User:Cdw1952/Troubled Teen Program

This page is a collection of materials I wish to use to produce a future article, Please do not edit this page, but feel free to leave comments on it's talk page.

Troubled Teen Program

Troubled teen Industry, refers to all activities geared toward treating teens and young adults who engage in behaviors significantly more risky than Teenage rebellion. This industry includes diagnosing and referring professionals, educational consultants, youth programs, the legal/penal system, and teen advocacy. Teens that are diagnosed with behavioral or psychological problems, learning differences or that may have run afoul of the law may be treated through a variety of interventions. Programs exist in a broad range of settings and cover alternatives ranging from minimally intensive, home or outpatient counseling, through parent-choice interventions or Community mental health services, to the most intensive, secure, lockdown, psychiatric institutions.

Overview

The following list of program types form the core of the treatment options. Living at home and participating in counseling or a day program would be on the low end, while a long-term, secure, residential psychiatric-based programs would be the high end.

Home Based

• Counseling
• Day School (with a reputation for discipline)
• Family Coach
• Outpatient Treatment

Honor or Community Based

• Residential Military School
• Traditional Boarding School (emphasizing a sense of community)
• Religious Boarding School

Residential Family Based

• Private home (a few students at a time)
• Group Home
• Young Adult Program : In Progress

Self-contained Communities

• Adventure therapy

• Experiential learning
• Experiential education
• Outdoor education
• Wilderness Therapy

• Emotional growth school
• Therapeutic Boarding School (TBS)

• Public
• Private

Secure Interventions

• Wilderness Boot Camp
• Residential treatment center (RTC)
• Psychiatric hospital

History or Origins of youth residential programs

Therapeutic Community's

Further information: Therapeutic Community

Therapeutic Community concepts, beliefs and practices can be traced to indirect influences found in religion, philosophy, psychiatry and social & behavioral science. Although the addiction TC draws on various sources, the term Therapeutic Community is modern. It was first used to describe psychiatric TC's emerging in Great Britian in the 1940's. In the US it has come to be used to treat various forms of addiction.

AA's Influence

See also: 12 step

The higher power concept of AA was a direct outgrowth of XX and XX's involvement in XX..

Synanon's Influence

Main article: Synanon

Father William B. O’Brien, the founder of New York's Daytop Village included Synanon's group encounters and confrontational approach in his research into addiction treatment methods.

Mel Wasserman, influenced by his Synanon experience, founded CEDU Education. The schools used the confrontation model of Synanon watered down quite a bit..

Author, journalist and activist Maia Szalavitz claims to trace the influence of Synanon in other programs including Phoenix House and Boot Camps in addition to those mentioned above. .

CEDU's Influence

Further information: CEDU

The history of CEDU is largely the history of the development of parent-choice, private-pay residential programs. Prior to CEDU the choices for treating troubled teens were limited to Medical and Psychiatric methods. A significant number of the schools in the Emotional Growth/Therapeutic schools industry were developed or strongly influenced by people who were originally inspired by their CEDU experience.

The term "emotional growth education" was created by Linda Houghton in the early 1980's to describe workshops and other specialty programs at the first CEDU School. The term was intended to clearly define how the curriculum used child development principles and healthy stages of growth to create self-esteem and develop greater skills in communication, work ethic, self-awareness and academic study. She used the principles of child development as described by Erik Erikson to bring understanding of the emotional growth workshop curriculum to parents, faculty and referring professionals.

Over the years, as more schools and programs were created, the term "emotional growth" was used and misused to describe vastly different therapeutic schools that sometimes did not adhere to the basic components needed for true emotional growth education. Ms. Houghton went on to found two schools (Mount Bachelor Academy and the King George School) attempting to refine what she calls "holistic education" or "a new way of looking at things". These schools and programs were designed as models for the integration of emotional growth, academics, the arts and other specialized learning.

New Leaf Academy, another therapuetic school run by another former CEDU employee, Marci Padgett.

Academy at Swift River, run by a former CEDU employees, Rudy Bentz and Jill Shwaiko Bentz.

Cascade School, now known as ...

Research the CEDU schools and to review the documentary "Surviving CEDU", by Liam Scheff.

Therapeutic / Emotional Growth boarding schools

Further information: Therapeutic boarding schools

The roots of the therapeutic curriculum originated at CEDU .

A therapeutic boarding school (TBS), alternatively known as an emotional growth boarding school, is a type of boarding school that offers an educational program together with specialized structure and supervision for students with emotional and behavioral problems,substance abuse problems, or learning difficulties.

In contrast with residential treatment programs, which are more clinically focused and primarily provide behavioral management and treatment for adolescents with serious issues, the focus of a TBS is toward emotional and academic recovery involving structure and supervision for physical, emotional, behavioral, family, social, intellectual and academic development.Therapeutic and educational approaches vary. The typical duration of student enrollment in a TBS range from one to two years. Students may receive either high school diplomas or credits for transfer to other secondary schools. Some therapeutic boarding schools hold educational accreditation.

