How many legitimate, high quality programs to treat kids have one facility closed after an investigation? Perhaps, extremely rarely, you get one that has a bad apple and doesn't deal with it properly and it gets shut.
How many have two? OK, odds are low, but you know, it could happen.
Three? Well, one in a million, but still, in the realm of possibility.
WWASP has had Samoa, Czech Republic, Dundee, Brightway Hospital (Utah), High Impact in Mexico and Sunrise (I think, I might have this name wrong) in Mexico shut down, all following allegations of abuse and/or fraud. That's six.
That's not smoke, that's a gargantuan inferno.
When you *also* have hundreds of kids from dozens of facilities (many who have never met each other or emailed or anything) reporting similar tales of abuse, you have to be stark raving mad to submit your child to these same perpetrators.
If you think the program saved your kid, ask yourself: how do I know this? Did I send his identical twin elsewhere or leave him alone entirely and his identical twin OD'd and died? No, you have no control group and no way of knowing if your kid would have outgrown his juvenile behavior the way 99% of all kids do.
Do you know what proportion of teenagers die of drugs and drink? It's far less than the number who die in non-alcohol car accidents, which is still only .001 percent of the teen population. The average American life expectancy is nearly 80.
This couldn't be if teen drug and drink deaths were common. The WWASP folks are using bogus statistics and scare stories to frighten you into buying something that *does* have a good chance of harming your child severely.
Why take that risk when there are other lower risk ways of helping that actually *do* have research evidence to support them?
Would you make the same decision if your kid had cancer-- let's believe the people who have only testimonials to support their treatment, not the docs at Sloan Kettering or Duke or Harvard?
