Julia Scheeres Blog

Anyone interested in the "teen help" industry should read Maia Szalavitz's brilliant expose of the business, "Help at Any Cost," to be published by Riverhead in March.

Although her book does not mention my alma mater, New Horizons, it does explore the history of teen behavoiral modification programs beginning in the 1970s with "The Seed" and "Straight." Many of these programs use the same techniques I witnessed in New Horizons, including deprivation, humiliation, and a rank system.

Here is the Publisher's Weekly summary of her book:

From Publishers Weekly
"This important book takes the troubled-teens industry to task, exposing the "extremely harsh, perhaps even brutal tactics [companies use to] keep [kids] in line." For $2,000 a month and more, a program will take an oppositional teen to a lockdown facility or a wilderness boot camp for however long it takes to break him or her. Parents pay more than an Ivy League tuition for their children to undergo some "out-of-line" punishments (use of "stress positions," brainwashing, etc.), and, says Szalavitz, there's no evidence that these facilities cure anything. Indeed, many teens suffer post-traumatic stress disorders for years; some actually die in these facilities. Szalavitz, a freelance journalist and senior fellow at Stats.org, has written a courageous—if horrifying—study of the tough-love industry, focusing on four key players: Straight Incorporated, North Star Expeditions, the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and the KIDS program. These hugely profitable businesses are largely unregulated by legal, medical or ethical codes, avoiding accountability for failure by blaming the victim. With a useful appendix discussing when and how to get responsible help for a troubled teen, this book, filled with first-person accounts, should be required reading in Parenting 101. (Feb.) "