Whiteout – By Lathrop Lybrook – Description: At the age of 16, I was told to be ready to be picked up at 4:00 in the morning by two strangers who would be taking me to boarding school in northern Idaho. I had spent the last week on the Adolescent Unit at Northside Hospital in Thomasville, Georgia. [...]
We Can’t Be Friends: a True Story – By Cyndy Etler – High school sucks for a lot of people. High school extra sucks when you believe, deep in your soul, that every kid in the school is out to get you. I wasn’t popular before I got locked up in Straight Inc., the notorious “tough love” [...]
Unbroken Brain: a Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction – By Maia Szalavitz – More people than ever before see themselves as addicted to, or recovering from, addiction, whether it be alcohol or drugs, prescription meds, sex, gambling, porn, or the internet. But despite the unprecedented attention, our understanding of addiction is trapped in unfounded 20th century [...]
Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs – Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control—suffering from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage—are carted off against their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across the country. Desperate parents of these “troubled teens” fear it’s their only option. The private, largely unregulated [...]
Trapped in Paradise: A Memoir – Memoir of the life of a ‘student’ of the WWASP run Tranquility Bay and Spring Creek Lodge Programs. Imagine what it would be like being taken from your home in the middle of the night by complete strangers? ‘Trapped in Paradise: A Memoir’ details the history of a troubled teen [...]
Totalistic Teen Treatment: A Qualitative Analysis of Retrospective Accounts – This original qualitative research analyzes adult reports about the experiences and impacts of totalistic teen programs. In the United States, a wide array of residential treatment centers, therapeutic boarding schools, wilderness/outdoor, and intensive outpatient programs provide psychological and behavioral programming to “troubled” youth in totalistic settings. [...]
The White House Boys: An American Tragedy – By Roger Dean Kiser – Hidden far from sight, deep in the thick underbrush of the North Florida woods are the ghostly graves of more than thirty unidentified bodies, some of which are thought to be children who were beaten to death at the old Florida Industrial School for [...]
The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence – By Elliott Currie – In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed sociologist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliott Currie draws on years of interviews to offer a profound investigation of what has gone wrong for so many “mainstream” American adolescents. Rejecting such predictable answers as TV [...]
The Game: A Return to the Elan School – By Wayne Kernochan – Book Description: The Game: A Return to the Elan School, is the fifth book of my memoir series, and the story of the first book in this series, A Life Gone Awry: My Story of the Elan School. This book tells the history of [...]
The Dozier School for Boys: Forensics, Survivors, and a Painful Past – By Elizabeth Murray – Some true crimes reveal themselves in bits and pieces over time. One such case is the Florida School for Boys, a.k.a. the Dozier School, a place where―rather than reforming the children in their care―school officials tortured, raped, and killed them. Opened [...]
