Veran’s Testimony – New Haven RTC

When I was 13, in 2019, I was discharged from the UCLA psych ward and taken to Visions RTC in Los Angeles. It was a short term, so I was only there for 2 months. I had turned 14 there. That was my first experience with the TTI. The UCLA psych ward and Visions wasn’t horrible for me, it was just hard being away from home and missing my friends and normal life. The worst part about it for me was having to carry that label as “troubled teen” for the years to come. Not to mention, it did not help whatsoever. If anything, I became worse, as I developed a nicotine and alcohol addiction after leaving.

After a year of alternative treatment and outpatient, on August 11th, 2020, when I was 15, I was sent to New Haven RTC. I would be there for about a year, then leave on July 30th, 2021. I was traumatized there, and would’ve been worse if I hadn’t been with such amazing peers.

Over the course of the entire stay, I ate horribly. I grew up in China and Taiwan, so I was not used to the poor quality American food they gave me. They refused to make any accommodations. I barely ate, and when I did, I would feel sick afterwards. The program did not care. My blood sugar was tested to be really low, and the nurses did nothing.

One of my worst moments was being put on SW (suicide watch), as the isolation and constant surveillance deteriorated my mental health. Furthermore, when I was out of SW, i learned that my therapist had told my parents that I tried to kill myself as “revenge for being sent away,” which was something I never said nor was it the reason for my attempt. After I was released from SW, they made no efforts to provide me with support and company even though I frequently asked. It was traumatic—both the experience of being in SW and the neglect I faced after being released.

Another aspect that made New Haven hard was that the staff were quite racist. My therapist called me a ch*nk, and kept attacking me when I said she couldn’t say that (I have video evidence of her saying the n word). A week before I was supposed to leave, they cancelled my “transition” and said I had to stay because they thought I was racist towards white people—which simply has nothing to do with my treatment goals and is just ludicrous to say just because I’m a person of color. The Atlanta shooting of 6 Asian women and Christian Hall’s murder happened while I was at New Haven. They gave no regard as to how I was feeling about my fellow Asian Americans being slaughtered, and even said that I was overreacting.

While I was at New Haven, I had repressed trauma of being sexually assaulted that I had resurface. My therapist gaslighted me and told me that “if I didn’t want to be raped, then I should just choose to believe it didn’t happen.” That session completely worsened my trauma, and I had to unlearn what I was told with my current (non-New Haven) therapist. I experienced worse things happen to others.

A therapist tricked my “peer mom” and told her that her whole family was dead—going as far as to print fake newspaper articles to show her. Transphobia and homophobia was rampant amongst the program and their staff. Someone else even got her thumb ripped off by a horse in their equestrian therapy program and now there’s a stub. I could go on.

In conclusion, overall, I had nothing but a bad experience with the place (though I really liked my peers). New Haven did absolutely nothing for me but give me CPTSD and continue to ruin my life after discharge. I’m more unstable due to New Haven, and I’m completely out of place in “real life” when compared to my peers.

I lost years in the trouble teen industry that I won’t get back.

It isolated me and gave me trauma and defined my whole life—as I haven’t had a life outside of treatment in years.