Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of The Troubled Teen Industry

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

We’re in for a shocking one this week: The Troubled Teen Industry has for decades promised parents to reform their “problem-causing” kids through 8-12 week “wilderness therapy” and other military-style schools. But kidnappings, isolation, punishment, secrecy, and abuse are all a part of the equation, resulting in the separation of families and years of trauma. Yikes doesn’t even begin to describe this unregulated cult-like industry, which was originally inspired by the destructive cult Amanda’s dad grew up in, Synanon, and somehow hasn’t been shut down yet. Many disturbing stories await you this week!! Dipsea is offering an extended 30-day free trial at DipseaStories.com/CULT Everlywell is offering listeners twenty percent off an at-home lab test at Everlywell.com/CULT Dad Grass is offering our listeners 20% off your first order when you go to DADGRASS.COM/CULT Check out jordanharbinger.com/start for some episode recommendations, OR search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The views expressed in this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Hi, I'm Alex and I'm calling from Los Angeles. And I think the coldest thing about the troubled teen industry is this false hope that they peddle to parents that they can, quote-unquote, fix their, quote, troubled teen when in reality we just know that it doesn't work.

Often the best solution for this, quote, troubled teen is to seek out a licensed and accredited therapist. This industry is just incredibly abusive and manipulative and exploitative and incredibly toxic. Hi, my name is Beth and I'm calling from Maine. I think that the coldest thing about the troubled teen industry is the complete and total disregard for the bodily autonomy of said teens. I did know somebody's older brother who was sent to a troubled teen camp, kind of like

in the middle of nowhere in Utah, and basically with his parents' permission, just two men came and stole him out of his bed at night and wrestled him into a car. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Issa Medina and I'm a comedian, and I'm Amanda Montell, author of the book Cultish the Language of Fanaticism. Every week on our show we discuss a different zeitgeisty group that puts the cult in culture from astrology to academia to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really?

To join our cult and see culty memes and behind the scenes pics, follow us on Instagram at SoundsLikeACultPod. I'm in the cult of Instagram, I'm on there at Amanda underscore Montell. Also still Amanda here, I wanted to let you all know that I'm going to be in New York City on Wednesday, August 10th, 2022, doing a cultish book signing and meet and greet at the Strand bookstore so you can find details for that at the link in my Instagram bio or AmandaMontell.com, and I'm on Instagram at Issa Medina, I-S-A-A-M-E-D-I-N-A-A, where you can find clips of me doing stand-up comedy, you can also find information of where and

when I will be performing live. This month I will be in Scotland performing at Edinburgh Fringe Fest, all month of August 2022, in the fall I will be in New York City doing so many shows, so make sure to check out my Instagram where you can also request for me to come to your city and you can see my little jokes live and in person, and maybe after my shows we can grab a drink and talk all things cults. And feel free to check us out on YouTube where you can watch our show or hit us up on Patreon at patreon.com slash sounds like a cult.

Where our episodes are available, ad free. Alright, cult girl summer is over and if you missed it go back and listen to our last five episodes, but now we are back baby with our regularly scheduled programming, the heavy stuff. Oof, we've got a heavy one this week, we've got a heavy one this week, sorry I'm just trying to keep it light. Yeah, keep it light, keep it light, keep it light baby, yeah we're going to be talking about the troubled teen industry, and if I say it like that maybe it's a little funny

huh? Yeah, I'm imagining an umlaut above the why. Yeah, you know what's funny about this topic is I don't think it's been that highly requested. Nobody wants to hear about this. Yeah, which is I think the most fun ones because I'm like, surprise bitch, we got a cult for you today. It's like we know, we know, you want us to talk about Joe Rogan, sorry we're talking about the troubled teen industry, but I have been itching to cover this topic for quite

a while for multiple different reasons and we're going to get into those reasons right now. I just recently watched the scripted series Under the Banner of Heaven about fundamentalist Mormons and I know we have a podcast about cults, but I was so fascinated because I used to work in documentaries, I kind of took a break from watching documentaries, but now that we're podcasting, now I'm back into documentary watching and I'm like texting me on a Friday night like, holy shit, did you know about this? She's like, yeah bitch, I wrote a book on it, yeah actually the section of my book that

covered the fundamentalist Mormons did get cut, but earlier you mentioned the phrase keep sweet and my stomach just dropped to my toes because that is a thought terminating cliche used among the FLDS to keep young women in their place. And the full phrase I believe is keep sweet above all else, so like no matter what is happening to you, literally keep sweet and that relates to today's topic. Yeah, absolutely. There is a more explicit troubled teen industry to fundamentalist Mormon connection, but the surface level connection is that it is about keeping young people in check.

So first of all, what is the troubled teen industry? So the troubled teen industry is schools or facilities that take in teens who are acting out at home, maybe they're drinking underage, they're getting into trouble and so their parents go to these facilities for help and they pay these facilities or these schools or these boot camps essentially to kidnap their child, put them in the school for an extended period of time and train them to quote unquote be a better person or no longer a problematic teenager. Think Cadet Kelly, but not good.

