Parent in Crisis: I hope you are joking. Because the sad fact of many of these facilities are that the "professionals" who have "many years" of experience dealing with teens in crisis have "many years of experience" as staff members with no credentials or real licenses. Some supposed schools are really classified as a "group home" with no teachers (if you ever get around to reading the fine print--which won't be in the brochure.) Staff who show you a license should not be taken at face value because often these degrees come from degree mills, or bogus colleges with no real accreditation. You should also hope that these "compassionate, caring" staff don't have a history of perverse, illegal behavior because one of the things I and others quickly learned, was that they loved telling war stories of their early days in the gutter of drugs, rape, and other inappropriate things for a "THERAPIST" to be discussing with a client who should, if nothing else, feel safe.
Finally, it's not "tough love" meaning discipline and structure. It's isolation and insularity, coersion, hours on end verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse which your kid will never make the mistake of telling you about after any initial complaint, because their lives will be made miserable, and the staff will do a fine job of telling you that you were manipulated and conned. Eventually, your kid will also believe the script they wrote her, including exaggerrations of real events, along with false events.And he or she will confess to you in shame, and you will all be so glad the facility "saved" him or her.
For awhile after she gets out, she will knock you dead with her straight edged life only to have it all slowly seep out in subconscious ways. Ways that are more convoluted and difficult to untangle than before, because they still have the baseline issues that made you want to cmmmit her to a program compounded by the royal mind fuck she received at the school. (She drank the KoolAid to survive the place, and even though it didn't turn out to be fatal, it was still malignant.)
She may still look good on paper, but she will wonder why am I so fucked up inside? Why don't I trust anyone? Why do I have nightmares? Why am I depressed and anxious? She may or may not fall like a house of cards... but she won't be the solid deck you hoped for. Just wait 5 or ten years.
I've been out of the program that I was in (which coincidentally had one of our "star" staff at Hill) for 18 years. I have nothing to gain by bashing the place. I am a teacher, a mother, and a graduate student, and live a boringly clean life, so its not like I'm some drugged out prostitute complaining about my former TBS (no offense to drugged out prostitutes--they make a much more honest living than the scam artists operating these schools). I am telling you now to be very careful with your choices. Because these schools tend to weave into your psyche in a way that is almost impossible to detangle. (That won't be your job--because liek most parents, you'll still be clinging to the belief that the school "saved" her, even when she's on 20 different anti depressants.
The funny thing about these "schools"--is that I felt like a dirty, drugged out whore for years and years inside afterward, and I wasn't even on drugs when I went to the program, and I was never remotely promiscous. That is what the school does. That is their "emotional growth" program.
Shanlea
PS If I seem pissed, it's because I am. I am a teacher and I've seen parents ship off their kids to be emotionally lobotomized. My favorite reason? The hard working, honest, good student who was sent away for not being pure enough in his Christian expression. Interestingly, this same place boasted an ability to turn a gay youth straight. (Not the reason this kid was placed.)
