Weighed down by the past

I was victimized by one of the owners of a Youth Group home in Utah where a a staff member was brutally attacked as he was the only one on duty. My incident occurred before he started his facility, I called the police but they wouldn't do anything to him because of WHO he was within the community and his powerful business partner.

I feel a tremendous amount of guilt, pain, and trauma... I wish somebody would have listened and stopped this man before he opened this facility and what happened. These homes are magnets for shrewd, amoral, and corrupt "business" men seeking nothing more than money. The kids and the pain are not worth their sick obsession with money and power. E-mailing local city council in Utah has been like trying to converse with a cinderblock wall... they protect family names rather than family values. Every name associated with WWASPS, I know or even went to school with and the infamous DACE of Casa Bay, his father was my principle.

I was a past student at Greenbrier and coming out of the woods i did think the school was very good but after being there for 8 months and it being my 7th treatment center and it was the worst out of all, the teachers didn't seem to connect with many of the kids or they would push their problems to the side if it interferes with what their doing, the new staff they got in the last few months dont seem qualified to work with us they were very disrespectful at times and although there was some great staff there's only about 5 good ones left so its a very bad combo and the treatment center treats kids like were in a behavioral facility with the way they handle situations, the therapists dont work with the clients and will cancel meetings and avoid the kids if they dont want to do sessions.

The students are out of control and instead of trying to work with the students to find out how to help them and make everyone come together they just put up cameras and make things strict and take everything away. I personally dont recommend wasting money on sending your child here because i've barely seen people come out and be as you would call "normal" I stayed in my bed and didn't go anywhere for over a month till i convinced the staff to send me to another center

The original testimony on Yelp (Link)

This testimony was located on Reddit (link). Hope Ranch aka Star Meadows Academy is closed but the legacy of their strange school uniforms remain forever

I’ve lurked in this subreddit for a long time and made an account to post and share my experience with you guys. I’m almost 40 now and the tldr of it is that it fucked me up.

I was sent to Wilderness Treatment in 1997 when I was 16 years old. Like many of us, I came from an abusive and neglectful family. After I expressed some self destructive and suicidal behaviour, my parents put me into an inpatient treatment facility for 2 weeks. I expect this is where they were given the idea to send me to Wilderness Treatment.

After the inpatient facility, I was sent to Idaho. The school had a bunch of resident kids there but we weren’t allowed to interact. 2 of us lived in a cabin with 2 counselors until we went into the woods for 3 months. This part was actually really nice; my counselors were decent, in it for the right reasons type of people. Once we got back to the house in Idaho, things changed. We were given a 3 day solo, where we were not allowed to leave our camping spot, not allowed to speak to anyone, and given half a day’s ration of food for the whole three days. We had to sleep in the open air, no tents, no heat, and I remember seeing lots of bugs and worms out at night. I was so hungry. It was horrible.

After my solo I was sent further upstate to a place that is now shut down. There were...6 of us? The food was moldy. The house was full of stink bugs and we found maggots living in the mop. We told the counselors, but the mop wasn’t replaced the whole time I was there. We had to do 2 hours of PT every morning and if you opted out, you had to sit on a stump with a 3” diameter for the rest of the day. Phone calls were monitored. They made fun of us and took opportunities to be mean to us and said it was to make us appreciate our parents. I think I spent 6 months there before my parents sent me to a different school.

Hope Ranch. I don’t remember the names of the others but I remember this one. Abusive Christians hiding behind The Bible. They would perform exorcisms on us if we misbehaved. A few of the counselors lived there with their children and they encouraged their kids to be mean to us. It was so demeaning, being berated by an 8 year old. Some girls said they were molested by one of the counselors but I wasn’t. I ended up running away from that place.

My parents took me back in but looking back at it, I wish I had just left.

My relationship with my parents was pretty good for awhile, but I recently had a kid and all of these memories came flooding back, fresh as ever. I am low contact with them and they think it is because I live far away, when in truth I just can’t stand to look at them.

If I could rate this facility lower, I would. I was a patient here for 5 months from May-October 2015, the worst 5 months of my life. During my stay, I experienced things that only made my problems worse.