Yeah, the TTI is this, which sounds like sounds like a sexually transmitted infection. I know, we were like doing our research and then I was like, we were literally talking about troubled teen industry for like half an hour and I was like, what is TTI? And you were like, troubled teen industry, but it is a gross sounding acronym for some reason. It's like ITT Tech. It does. It does.

ITT Technical Institute where you will get abused. Yeah. No, it either sounds like a for-profit college. Those are cults for a venereal disease. Anyway, yeah, the TTI, it's the system of extremely under-regulated residential youth treatment facilities, I suppose is the technical term. Sometimes they're called wilderness therapy and these schools might consist of military style boot camps or juvenile justice facilities.

They're there basically to modify the behavior of teens that parents for one reason or another just can't deal with. Teens are in part defined by their misleading fucked up recruitment tactics, but I don't think we've ever covered a group that brings people in as violently as this one. With the troubled teen industry, there's no love bombing happening. There's no one that gets there by joining voluntarily. The scary part is the way that the teens are brought into the program. For me, it was like the red flag immediately of like, these teens are often kidnapped in

the middle of the night taken from their family and they're like screaming for help thinking that their parents are going to come save them. But it's their own parents who facilitated this and took them in the middle of the night. Can you imagine as a child? Absolutely not. Some people might be familiar with the troubled teen industry from the Paris Hilton documentary I Am Paris. Paris actually went to four different troubled teen programs because she was partying too

much. And then, if you recall, she got out of these troubled teen programs and became the most famous party girl in the country, so they didn't fucking work. They literally do not work. She became famous for partying and then got a reality TV show. But it was incredibly traumatic for her and a lot of her behavior as an adult has been in service of like repressing those memories and distancing herself from that experience because it really did shape her in a really upsetting way and now she's coming out and

speaking against the troubled teen industry. And I often think to myself, I don't know if you've ever had this thought, but ever since I first learned of the troubled teen industry when I was very young, I think in middle school or high school, I always thought to myself like, if my parents were more controlling or just like paid more attention to me, I might have gone to one of these facilities because I smoked a lot of weed and cut a lot of class. I have literally never thought of that before because I've never heard about the troubled teen industry until I watched the Paris Hilton documentary.

Yeah, I think that's the case for a lot of people. And I also think like being an immigrant, it's like my parents would probably just send me to Columbia. There you have it. So not everyone has heard of the troubled teen industry, but it's actually fairly common. But it seems like the reason we don't hear about it is because these people are so traumatized, they don't talk about it after they leave because they're embarrassed. And because they don't have a community to turn to after they leave to believe them and

support them. Yeah. And another highlight that Paris made in her documentary was that because you don't have your phone number or you can't bring anything into the facility or out of the facility, the relationships that you make within the facility, like it's really hard to find other people after you've all left. They're lost to you. Yeah.

It's like they never existed. But it's crazy because there are so many of these people that do exist today. There are an estimated 120,000 young people that are housed in these congregate care facilities at literally any given time across the country. There are currently 6,000 unregulated care facilities in the United States. And these programs cost between $2,000 and $3,500 on average for eight to 12 week outdoor programs. These programs are not considered evidence-based treatment, they're often not covered by insurance

and therefore people are paying directly out of pocket. Cults are often defined by recognizing a common vulnerability and exploiting it, right? I think this all comes back to how overwhelmed parents are in this culture when they don't know how to handle a conflict in the family. They just like outsource it. And that's so American. Like where family units are so fractured and don't have that same sense of connection as they do elsewhere in the world.

Yeah. And I can see multiple reasons for that happening. They lack community. Like a lot of immigrant families, their grandparents live with them or their family lives with them. And so you have that community to turn to or you have that aunt or you have that uncle that can relate to you because maybe they don't have kids and they're like, you're homey or something and they can get down to your level and be like, hey, I've been through

what you're going through. And that's like the community aspect of care. But then there's also the lack of public resources like in public schools. You see all this money being thrown into policing efforts and putting police on campuses and you don't see a nurse. You don't see a public mental health expert on the property of a school. And so like these parents at least not enough of them or you see one, especially in like lower income communities that's so well.

There aren't like enough healthy, free resources for parents to access for their children that might keep them from being quote unquote troubled by the time they get to high school. Exactly. And I think the thing that frustrates me the most about this troubled teen industry is that it's received an estimated $23 billion of public funds a year. And so why this is literally what's wrong with America. Why are we giving so much money to a privatized industry? Yep.

This is public funding, despite there being zero federal legislation that oversees the troubled teen industry, and despite there being like public programs to maybe give scholarships to teens, which in hindsight, now we know it's better that no one's like applying to scholarships to get kidnapped, you know what I mean? It's so frustrating because like these public funds should be going to actual publicly accessible program. Hi, my name is Amanda and I am a lawyer located in Newport Beach, California, as well as a survivor of a now closed TTI facility.