In his 2005 book, journalist David L. Marcus estimated that dozens of therapeutic schools have been established in the United States since the 1970s, operated by both private corporations and nonprofit agencies. David describes a typical school as follows:

"[The school’s] curriculum defies easy explanations. It was a patchwork of theories of leading behavioral psychologists of the twentieth century, mixed with techniques from twelve-step programs, California feel-good movements, Big Sur group processing, and Esalen-style encounters. The curriculum drew from the pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that children must learn at their own pace. And Erik Erikson, who argued that a person’s ability to resolve conflicts during critical transitions early in life is an indicator for later happiness. And, especially at base camp, [The school] borrowed from Abraham Maslow. He had charted a hierarchy of needs, starting with the physical – air, food, water – and ascending through self-esteem, belonging, love, and finally to truth and beauty.

The school wasn’t trying to turn rampaging teenagers into cherubic clones. It was trying to help kids rediscover their talents, to give them tools to deal with inevitable setbacks and pain. [The school] started by reducing newcomers to coping with primordial needs – potable water, shelter, a comfortable temperature. As they fulfilled Maslow’s hierarchy, they started to think about who they really were."

Out of the 60s

Needs to be paraphrased and attribution given.

Those of us old enough to remember the 1960s will recall a decade of tremendous change, creativity and turmoil. It was a turning point decade, a time when many of the old attitudes were cast off and new directions taken. At least one national social critic has asserted that when you look at the things going wrong in this country today, they all came out of the 1960s. On the other hand, many of our most respected contemporary values were products of the 1960s.

In education and personal growth, a tremendous amount of creativity and new thinking began during the 1960s. Traditional public and private education thinking was widely challenged. The traditional interventions for emotional and behavioral problems of juvenile detention or hospitalization were criticized as harmful all too often.

Storefront schools and other experimental and experiential forms of education flourished, as they tried to break away from the traditional model of education founded on the concept of the factory in the early years of the 20th century. In personal growth, we saw est, lifespring, synanon, a variety of eastern mystic ideas brought to this country, and a host of other movements with new visions of how to increase human potential. In addition, the concept of individual therapy provided by credentialed therapists, rooted in at least the trappings of science and credentials, finally became accepted legally and culturally. This was marked by the legal acceptance of alcoholism as a disease in 1962, rather than the old view of it being only a moral problem. The 1960s was a cornucopia of new ideas and experimentation, starting a process of developing, interacting, and evolving to find better ways to educate and help young people.

The network of emotional growth/therapeutic schools and programs this newsletter focuses on evolved directly out of the experimentation going on in the 1960s. Part of this experimentation was to establish schools for at-risk adolescents as private alternatives, with parental choice driving enrollment decisions. These influences are still evident, it is these roots in the experimentation of the sixties that make this network unique from other education and mental health associations and networks. Many of the people and schools who started working with struggling teens during the creativity of the 1960s, are still around.

Larry Dean Olson, founder of Anasazi Foundation, discovered that students at Brigham Young University did better academically after going on one of his wilderness experiences in the late sixties, and Larry Wells, Founder of Wilderness Quest, found that taking young Idaho prisoners into the wilderness in the early 1970s reduced recidivism rates drastically. In addition, many of the programs in Montana were founded by people who had worked at, or been inspired by, Spring Creek Community School, a backwoods alternative school founded by Steve Cawdry in the late sixties or early 70s. Cawdry closed the school down several years ago, but its influence remains.

The late Mel Wasserman founded the CEDU School in 1967, and CEDU probably had the most widespread influence on this network. Originally, Wasserman saw how many of the young people he met around his hometown of Palm Springs, California in the mid-sixties were living in total chaos. They had real problems with drugs, relationships and parents, and from the standard institutions and interventions of the time, there was nothing available to effectively help them. He decided to go into the school business. He founded CEDU specifically as an alternative school, designed to provide what these confused young people desperately needed. His genius was in selecting from the currents of experimentation floating around the sixties, those elements that created a whole child education system by addressing their physical, mental and emotional growth. The term Emotional Growth education came out of the CEDU approach. CEDU became extremely successful in helping young people as an alternative to therapeutic institutions. CEDU expanded to establish several north Idaho schools by the 1990s and added the two schools currently in California. More importantly, many people who worked at CEDU left to establish their own schools, or took key positions in other schools, adding their own personal ideas to what they had learned at CEDU. A significant number of the schools in the Emotional Growth/Therapeutic schools and programs network were developed or strongly influenced by people who were originally inspired by their CEDU experience.

