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Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

bbc.com

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Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#71

Post by yarcob »

adrianN wrote: post #29
trentnix wrote: post #27

Parents whose choices and behaviors have resulted in having raised a troubled teen make really poor choices in how they deal with their troubled teen. That’s not surprising.

A child's peer group is often at least as important as whatever their parents do. Parent have little influence on that.

As are genetics. Psychological illnesses often first manifest in the teenage years and they happen in all kinds of families. People always want to look for some kind of reason but sometimes there just isn't one.

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#72

Post by DenisM »

agumonkey wrote: post #52
throwaway_egbs wrote: post #4

I was sent to an “emotional growth boarding school” in the ‘90s. I wasn’t kidnapped but many of my schoolmates were. A few years later the department of education (can’t remember if it was state or federal) shut the school down after stories got out about the horrific things that were going on there. Kids forced to sit in corners for days at a time, ambulances not being called for kids who had very seriously self-har…

I see Evergreen College has ancestry

Do tell?

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#73

Post by nextaccountic »

anm89 wrote: post #40

I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school. The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensiv…

What do you think about your parents?

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#74

Post by waterhouse »

anm89 wrote: post #40

I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school. The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensiv…

My reaction to these kinds of things (see also: the abuse of the Battle School students in Ender's Game) is to think: (1) Perhaps it was the best way to teach certain things; but (2) I don't think the people who do such things usually rule out all the gentler methods first.

It sounds like the "challenges" weren't necessarily intended to teach you what you learned, and you just happened to have a mind and mindset that responded well to the situation, so it isn't even an instance of "competently executed dangerous teaching methods". Nevertheless, do you think there's a safer approach that would have had a high chance of teaching you and the other kids those lessons?

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#75

Post by Clewza313 »

dash2 wrote: post #68

My first thought: wow, the US is crazy, I’m glad they don’t have this in the UK! Then I remembered that I was at a famous boarding school for five years, the most miserable years of my life. Thirty years later I’m still coping with the aftereffects. I think of that place as a form of institutionalised child abuse, and frankly if someone pipebombed it, I would not shed a tear. One simple thing: it wasn’t authoritarian…

Brutal reform schools/camps can be found anywhere. Here's one in Japan whose headmaster was convicted of beating two students to death:

https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0218/p12s1.html

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#76

Post by lordnacho »

dash2 wrote: post #68

My first thought: wow, the US is crazy, I’m glad they don’t have this in the UK! Then I remembered that I was at a famous boarding school for five years, the most miserable years of my life. Thirty years later I’m still coping with the aftereffects. I think of that place as a form of institutionalised child abuse, and frankly if someone pipebombed it, I would not shed a tear. One simple thing: it wasn’t authoritarian…

Which school? Seems to me uk boarding schools have changed a lot recently, with a lot of emphasis on pastoral care.

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#77

Post by dang »

dash2 wrote: post #68

My first thought: wow, the US is crazy, I’m glad they don’t have this in the UK! Then I remembered that I was at a famous boarding school for five years, the most miserable years of my life. Thirty years later I’m still coping with the aftereffects. I think of that place as a form of institutionalised child abuse, and frankly if someone pipebombed it, I would not shed a tear. One simple thing: it wasn’t authoritarian…

Your comment reminds me of Robyn Hitchcock's classic line about English boarding schools: "they fuck with your mind forever, then send you out to run the country".

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#78

Post by Cullinet »

_delirium wrote: post #9

The "troubled teens industry" definitely has a lot of weird stuff going on. Some of the institutions are are bad-faith operations that were always scams (or worse); some were well-intentioned but were managed in a way that produced abuses nonetheless. Maybe a few actually did a good job helping out troubled kids, but it does not seem to be the norm. This is perhaps a place where internet culture has been somehow ahea…

accessible reddit link :

https://old.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#79

Post by dmje »

Once again I read about something in the news and I'm just full of WTF. Unbelievable that this stuff exists. Unbelievable that any parent does this willingly. Unbelievable that a "troubled teen" is even a label of a thing that "needs sorting out".

It's just so blindingly obvious that if you teach and expose kids to love and respect and fairness then they'll grow up to love and respect and be fair to people. If you teach them violence, horror and coercion, that's what you're going to get as adults.

Seriously screwed up.

Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps

#80

Post by anm89 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #73
anm89 wrote: post #40

I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school. The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensiv…

What do you think about your parents?

I'm not in contact with them at this point.
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