I currently practice in the areas of institutional child abuse and child sex assault and I'm working on research into coercive environments and sexual assault within these environments. My belief is that TTI facilities share a number of striking similarities to cultic environments, most notably the complete lack of consent, the lack of consent within the industry and the use of aversive techniques seems to almost always lead to a form of authoritarian control. Furthermore, we are just beginning to understand the magnitude of these harms and the psychological abuse that we experienced within these facilities. Today sounds like a cult podcast.

This is Emmanuel, I am a French psychiatrist and I think the troubled in industry programs are quite culty, especially because they isolate the children from the outside world during the entire program. Any communication is forbidden with their family, with their friends, with actually anybody outside of the program and to me this is a way to control the way people think, the way people feel and to modify the way they think about the program. It is specifically geared for teens, it's not geared for young adults. These are really important years in the development of a person and so the scariest part is that

these people get kidnapped in the middle of the night. So they immediately kind of create this lack of trust for anyone around them. That is such a destabilizing trauma. Yeah, because it's like these people who are supposed to take care of you, these parents who are supposed to be there for you are the ones who facilitated your own kidnapping. I know, I know, it's like something from a horror movie. I cannot believe that this happens. Do you want to describe a little bit exactly how the kidnapping occurs?

Yeah, their parent approved kidnappings. The parent makes the decision to send their children to these programs and they hire transporters. Transporters? What a euphemism. Yeah, quote unquote. I feel like this often happens with like culty groups, it's like they just assign like really official sounding language to their transporters, literal kidnappers to obscure a truth, to hide an unpleasant truth in a pocket of subtext.

That's what euphemisms are for and they're a major part of cult language. Like keep sweet. Disgusting. Yeah. So these teens are transported usually in the middle of the night. They are hours and hours away from home. They don't have any knowledge of where they are, where they're going or why. It makes me feel sick to my stomach even thinking about that experience.

Yeah. So there's the euphemism of being transported by a transporter, but people who have survived the program, they call it being gooned. Paris Hilton specifically talks about this way in that they come to your house and they say, you can do this the easy way or you can do this the hard way, but either way, you're coming with us. Oh my God, it's like a military torture. It's like being a prisoner of war.

But you're a kid. Yeah. And you're a kid. And so I think it puts into question like everything you've ever believed, your whole life. Yeah. Who to trust, what the point is of life, honestly, like what goes through your head when you think you're like in your very last moments because growing up, you're taught

that like if you're getting kidnapped, it's for two reasons. It's to be murdered or to be raped. Yeah. Especially if you're a girl. Especially if you're a girl. So what's going through your mind in these moments is like one of those things is about to happen to me. Yeah.

You never think your parents are sending you away to quote unquote therapy. Yeah. So then once they get there, ostensibly, they're supposed to spend eight to 12 weeks in the wilderness away from their families without any knowledge of what day or time or month it is or anything else about the outside world. So this is an extremely disorienting case of isolation. A typical stay is eight to 12 weeks, but for 80% of teens, the story doesn't end there because they go on to a therapeutic boarding school afterwards.

Can you imagine that? I can't even go three days without Instagram. I'm like, they're going eight to 12 weeks entirely isolated, not knowing why. And like, I lose my phone for two hours and I'm like, where am I? I'm like, what year is it? Honestly, that part of it sounds really nice. Yeah. That's true.

If you knew why though. If you knew why, if you consented or like at least, I think the fear is that the parents think that like if they tell their kid, like this is going to happen, the kid will run away. But even if it runs away, then they can like find the kid. I love children. When people who don't have kids talk about kids. I actually think calling children it is really gender neutral and I've been doing it.

I saw a kid off its bike the other day and I was like, look, it fell. And I was like, this is really progressive. Some languages only have one singular third person pronoun to refer to objects or people and it really is the it equivalent. So you're not wrong. You're like, even if it knew that it was going to get kidnapped and it ran away, at least when it did finally get kidnapped, it would know that literally can't call it anything else, but it would know why, you know, this is where it gets scary, the lack

of communication in the program. So any communication that happens once they arrive, which is exclusively with the parents, they can't like chit chat with their friends, it's heavily monitored as if you're in prison. If you're like sending letters to your parents home, if there is any actual abuse happening in these facilities, the letters are read by the counselors before they're sent home. So the parents are actively told not to believe anything that their kids are saying. So if their kids are literally trying to communicate with them, like, this is really abusive, like X, Y and Z is happening to me and I don't feel actually safe.

The parents are like told not to believe them. Yeah, and I think we have like a larger problem in this culture and I believe many cultures of disregarding the validity of what someone is saying just because they're young. I think that's a lot of what parents are experiencing, this cognitive dissonance and this like almost cultural unwillingness to believe what a kid is saying. Yeah, it happens a lot. It does make sense and like a lot of these times parents do experience that cognitive dissonance because they think of the big picture, they think like, this is tough love.