Another early school was Elan, in Poland Springs, Maine. Established in 1970, Elan was strongly influenced by the behavioral concepts prevalent at the time, developing into an extremely tightly structured behavioral modification school. Although Elan itself has not grown to beyond the one school, I have met several people elsewhere in the Northeast who had once worked at Elan. It seems Elan’s approach differed from the norm, and it opened people up to the idea that there were ways beyond the traditional to construct a school or program for struggling teens, and they proceeded to act on that insight.

Provo Canyon School, in Provo Utah, was founded in 1971. Although a secure treatment center, they employed several new ideas, including thinking of themselves as a school, and referring to their residents as students instead of patients. Today, there are many schools and programs in Utah that were either founded by people who had once worked for Provo Canyon School, or learned the business from an ex-employee of Provo Canyon School.

Other important influences were Campbell Loughmiller, and his book Wilderness Road, published 1965, from his work with the Salesmanship Club near Dallas. This book, and the Salesmanship Club, found a kid’s behavior gets better after camping out. Primarily influential in the Southeast, this concept of long term camping inspired the Three Springs programs and the Eckerd Programs, along with a number of other smaller programs.

So, what's my point? First, if you start tracing the history of influences on many of the schools in the network of Emotional Growth/ Therapeutic schools and programs, you usually wind up back to just a handful of early founders. Also, much of what is most successful and creative in the schools and programs in this network came directly out of the creative thinking and experimenting that occurred in the 1960s.

Types and Methods

While Intervention Types range from the formal to the informal as indicated below, Troubled teen programs tend to focus primairly on formal interventions.

Range of treatment types

• Formal Independent Medical Psychological Treatments

Hospitals, Outpatient Clinics, Community Programs

• Professional Therapies

Family Therapy, Group Therapy

• Formal Community Support

Support Groups, Independent Living Centers

• Schools
• Supported Employment
• Informal Community Support

Mentors, Friends, etc.

Methods

• Therapeutic Community (TC) - based on milieu therapy principles and includes group psychotherapy as well as practical activities. Troubled teen TCs are often modified to accommodate adolescent developmental differences and to facilitate their maturation. They may involve less hierarchy and confrontation and greater emphasis on education. Many Troubled teen TCs have an onsite school. Most offer a range of family services that require family participation, and offer after treatment follow up care.

• Positive Peer Group - Run by a therapist assigned to the group. The students are allowed to offer constructive criticism of each other and are expected to confront on negative behaviors in the spirit of helping not in the spirit of hurting.

• Positive Peer Community Meeting - Designed to discuss how the day went and how the unit handled the day and to confront any issues with any negative leaders throughout the day.

• Wilderness therapy - sometimes referred to as outdoor education or adventure-based therapy providing Contact with Nature or dealing with Nature Deficit Disorder.

The Hero's Journey...

Ocean Based Adventure Therapy

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - In the 1970's Cognitive Therapy (dealing with how patients think) became joined with Behavior Therapy (dealing with how patients behave) giving rise to the ideas behind Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy - combines standard cognitive-behavioral techniques for Emotion Regulation and reality-testing with concepts of mindful awareness, Distress Tolerance, and acceptance largely derived from Buddhist meditative practice.

These programs specialize in DBT:

Fulshear Ranch Academy - Young Adult Treatment and Transition Program for Young Women.

NorthStar Center - Young Adult Therapeutic Transition Program helping to achieve educational and life goals.

Numbers

In 1999 the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs gave the number of schools at 43. By 2005 their number was 140. Recent estimated of the number of teen programs vary between 350 and 650 programs. Trends in numbers of these programs tend to follow the economy. In 2009 one consulting firm reported there were 40 closures and 12 new programs. In 2008 they reported 11 closures and 15 new programs.

Effectiveness

“ All I need it the truth, just gimme some truth. ” — John Lennon, 1970

Program

Effectiveness research is sporadic and usually sponsored by the industry calling into question the reports objectivity. In 2006 the results of one such study conducted between 2003 and 2005 involving 993 students from 9 private youth programs utilizing the Youth outcome questionnaire was presented at the 114th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. The report concluded that there were significant improvements...

In 2006 the results of a study conducted between 2003 and 2005 involving 993 students from 9 schools was presented at the 114th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. The study made use of the Youth outcome questionnaire certified by BYU in terms of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and concurrent validity as well as being a valid and reliable self-report measure of psychosocial distress in youth psychotherapy research. Another study from 2001 utilizing the Youth outcome questionnaire and involving students enrolled in a group of wilderness therapy programs has been published by the University of Idaho.