When you first arrive to the village, after you are checked in, strip searched, and drug tested, you get sent to Magnolia cabin. In Magnolia, you get very little chances to talk, you rarely go outside (but when you do, you’re stuck in a fenced in front yard that really doesn’t get much sunlight). Most of the time in this cabin, you’re either in the classroom teaching yourself your school work, or you’re sitting in a hard plastic chair in the day room staring at a wall not allowed to talk. You’re allowed 2 outfits while in magnolia, but you have to ask the staff to get them for you because all of your belongings are in a room behind the staff desk. Only when you prove yourself with your best behavior can you be transferred to an outdoor cabin.

While I was in the outdoor cabin, fights constantly broke out. At any point if you got upset, instead of trying to talk to you and calm you down, you get out in a hold and get injected with Benadryl to calm you down. Luckily, I never had to experience this myself, but I watched many of them take place.

At one point during my stay, one of the staff members in my cabin disappeared for a few weeks. She later returned, and she told me why she had been gone. She had attempted suicide, and even showed me pictures of the graphic incident on her phone.

The “school” they have on campus is just a double wide trailer with desks. The teachers don’t actually teach, they sit at their desks and have conversations with each other and some patients. If you want to learn, you have to teach yourself with the falling apart textbooks they provide.

The only thing I got from coming to The Village were nightmares I still continue to have, and the fear of messing up again because I was scared to get sent back.

Please, if you care about your children, please don’t send them hear. There are plenty of other behavioral health facilities that will actually benefit your child, and aren’t just in it for the money.

Source
The original testimony on Google Maps

Untrained employees and no experiences handling children with illnesses. Not a good cocktail.

This testimony was located on Reddit message board (link)

I attended auldern from March 2015- May 2016.

I don’t even know where to begin... the staff would totally brainwash desperate and uninformed parents to send their kids there and sign custody over to the staff of Auldern. So I guess that’s what happened to my parents around the time I got in to some trouble a few weeks earlier. My parents tricked me; they told me I was going to visit like a normal high school because I wasn’t making good grades and thats what they cared about most, so we had been visiting some schools lately.

We drove to auldern and they gave me an hour long fake tour of the school and after I told the headmaster I didn’t like it she said “Well, it doesn’t matter because you have to stay here.” I begged and pleaded to my parents not to leave me here. Then a staff member brought me in front of the whole community to introduce me while I was in complete shock and intensely crying. It was humiliating and I felt like I was in a night mare. I was, and I still haven’t woken up yet.

To try to make my story a little shorter I’ll sum it up; they emotionally abused us every chance they got, the therapists and staff were not trained properly at all, staff picked favorites and bullied the ones they didn’t like, they made up steps you could move up through throughout your stay incredibly difficult and emotionally straining. I was on apprentice which is what your on when you first get there. You can’t even go outside without having a staff member come with you and coldly stare you down. I liked to run; they didn’t let me unless and staff could watch me and rarely was there a time when there was enough staff available for one to watch me. They had multiple punishments. One was non-com where you couldn’t talk to anyone.

They had “bans” where they would not let you talk to a specific friend, or be in the same room with them even if they were your best friend there.

They had a punishment called”Refocus” that they could keep you on for as long as they want. When I was on it I remember the staff laughing at us in the freezing cold trying to set up tents for ourselves, which we didn’t know how, and didn’t have any directions. We had to sleep in below freezing weather and I remember my toes feeling numb and my nose being frozen solid.

They made us do manual labor all day instead of school. I remember one time we had to pick weeds out of this sand pit for about three hours in pitch black and freezing cold while the staff member sat on her butt and went on her phone. They made us make our own fires to make meals and gave us limited matches. I remember fighting over some girls for a can of chicken because usually all we got was rice and beans. We were so hungry from doing labor all day. We would occasionally get to have an apple. We couldn’t sit on furniture like dogs.

They made people sleep on the tile floor under a fluorescent light, sometimes for weeks on end. I feel I could write on and on but to make it shorter auldern was so terrifying, manipulating, isolating. Many people who have gone have died, including one of my best friends, who I believe would not have died if she had not attended auldern. Sometimes we would sit in these huge circles and we would just go around the room and people would berate you for no reason. It was so emotionally abusive and I think I came out so traumatized from it that I developed many new anxieties, insomnia , awful night mares. Even if you didn’t need to be there they would keep you there for the money. I’m so glad it’s getting shut down and I know there are so many other schools like this and worse.. that I hope are getting shut down too.

It changed my life and I still suffer from the memories of that place.

Everything they say on the website is a complete lie. My parents and I were completely dissatisfied. My therapist was rude and discouraging about my passions and dreams.