This is what I want for you. I want the best for you and even though you're suffering right now, it'll be better in the long run. Ends justify the means. Ends justify the means and I feel like the problem with that as like our culture shifts and changes is that parents don't always know what's best for you. Our parents carry the trauma that their parents pass down to them. If you're not in a family of like that's been in generations of like actually good therapy,

then like there's no parent that knows what's best. 100% and I think the healthier my relationship with my parents gets, it's because I see them as fallible. I see them as not having all the answers. But when you're a kid, not only do you have less perspective, you also have little to no power. So if you're rebellious or different in such a tight ass individualist capitalist culture, that's how a cult industry like the troubled teen industry can develop.

And I think especially when the quote unquote cult leaders at these facilities are telling the parents, this is treatment. This is for their own good. That's going to further help them self justify that this was the right move for their kids. And that relates to the fact that this cult of the troubled teen industry, it's not just a cult that's pulling in the troubled teens, but it's this cult that's also pulling in the parents with their language and with their ideology and telling them like, we know what's best, but we'll get into that a little bit more after we talk about the background.

Like, what are the roots of the troubled teen industry and like, where did it come from? The origins of the troubled teen industry are something I've been itching to talk about for quite a while, because this whole industry took a lot of inspiration from the cult where my dad incidentally spent his teenage years, Synanon. And this is Amanda speaking here for anybody who gets our voices confused, Amanda's dad grew up in Synanon. Okay, wait, now I'm realizing why your parents never send you to a troubled teen industry because they were like, this bitch is going to join a cult.

Yeah, maybe. And no, that's totally possible. You know, if your dad was probably like, I don't want to put her through what I've gone through. Yeah. I still maintain that it was because they were too busy to pay attention to how much weed I was smoking. It almost worked out for the best because then you're like, you didn't join the cult you

wrote about them. You know, but I also think that giving your teens the space to make mistakes can often even itself out. And Amanda knows this as a cat mom, you're like my teenage cat. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. My cat.

Well, my cat is like a middle-aged lady now. Yeah. But her 13 years, I wish I could have put that in a troubled teen industry for cats. She's still, she's still pretty rebellious so much. We heard from a few listeners that you'd like to hear some more stories and fun facts about old school cults like Jonestown and here and there on this podcast. And we've got lots of those. So get ready, classic cult movie.

So Synanon was founded in the late 1950s in Southern California. It later moved to the Bay Area, but it originated as an alternative drug rehabilitation center for hard drug users who were called dope fiends and later grew to accommodate so-called lifestylers who just wanted in on the sort of blossoming counter-cultural movement of the era. But they kept a lot of the ideology from back when it was just a drug rehab. And so in Synanon, kids lived separately from their parents, miles and miles away, because their whole ideology was like separate families. That is like the fundamentalist Mormons.

They would separate their kids. And I feel like that's literally because when your parent isn't like attached at the hip to you, they can like reinstall like a mindset into the child to be exactly what they want them to be. And their whole argument was that, you know, your family enables you. You need to like become independent from that enabling, but these kids didn't have a drug problem. You know?

And also like, that's not false. Like your family doesn't enable you. You know what I mean? But like co-dependence is good. No, co-dependence is good, but it's that's the thing. Nothing is black or white or like perfectly good versus solely bad. So like the idea that your family enables you, that's not false. But the idea that in order for it not to enable you in a bad way, you have to fully separate

yourself from them, that's not, that's not healthy. That's not healthy. So a lot of the troubled teen industry's current methods derive from Synanon where they would try to break people's addiction through isolation, humiliation, hard labor, sleep deprivation. So Synanon ended up devolving into a lot of violence and it was disbanded in the early 1980s after that violence was exposed. What kind of violence? So what happened was the leader, he was a guy named Chuck Diedrich.

At the beginning he was characteristically nonviolent. This was like peaceful socialist utopia vibes. Classic vibes. Yes. Classic vibes. But of course he grew more bloodthirsty and deranged over the years as notorious cult leaders tend to do. And by the end he founded his own like personal militia called the Imperial Marines.

What the fuck? He really didn't want people to leave the group. People who left were called splitties. And there was once a group of splitties that tried to sue Diedrich for the abuses. And that lawyer who helped them sue, Chuck Diedrich got the Imperial Marines to put a rattlesnake in his mailbox. And the rattlesnake then bit the lawyer who was hospitalized after that incident, Chuck Diedrich was imprisoned.

Oh, okay, so like there was a particular incident where like there was violence through the snake. But also the Imperial Marines would be assigned to beat up splitties, like physically pummel them for leaving. It was bad news bears. Bad news bears? You mean like toxic and dangerous? It was horrible.

