prevented me from having any kind of quality of life. Everything good about my life, I found for myself. I earned it. But the best part of my life, the thing that saved me is my best friend. He works in mental health care, specifically building resilience factors. When you have adverse childhood experiences, ACE, resilience factors are the only real hope you have for like building towards a good life, you know, a positive support system, um, things that bring you joy and happiness and make your life worth staying in. So with him, I almost died through a DV and my body did a faint response, which is something I've never experienced before. I was choked until I passed out. And that is so hard to come back from. But through getting diagnosed with PTSD, working with a trauma therapist, having a great psychiatrist, having amazing supportive friends, 11 months later, I was choked again. And I had already dialed my friend from my hoodie pocket so he heard everything. I was able to get out of that place and, you know, get help from a neighbor and escape, like, 11 months. And what that says to me is, what if somebody had listened when I was 17? What would my life be like? Would I have been widowed before 30? Would I have experienced brutal rape before 18? Would any of the Never happened. If I had just had somebody that knew how to build resilience factors, that knew, that recognized my trauma and listened to it. So I think not only is the troubled teen industry doing everybody a disservice by giving them trauma and perpetuating the trauma, the world itself doesn't really understand it. And none of us really get the help. But my best friend's one of those now. So I know that at least in my hometown, if they go to that place, they'll have someone that believes them. And that's why I come out and do these interviews because hopefully there's somebody in a position that if they come across a survivor now they believe them that's so hard for us my whole life I've just wanted someone to listen and believe me and Thank you, by the way, for giving me that opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 46:07

Of course. I mean, yeah, it's just so painful. And yeah, I think it definitely is because there are like more like documentaries and news articles and all of these kind of different platforms and forums as well. If people are talking about it so much more, I think it's it's you're not just a statistic and just a quiet statistic. You are a voice now that matters. Right. I think, yeah, that's definitely so important.

SPEAKER_00 46:30

And I know like, you know, some people are split. They're like, oh, these documentaries are just, you know, trauma porn. or whatever and it's like maybe for some of them like that's part of why I couldn't specifically watch the program because it's really hard for me seeing all these people go through the program that they were at now that it's closed down they just left their documents there you know and all that but for me my first program is still open and I have I have nothing I can do about that here and so seeing other people get that kind of circular thing that's the only program I had that's still open like I can't go to the other ones that I was at either because they're closed down but those buildings are probably still being used for stuff so it's this sense of justice that i'm not gonna get and i know that but the best i can do is get justice for people here you know i read the reviews of the programs here and the people who wrote them find me on tiktok and and and you know tell me about their experiences and i'm hopeful uh i don't have a whole lot of hope in my state right now but i just want their voices to be heard because theirs are the ones that we can do something about out right now. You know, a kid who just turned 18 has a lot more legal options to take on the behemoth of the troubled teen industry than I do at 34 because my trauma was so long ago. And they'd be right to say that I have a little bit of problems remembering because there were four different programs.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

Yeah, it's true. And of course, you can also change the course of their future as well by sort of like believing them at the time, right? Exactly. One

SPEAKER_00 48:01

of the things that, you know, I found another survivor in my area who has a nonprofit that's, the goal is to provide resources to all survivors. But I think about, you know, an 18 year old coming out of program, you don't know how to apply for Medicaid, you don't know how to apply for an apartment or get your social security card. So having an organization that number one, is going to be mindful of your trauma as a survivor and understanding because we're survivors too, and helping you actually build a life instead of, you know, a lot of people just leave the program and end up like homeless and having to struggle their way up like we might not be able to shut down the industry but we can support the new survivors that keep getting pumped out as best we can so even if you know Paris Hilton's bill didn't get the research that we want the research options are still out there so the non-profit that I'm trying to build will hopefully you know using grants incentivize that kind of research for college students to do because honestly it makes you look great for your master's program and whatever you're doing to have any kind research, but wouldn't it feel great if the research you did actually changed lives and helped kids not be traumatized for forever? For

SPEAKER_02 49:13

sure. Yeah, I love that. Wow, Ferry, thank you so much for being on Multispective and sharing your story with us on air. You know, super, super powerful message. And yeah, I hope people listening to this are feeling just as angered as I am and as you are and, you know, can spearhead some kind of change, you know, if they do have any kind of power in this. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:36

And again, thank you. You know, the inner child in me wants to really express how much it means to that you let me come out and share my story. After all these years with no real words, I have found the words and I appreciate a medium to get them out there.

SPEAKER_02 49:58

If you enjoyed the episode and would like to help support the show, please follow and subscribe. You can rate and review your feedback on any of our platforms listed in the description. I'd like to recognize our guests who are vulnerable and open to share their life experiences with us. Thank you for showing us we are human. Also, a thank you to our team who worked so hard behind the scenes to make it happen.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

The

SPEAKER_02 50:22

show would be nothing without you. I'm Jenica, host and writer of the show, and you're listening to... multispectre.