I was not able to address any of my adoption related issues in the 8 months I was there. my parents and I went to the head of school and asked to switch therapist but I was never allowed. My parents were completely shocked and appalled at all the lies the school told them and have even said they wish I was never sent there.

My mom worked hard to get me to graduate early due to the dishonesty, and incompetence of the school and they still have not given my family money back for a trip I was supposed to go on. Its an overall lousy school and I would recommend ANY thing other than this.

The original testimony on Yelp (link)

This entry was written in 2009 on a website. The owner of the facility where the person who wrote the testimony was confined committed suicide after the authorities charged him with a crime. The victim wrote:

I have been thinking a lot lately about my 16 month stay at wellsprings academy back in Dec 2001- April 2003. I was there when it was shut down and all of us had to leave. I am now 23 and am still recovering from what I experienced there.

I was sent there because when I was 16 a became involved in drugs and alcohol. My parents we told it would be the best place for me. They were misinformed. My parents were terrified about my problems and wanted to desperately help me. While at wellspring I was confined to a small room in isolation for weeks on end. It was punishment for not behaving. I attempted to reach out to my parents but they had already been subject to my stories so they did not believe me. Furthermore the staff at wellspring assured them I was not being mistreated. I was also forced to participate in religious practices. If I did not I would be punished by ISS( in school suspention). This is what we had to refer to the isolation. The "students" or as I say prisoners referred privately to this punishment as the box. What I endured at wellspring effected me greatly.

When I was released I became a time bomb. I could not cope with this abuse. Even though I know now my actions were wrong and I take full responsibility for my actions I saught escape from what I felt. I turned to Herion to do this. I lived in a downward spiril until I was 21 years old. I destroyed everything around me. I finally got sober at 21. I was able to start dealing with all the feelings I felt. I am now 23 years old. I have been sober for over 2 years. I am back in school and am living a great life. Today I was thinking a lot about what happened and I hadn't heard anything about wellspring since I left back on that cold April day. I googled it and found this page. I can't say I was too upset to find that bob g. killed himself in 2008. I guess karma is working. I hope that we can just stop this "abuse" from happening to other families at other schools like Wellspring. 

The original testimony on FICAN message board (link)

“My name is Brittany. I went to Copper Canyon Academy, in Arizona, from October of 2009 until December of 2010. I was 16 at the time. CCA was not my first program (it was my third), but it is the one I remember the most.

Seminars are what I remember vividly though. In the first seminar, we were forced to relive all of our trauma out loud with girls we did not know. I remember sitting in front of a mirror for hours in a dark room. We were told to think of all the bad things that had happened in our lives. We were not allowed to do anything else until we had “cried it out.”

Later that day we did an exercise called “Mom and Dad,” where we confronted our parents. We were sitting in a circle, facing outwards. At one point a girl got so upset that she got up, picked up her chair, and threw it. It hit me in the head. I was denied any kind of care because it would disrupt my progress. I had a headache for days after the incident.

In seminar three, later on in my stay at CCA, I remember being down at a river, where all the girls who admitted being gay were “baptized.” I watch a girl get hit with metal hangers because that is how she felt her parents would punish her if she did not do well. As for me, they made me burn some of the few pictures I had with my family. Saying I needed to move on from the past and learn to be better. They made me burn journals that had my sincere feelings in them because they had entries of a boy I had known, which they had found during a room raid. The worst part for me was being forced to burn my favorite book. Books were my safe haven, and they knew that. I was told I would be stuck there for much longer if I did not, so I did.

I was told I had Borderline Personality Disorder, but not until the end of my program. I had been medicated with antipsychotics for over a year, off of the assumption of a psychiatrist who saw me once a month for five minutes. As an adult, I found out I never had or have that disorder.

Ten years later, I have no relationship with my family, and I have an extremely hard time keeping any kind of relationship due to abandonment issues. That is what hurts me the most. After everything and all this time, after doing what I was forced to do, they no longer talk to me because I “faked” a program or I am not the same person they remember.”

Copper Canyon Academy was purchased by Aspen Education Group, which collapsed after several children died while attending their residential treatment programs. Then the previous owners bought it back and it is now named Sedona Sky Academy. Basically nothing have changed in treatment approach since Brittany was there

Source of the original testimony (https://www.breakingcodesilence.net/testimonial/brittanysstory" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Link)