It was horrible. By the early 1980s Synanon was largely disbanded and yet its model had already been widely copied, for example, way back in 1971, the federal government had given a grant to a Florida organization called The Seed, which had used Synanon's methods on teenagers that they only suspected of having tried drugs. It's giving a witch trials, you know, like I'm suspecting you're a witch. It's just like almost like the patriarchy, but for adults, you know what I mean? It's like the hating of a group of people for no particular reason or like diminishing

a group of people, but these people are just children. Like people so much want to take away children's rights, what happened to giving children rights? Here's a conspiracy theory. People don't want to give kids rights because children are the future and because also traditionally children or young people are a lot more liberal, so it's like so conservative to not want to give younger people rights. This is literally not a conspiracy, that's just the truth. I think, you know, a lot of these parents sending their kids to these drug programs,

even though they were only suspected of drugs, it's like throw the woman in the water and if she drowns, I guess she's not a witch. I think a lot of these parents were conservative and they were scared about all the cookie new drugs coming up in the culture and they were like, no, I don't even want my kid to have even tried any of this stuff. Why not? A little weed never hurt, no buddy. You know what I mean?

Sorry, mom and dad, I smoked weed at home alone in my basement when my parents went out of town one weekend. Weed is fully legal and less dangerous than alcohol. Yeah, and if you've raised your kid properly, they will get so high they will try to call the cops on themselves. Wait, what? I tried. I did.

My friends literally grabbed the phone for me and were like, no, do not. I never smoked weed again for like another six years. Wow. Oh my god. And I just never did weed again until I moved to California where it was legal and then I was like. I'm still getting used to a drug when you say did weed. Yeah, still getting used to it.

But today, famously love weed. Famously love weed. Yeah. So anyway, the seed got exposed for employing many of the same mind control techniques that were used by North Koreans during the Korean War and that bad publicity sort of like put an end to the seed, bad publicity, war tactics or bad PR. Not good. Not good.

So then this copycat organization was created under a different name and this is a classic cult red flag as well when you're basically taking the same ideology and you're just renaming it in order to evade persecution. Classic cult. Happens with a lot of religions too. It absolutely does. Fringe religions. Latter day saints.

Yeah, right. And so that organization was called straight ink, like scared straight, like keep yourself straight. By the mid 1980s, straight was operating in seven different states and they used the same Synanon tactics of confrontation and humiliation. The centerpiece of life in Synanon was a humiliating form of quote unquote group therapy called the game where everyone including kids would have to gather in a circle and subject one another to hours of vicious, brutal ad hominem criticism just for the sake of it.

It was pitched as a form of group therapy but really it was a means of social control. The actual term scared straight reminds me a lot of conversion therapy because I feel like it probably had a double entendre. Some of them were probably actually trying to scare them into being straight. This is like sort of dated slang now but at least in the 70s and I think maybe the 80s but not really since then straight meant sober. Like you know how people say aren't going to be straight and sober. And I think people have like sort of moved away from that terminology now because of

the overlap with gay versus straight. Yeah, but it also probably is in that overarching umbrella of like conservatives don't want to drink, they don't want to do drugs and they don't want to be gay, a.k.a. they don't want to have fun, so all of that falls into like be good or else. Totally, totally. No, that is all the same. There's definitely overlap between the troubled teen industry and conversion therapy. But anyway, long story short by the 1990s these tough love military style boot camps

and wilderness programs were common and it really started with Synanon. It always has to start somewhere, you know? And it started with your dad. But isn't it freaky that like my own father was a teenager in Synanon? Yeah, that is so scary. But I feel like it's also bad publicity for these troubled teen programs because your dad turned out to be really successful and like a good guy. He did, but it was in large part because he broke the rules and you weren't supposed to

go to an outside school in Synanon, you were supposed to go to the Synanon school and my grandfather who forced my dad to join Synanon maintained until his dying day that he brought my dad to Synanon because of the good school. That was bullshit. It was just him justifying why he made my dad join a cult as a kid. But anyway, my dad was like, this school is bogus. And so he escaped every single day and hitched a ride to San Francisco so that he could get a diploma from a real high school and matriculate in college.

And then my dad got his PhD and now he's a scientist. And now he's smart and doing fine and that goes to show sometimes kids need to sneak out. You know what I mean? I feel like a lot of really good parents, especially these days, it's like it's not like they let their kids sneak out but it's like they know their kids are doing certain things but as long as they know it's not really dangerous, they kind of let them get away with it. I saw this TikTok the other day of a little kid, an actual toddler walking really close

to the pool and the mom was saying, sometimes you need to let your kids learn but you're observing them and the toddler didn't fall into the pool but you know how toddlers wobble around? They toddler. Oh my God. I never thought of that. Yeah. Yeah.

But the toddler was toddling around the pool and it looked like it was going to fall in but it didn't but it readjusted itself. It readjusted and stepped a couple feet away from the pool and the parent was like, look, the child learned on its own but I was there to catch it just in case it had fallen. Totally. I think that's a metaphor for teenagers experimenting. Yeah. There is a point past which it's dangerous and interfering with your life but if your

kid's, I mean me saying as the parent to only a cat and a dog but if your kid is smoking a little weed but seems happy-ish and is still getting good grades and leave him alone. The only thing is that the word experimenting triggers me a little bit as a queer person because I feel like a lot of parents who aren't very homophobic, they're just happy their kid isn't queer, they say that for bisexual people. When we come out as bisexual, they're like, oh, you're just experimenting, have fun with them. I'm from a family of scientists so like experimenting is great.