Outcome Statistics of Residential Therapy at Red Rock Canyon School

Home Environment

It is easier to change a behavioral problem by addressing all the outside forces that are maintaining it. This point is often illustrated when adolescents are placed in residential facilities. After an initial "honeymoon" period of relative calm upon returning home, the adolescent frequently returns to his or her old ways of functioning. This is because the conditions within the family and external environment have a greater influence on the difficult teenager than any other factor. Recent meta-analytic studies support the contention that a family systems approach is the most effective treatment modality for severe behavioral problems in both adolescents (Chanberlain & Rosicky, 1995; Shadish, Montgomery, Wilson, Wilson, & Okwumabua, 1993) and children (Estrada & Pinsof, 1995).

Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement

Disagreement Pyramid

This might belong on the talk page to preempt those who are intent on flaming this article.

Teen Advocacy

Real Abuse

Abuse of teens has been well documented. Abuse occurs in many forms. It may range from benign neglect to intentional mistreatment.

Organizations

The Disability rights organization, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, opposes placement in Therapeutic Boarding Schools equating them with residential treatment centers. They call into question the appropriateness and efficacy of such group placements, the failure of such programs to address problems in the child’s home and community environment, the limited or no mental health services offered and substandard educational programs. Concerns specifically related to private therapeutic boarding schools include 1) inappropriate discipline techniques, 2) medical neglect, 3) restricted communication such as lack of access to child protection and advocacy hotlines, and 4) lack of monitoring and regulation. Bazelon promotes community-based services on the basis that they are more effective and less costly than residential placement.

Political Action

From late 2007 through 2008, a broad coalition of grass roots efforts, prominent medical and psychological organizations that including members of Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate use of Residential Treatment (ASTART) and the Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY), provided testimony and support that led to the creation of the Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act of 2008 by the United States Congress Committee on Education and Labor.

Jon Martin-Crawford and Kathryn Whitehead of CAFETY testified at a hearing of the United States Congress Committee on Education and Labor on April 24, 2008, where they described practices they considered abusive, which they had experienced, observed, and been told about at the Family Foundation School and Mission Mountain School, both therapeutic boarding schools.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued guides for parents considering residential treatment programs.

Angry Mob Mentality

A former student is quoted as saying “I stumbled on a number of sites devoted to people who had “survived” DeSisto. As I read on, I found a frightening wealth of misinformation about the schools. People raging about brainwashing, child-abuse, sexual humiliation… The list goes on. People who had gone to these schools and “escaped” talk about their experiences as if they’d been sent to POW camps and had bamboo chutes slid under their fingernails.” And, “These are not people who want to know the truth. This is a forum for people who want to vent their anger and frustration, their feelings of being victimized and not listened to, on the world at large. It’s rare, in my experience, to find an internet forum that does not suffer from this. This is why many forums have moderators, to attempt to illicit respectful, open-minded conversation, not fear-mongering and hateful accusations.” And finally, “The few people that attempted [to descent] were met with such vile hostility that it seemed clear to me that truth or reality was not what these folks were seeking; they appeared to actually WANT to be angry, they seemed to NEED it.”

Speaking on the closure of one particular program the following was reported. When these allegations came up in the spring, (Aldi) received a Facebook message that stated, `if you want to get your parent's money back, say you were abused.'"

Nefarious Intent

Opponents of the Troubled Teen Industry attribute the motives of participants to one or another form of malevolent intent, speaking of students as prisoners or detainees and describing programs as unnecessary and a substitute for good parenting. Some go so far as to claim that parents dump their kids into these programs with full knowledge that they will be mistreated, that these parents believe in a sinister form of tough love. See: Behavior modification facility. Explore this link for useful content.

See also

Related topics

• Behavior modification facility POV issues
• Teen escort company POV issues
• Residential treatment center
• User:Cdw1952/Boot camp (correctional)  : Work In Progress
• Young Adult Program : Work In Progress

Techniques

• Behavior Therapy aka Behavior Modification
• Systematic desensitization
• Operant conditioning
• Cognitive behavioral therapy
• Dialectical behavioral therapy
• Motivational interviewing

More

• Teenage rebellion
• Humanistic psychology
• Group psychotherapy
• Therapeutic community
• Educational learning differences
• Residential education
• Continuation high school

Specific schools

• King George School
• Montana Academy
• Academy at Swift River
• Mount Bachelor Academy
• New Leaf Academy

• Bromley Brook School
• Oakley School
• Elan School
• Hidden Lake Academy

• Family Foundation School
• Grove School
• Shortridge Academy
• Stone Mountain School
• John Dewey Academy

Notes

^ A: The XXX was influential of turning around the lives of XX and XX through the concept of a higher power. Higher power was an outgrowth the the Christian religious foundation of XX.

^ B: Another term describing troubled teens would be defiant Teens. See Defiant teens: a clinician's manual for assessment and family intervention By Barkley, Edwards, Robin

External links

• Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate use of Residential Treatment
• Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law
• Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth
• U.S. Department of State, Fact Sheet: Behavior Modification Facilities, 2004