Hollywood Park: A Memoir – By Mikel Jollett – His story opens in an experimental commune in California, which later morphed into the Church of Synanon, one of the country’s most infamous and dangerous cults. Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when […]
Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids – By Maia Szalavitz – The troubled-teen industry, with its scaremongering and claims of miraculous changes in behavior through harsh discipline, has existed in one form or another for decades, despite a dearth of evidence supporting its methods. […]
Gone to the Crazies: A Memoir – Alison Weaver’s privileged upbringing hid the darker undertones of her childhood until her parents shipped her away, at fifteen, to the cultish Cascade School, warping her perception of reality. Upon graduation, set adrift in New York’s East Village in the 1990s, her life began a […]
Girl Sent Away – By Lynn Griffin – Toby Sedgwick is terrified by his daughter’s increasingly reckless behavior and takes a tough love approach, enrolling Ava in Mount Hope, a wilderness behavioral camp for troubled teens. Ava quickly realizes that the camp is little more than a prison, warehousing and abusing kids […]
From Miracle to Madness 2nd. Edition: The True Story of Charles Dederich and Synanon – True and complete Story of Charles Dederich and his founding of first ever peer drub rehab–Synanon– and turning it into a violent and terrorist cult which in turn spawned decades of abusive cults and therapeutic communities.
Escape: My Lifelong War Against Cults – By Paul Morantz – From the back cover: The snake stuffed in attorney Paul Morantz s mailbox by acolytes of Synanon, a once-hailed drug rehabilitation center that had devolved into a paranoid, militaristic cult, was an early strike in what would become a 35-year war with […]
Dead, Insane, or In Jail: Overwritten – By Zack Bonnie – As OVERWRITTEN begins, the bounty hunter and an armed sheriff escort Zack back to Rocky Mountain Academy, six weeks after his escape. This time, Zack changes his tactics and stops overtly opposing the authoritarian program. Some kids crumble under the pressure. Others […]
Dead, Insane, or In Jail – The Dead, Insane, or in Jail memoir series tells Zack Bonnie’s story of his years at the Rocky Mountain Academy (a CEDU school) in Northern Idaho in the late 1980s. Tricked into going there at age fourteen, Zack ran away after several weeks, only to be […]
Dead Inside: They tried to break me. This is the true story of how I survived – By Cyndy Etler – I never was a badass. Or a slut, a junkie, or a stoner, like they told me I was. I was just a kid looking for something good, something that felt […]
Chasing Pleasure With Pain – Haywood Robinson was just seventeen when she was sent to a behavioral modification program in Montana-a horrible and painful experience. This raw and emotional memoir chronicles Haywood’s struggles with mental illness and her lack of a diagnosis until her thirties. It fearlessly tells of her experiences with […]