Experimenting is great as long as like your parents are willing to accept you once you decide it's like not just a little experiment. Yeah. Sometimes the experiment comes out with a result and the result is, gai. Hi, my name is Tori. I am calling from Washington, D.C. I'm an adolescent therapist, I've worked with a lot of youth who have been through the troubled teen industry and the most cultish thing about the troubled teen industry would

probably be the power dynamics that are kind of in play between staff and with kids. The normalization of the kids or the clients having no autonomy or independence or say in kind of expecting to just accept that. Let's talk about some of the cult like tactics that have lasted in the troubled teen industry long after its synonym derived origins. Yeah, so we talked a little bit about how they use different styles of camps like therapeutic camps or military style camps or juvenile justice facilities but like what are they doing within these facilities and how can this affect these kids for such a long period

of time. One of the things that I think is the most extreme that they're doing is punishment. Extreme punishment. They're making these kids go on like long hikes. They are putting them in solitary camps. Sorry, that sounds like when I said that so simply I was like okay this bitch does not work out but like really long hikes like think like 25 mile hikes. That's punishment.

Through the wilderness, I mean who knows how good the nutrition is in these groups. Also I feel like it's again this thing of like using lighthearted words to make it sound easier. Hikes, like everyone loves to hike or like some people like to hike. A hike is just a walk in trees. A hike sounds so pleasant. This is not fucking pleasant. It's not.

Like it's a punishment. A hike is pleasant when you have control over how long you're doing it, what you can talk about while you're doing it and when it ends and like these teens have no control over like when it starts, when it ends and like they are already in survival mode. You know, they're in mode of like I don't know where I am and I don't know how long this is gonna last. Imagine going on a hike and not knowing when it's gonna end. Oh my God, me and my toxic ex would be like, let's go on a two mile hike and we wouldn't

bring water and like eight miles later I want to die. Not comparing but toxicity runs in many circles. There's something called the chair that goes on in troubled teen programs where survivors have come out and talked about being forced to stay silent and sit in a chair for all hours of the day and if they broke, their time in the chair would be extended. So it's basically like extreme time out. I mean anything that's like called the chair reminds me of like fucking a death sentence. I know, like that's so scary.

That's so scary. An electric chair. And there's also like shaming and isolation like we mentioned their solitary confinement like if you try and act out at these camps, you're not only met with like more punishment but you have no one to communicate with. Like yeah, a lot of the times these camps have like quote unquote therapists or counselors that you can go talk to, but those people are like in on it. So if you're complaining to them about something, it's like they're communicating that back

to the person who's overseeing everything. It reminds me of dating shows like when like what they were, our guests were saying the other day, like they have therapists on set but you don't know if the therapists are like producers. Dude, full on. If you haven't listened to our cult girl summer episode on the cult of dating apps, give that a listen if you want to sort of recover emotionally from this episode. But shame is a huge tactic.

There was a vice documentary on this industry that spoke with people who were forced into a program called Cross Creek Manor. They said that the whole thing is based on a break you down to build you back up mentality. So they literally destroy you so that they can meld you into what they were needing you to be. The school performs full prison style intakes and cavity searches. So you know, bending over, spreading your cheeks. Another thing that's like really culty is the lack of oversight and the lack of accountability.

It's not that these programs aren't like official and don't have like all the legal paperwork to function. It's that despite how much public funding as we mentioned is going into these programs, there's not a lot of public oversight and why do you guys think this is? Why do you guys scream it out in your cars, in your houses, if you're folding your undies doing laundry? Why do you think it is? I'll tell you.

It's because this shit is going down in conservative ass states. They say that a lot of this is going down in these conservative states because of the nature like in Utah because they can go on hikes and they can go in the mountains. But oh, what else is happening in Utah? The multi-level marketing industry, the Mormons, the fundamentalist Mormons, conspiracy theories up the wazoo. Yeah, and a lot of these states have these like conservative policymakers that turn a blind eye to practices like these, a.k.a. also polygamy.

If you think that policymakers in Utah are turning a blind eye to polygamy, you can bet your bottom dollar they're turning a blind eye to troubled teen industry. Yeah. It is absolutely no accident that Utah is the unofficial headquarters of so many culty enterprises. Yeah. Doomsday prepping everything. Everything.

Essential oils. The only thing that's like made it out alive is like the ski industry. Oh, Zion National Park. Mountains Majesty. Beautiful. Although now I don't really like Zion National Park now or the name of it at least now that I've watched the fundamentalist documentary because it's like Zion is like they're having. I know they could use a rebrand.

