By Robert Kolker, The New York Times, January 13, 2021
TROUBLED
The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs
By Kenneth R. Rosen
From the very start of the prologue of “Troubled” — Kenneth R. Rosen’s examination of the so-called “tough-love industry” of wilderness camps and residential therapeutic programs for young people — there is no mystery about how the author feels about such places. Rosen writes that the parents who choose to send their offspring away “have their children vanished”; that sometimes they do so “through trickery or bribes”; and that these programs, in his view, are “a short-term solution with lasting (mostly negative) effects.”
Rosen does not come to this issue primarily as a journalist. He’s a former client, rousted from sleep as a teenager in the middle of the night in 2007 and forced away in what he now calls “a kidnapping.” It would not be his last: Rosen spent time in a secure residential treatment center in Utah, a therapeutic boarding school in Massachusetts and an outdoor therapy program in New York.
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