Our Healing Journey After Residential Treatment

If I had known then what I know now: that wilderness and residential treatment centers – more often than not – cause trauma to the adolescents they are set up to serve; I would not have made the choice to send my daughter to one of these facilities.

Because my daughter has generously, respectfully, lovingly, and patiently taken my hand on a journey of understanding and healing, I have come to learn what those places were like for her and others, and the ongoing trauma they have caused. Through this shared work, two things have become crystal clear to me:  first, there is a desperate need for better mental health services to be available and delivered in a young person’s own community, and second, the industry that has developed around troubled teens MUST change.

From the outside looking in, our family looked like a success story – from caring team members who offered this solution to our family’s challenges, to well-vetted places with good reputations, to our daughter “working the program” and coming home and moving successfully toward a healthy adulthood.  But peel back the layers – as we are doing through deep talks, listening, reading academic papers and memoirs, listening to podcasts and watching movies, and connecting with other young people and their families – and the very model of care that we were sold and chose was harmful to our teenaged children.

An institution does not need to be physically abusive or be responsible for a tragic death to wreak havoc on a young person’s mental health.  I have come to understand that you cannot force someone into therapy; it is fundamentally flawed to separate adolescents from their community, family, friends, and support systems without causing irreparable harm to the child and to their relationships, (which will either be sacrificed or have to be rebuilt); it is wrong to leave vulnerable loved ones in a system that puts low-skilled and low-paid workers with tremendous power over their daily lives (this will change the fundamental way a young person relates to their surroundings); you cannot take an individual with a unique constellation of strengths and challenges, and force them into a once-size-fits all points and level system (where inexplicably, no matter what your issues are, your stay is about a year).  The model is fundamentally flawed and goes against basic adolescent and developmental psychology, trauma informed care, and an emotionally-attached parent’s instincts.

Despite the rhetoric – and proven science – about the importance of working with entire family systems, the intervention of sending a child away frames the child as the problem, and groups kids who are suffering together, stealing from them opportunities for normal friendships, exploration of sexuality, athletics, and developmentally critical movement towards independence.  Creating a program where you are incentivized to say you are fine to avoid consequences does not support young people towards the integration of internally-motivated, healthy coping and communication skills.  Providing a generic education robs adolescents of a chance to thrive and succeed academically.  Making contact with parents and siblings, and visits home, contingent on one’s smallest daily behaviors as well as the subjective judgement of strangers is counter to common-sense, let alone developmentally appropriate trust-building, especially for an adopted teen.  Having the industry set up an adversarial relationship with your child by telling you that their letters and pleas to come home are manipulative, and that our ability to be played is what got the child where they are destroys trust in the child’s primary and most powerful relationship.

It will take me the rest of my life to forgive myself for sending my daughter to residential treatment, even though we felt we had “tried everything” in our community.  While it is not my fault that available, affordable, local, quality mental health care is so hard to find in our country, it is my fault that I went against every grain of my attachment parenting philosophy and agreed to send my daughter away.  In the meantime, I will do everything in my power to support other families to find better solutions for their challenges, and to reform the industry that so callously preys on struggling families with a flawed model that is negated by psychology professionals, counter-productive, creates trauma, imbues shame, and acts as an assembly line.  Our kids deserve more.