That perfectly tracks with the fact that the quote unquote therapy going on in these places is off the books in large part, not based on evidence. Group therapy sessions might include teens being forced to unleash the stories of traumatic moments in their life in front of others. There is this one program which employs a hot seat procedure very similar to the Synanon game where a person gets up in front of the entire group and they all go around and tell them what is wrong with the person. One person who survived he said typically what would happen in any therapy group which

would happen daily is we would have some topic for the group and normally one or two people would share their story or experience and once they're done we basically all go around and berate them. This is exactly derived from the game. That is so dangerous because it lacks the like ethics of actual therapy and proper therapy where like you just have a private space that you can truly tell your therapist everything you can trust that they're not going to use it against you. But in these groups it's like not only can the people working at the facility use it

against you but you're also, they're also pinning teens against each other. There are rape reenactments on sexually abused girls. They have male staff reenact the rape while other teens were instructed to yell out whore and slut. It's this lack of like evidence based treatment that I feel like for me is the scammiest part about the industry. They are charging so much money for these treatments that aren't legitimate and like the reason a lot of parents avoid taking their kids to therapy is because it's so expensive to find

a good like proper therapist for your child. But these programs are charging up the wazoo and they aren't like evidence based totally. I am Danielle from Montana, I attended wilderness therapy followed by a therapeutic boarding school in Utah when I was a teenager and I think the coldest thing about the troubled teen industry is the religious agenda. And for example I had a therapist in wilderness tell me that the reason I abused drugs was because I was secretly gay and not wanting to confront it but that they were going to be curing me essentially.

The therapist that helped me unpack my time in a troubled teen industry cult I think the most culty thing is what she called catharsis dependence which is a great way to put it. A lot of these quote unquote treatment programs what they consider treatment is pushing people to the point of this like intense emotional breakdown whether it's about a specific incident or just in general traumatic experiences and the person has this intense emotional release and it feels like a catharsis but their time there becomes about having those kinds of experiences over and over and over again to try to get that feeling of emotional release. So we've talked a bit about what makes both the parents and the children vulnerable to

the exploitation of the troubled teen industry but let's talk about some more of the costs. Of course the teens they're vulnerable because their parents are putting them in these programs and the parents because they just don't know what to do and they lack resources. It's not like these parents can like afford to spend all this money on their kids but they do it and so all of a sudden they're in this sunk cost fallacy mindset of like well I already spent all this money so I'm not going to pull my kid out. Nobody is going to justify their mistakes more than someone who's made a really really bad mistake.

And that's on the cult of weddings. Stay tuned for that episode coming oh so soon. But that just goes to show how these cult like through lines really track along the wide cultish spectrum like the sunk cost fallacy applies whether the stakes are as low as I spent too much money on a wedding or as high as my kid has been subjected to months of abuse. And parents famously are really bad at admitting whether they made a mistake. I think we all are.

I think we all are. You know. Because our parents were. I actually think it's human nature. I think we shift blame to protect our own self-esteem. For example I was late this morning because there was traffic not because I left ten minutes late. Yeah we do.

We make excuses because we want to protect this vision of ourselves as like we're fundamentally in the right you know and that makes admitting to wrong doing really hard. So before we wrap up and get to our conclusion let's maybe tell the story of like a worst case scenario that's come from the troubled teen industry because there are so many cases of documented abuse. Yeah as Amanda said there are a lot of cases of documented abuse but we don't want to go too in to depth because these are really just yeah they're dark there have been hella deaths it's just bad.

The case that we're going to talk about today is Cornelius Frederick he died of injury sustained in a residential treatment facility called Lakeside Academy. He was pushed into the ground and physically restrained by seven staffers for throwing a sandwich in the cafeteria. They placed their weight on his chest for 12 minutes. They did not call 911 for another 12 after he was unresponsive. He died by suffocation. I mean the physical violence that goes on in these places is really unspeakable and this

is just one story out of many. Yeah and Lakeside Academy is still open folks. Isn't that fucked? I also just thought of another connection between the troubled industry and a cult we're going to be covering soon the cult of celebrity doctors because Dr. Phil has famously sent young people on his show to Utah based troubled teen programs. Oh wow I wonder if he's like sponsored by them or anything you know. I'm sure he has relationships with them.

There's just so much money moving around behind the scenes in these in these facilities that we don't know about and if you think about it the food at these facilities are shitty. These people are sleeping in rooms that literally look like jail cells so why do they cost so much money? This is literally it's like FLDS vibes in that it's just these institutions used to like funnel money. It's like a front for something else. I want to see the fundamentalist Mormon troubled teen industry celebrity doctor Venn diagram.

Maybe I'll make that. Yeah make that. This wasn't the only case where one of the teenagers in one of these facilities died. This has happened multiple times and people have endured abuse or sexual assault in these facilities and when they write to their parents and they tell them how bad it is they are literally trained not to believe them. Yep they're trained not to believe them or their messages are censored. So Paris Hilton again is probably the most famous person who's come out and spoken against

these programs. She was actually sent to four different institutions when she was a teenager. One of them was called Provo Canyon. She said she didn't see sunlight or a breath fresh air for 11 months and claims that their isolation room is covered in scratch marks and smeared blood. Paris Hilton now has started a movement to hold the troubled teen industry accountable and I think it's important to talk about what is going on with regard to investigations into the industry and other people speaking out.

Paris Hilton's documentary and hashtag breaking code silence has really made this a viral issue but she's by no means the first person to try to bring the atrocities of the troubled teen industry to light. No I mean I think it's shown that people are trying to take it more seriously because in 2018 which is two years before her documentary came out California enacted legislation that requires strict licensing of troubled teen programs and specifically delineates participants rights. So now at least in California there are more regulations.

What about you Utah? Are you next? Yeah they ain't never going to come next. I mean they're still not condemning polygamy. Like I will not get over that like polygamy is illegal on a federal level. We are also to clarify because some people miss here. We're talking about polygamy not polyamory. Did you know that the opposite of polygamy is called polyandry?

That's when you have one wife and multiple husbands. I did not know that. What is it called when you hate men? Just kidding for that one lady who used commenting on my tweets being like my son and I were listening to your podcast and we really liked it until you said you hate all men and then I immediately turned it off. Yeah I got your email, I got your tweet, I got your DM lady. It was a joke.

It's a joke but that is called misundry. Yeah. Good to know. So Issa, out of the three cult categories, live your life, watch your back, or get the fuck out. What do you think about the TTI, the troubled teen industry? To me, the troubled teen industry is a hard get the fuck out because it reminds me of FLDS.

That's so funny you're like, I mean I feel like no matter what cult documentary you watch if we cover a get the fuck out level cult it's going to remind you of that cult documentary. Yeah. It's going to remind me of whatever cult documentary I've watched as of late. But no, I think there are multiple reasons, there are literal exit costs, there's brain washing going on, these people that are being affected the most are literal teens, they are isolated from their community, and it has a lot of really devastating long term

effects on the mental health of the people who even get out alive. Yeah. Hardcore ends justify the means philosophy, hardcore us versus them dynamics, supernatural beliefs. That is mystical, spiritual, woo woo shit going on in these groups. It checks off every single box adjacent to woo woo, a lot of them are really based in religion. Yeah.

It's like why don't we think this is happening in Utah? Look people, I don't hate Utah, if anyone wants to buy me a season pass to a park city, I'm happy to go to ski. Utah has a shitty reputation, it is a cult hub, but people are trying to do good shit in Utah. I think that in the fall, I'm going to a sexual health sex education conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I'm going to talk about gender inclusive language and sex inclusive language.

Oh, I love that. You should also mention that abortions should be legal, I will. I agree, it's a get the fuck out, and I think that of course it's a get the fuck out for teens, but they have no control over that. I do have a friend who is in one of these programs, and she literally physically ran away and hitchhiked and lived with strangers until she was 18. That's so crazy to me, like just send your kid to a normal summer camp, they'll have a summer fling, they'll eat shitty food, they'll make s'mores, they'll come back literally

just happy. I don't want to blame parents entirely because there is a lack of adequate mental health support and inaccessibility to actually regulated treatments in this industry. The people who are sent to these groups, a lot of the young people just have like mental health struggles that parents aren't educated in, you know? Yeah, I don't want to give too much slack to the rich parents that send their kids here because I feel like there are some really wealthy parents who do have the ability to access better programs, but they just don't want to, it's like people who maybe should

have never had kids, it all comes back to access to abortion, maybe. There are people who never wanted to have kids and so then they just like send their kids away because they don't want to parent. That's actually such a good point because in terms of like the really conservative families or wealthier families, sometimes like in the case of Paris Hilton, they're sending these kids these programs because their kids are not falling in line and not meeting the really, really rigid, poised, keep sweet-esque expectations of who they expected their kid to be. And I think about this all the time, like if and when I do decide to have kids, I'm

going to need to just completely relinquish any expectations of who I want that child to be because they're going to be their own fucking person and I'm not going to send them away if they just end up being like a little wilder than I expected. Yeah, and a lot of people forget that parenting takes time. It's not like you can like just do ABC and then your kids will fall in line. Loving a child takes quality time, effort and things that aren't tangible with money. Yeah, I mean, this might sound fucking corny, but like money is a privilege, but so are love and support.

And when you try to pay for love and support or when you create incentives to try and replace love and support with something better, which is what the troubled teen industry is trying to do, that's the recipe for a cult. That's our show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back with a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty, but not too culty. Sounds like a cult is created, hosted and produced by Amanda Montell and Issa Medina.

Kate Elizabeth is our editor. Our podcast studio is all things comedy and our theme music is by Casey Colb. Thank you to our intern slash production assistant Noemi Griffin subscribe to sounds like a cult wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss an episode. And if you like our show, feel free to give us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple podcasts and check us out on Patreon at patreon.com sounds like a cult.