If a teen is mentally ill and actively dangerous to self or others, skip the programs, go to a *real* mental hospital and get the kid stabilized on a medication or combination of medications that will work for him/her.
Then you can do therapy on an outpatient basis from there.
If your insurance won't cover for long enough to get the patient all the way stabilized, see if the mental hospital has a day hospitalization program your kid can continue in, just coming home at night to sleep, until they've got him/her fully stabilized.
If the kid is juvenile delinquent in an actually criminal (really dangerous to others and their property--a danger to the community) way, I hate to say it, but juvie seems to be better conditions and safer than what you're risking with a boot camp program---and a lot of programs that say they aren't bootcamps strongly resemble them in a variety of ways. The programs will tell you they work, but independent evaluations from researchers who have no financial stake in the results show that bootcamps just don't work. Better to go with juvie and hope the kid grows out of it. Some do.
If the kid is smalltime criminal in a non-dangerous way, pot, etc., your best bet seems to be traditional Mom Fu---searching rooms regularly and discarding any drugs or drug paraphernalia found is the only thing I know of that will inhibit a teen from storing little baggies of pot and stuff at home. Don't take their word for anything, don't *ask* them anything if it's a potential temptation for them to lie---just check everything.
Between me and my cousins, I'm the only one I know for sure never tried pot. And I did try acid twice in college. I know otherwise responsible adults whose only vice is that they occasionally smoke a joint. I've been to parties where middle-aged high-end professionals with stable lives wandered off in the back to smoke a joint. I have friends who have overcome addictions to substances and have decent, responsible adult lives.
I didn't approve at the parties (and didn't go to anymore parties with that crowd, not just because of that---just not my kind of crowd, not a good mesh), and I don't approve now. But I'm not their mother.
I guess my point is that all teens do things their parents don't like, and unless the teen is suicidal, homicidal, or stealing from stores or breaking into people's cars or houses, *usually* it's best to keep a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel and ride out the storm.
I was a *huge* risk of deadorinjail. A program would have killed me, not helped me. I have a major mental illness of the kind that is statistically most likely to result in suicide.
(bipolar type II).
My parents rode it out. It was the right thing to do.
A *better* thing to do would have been to get me in to a psychiatrist and properly diagnosed and treated, but in my case my parents were already so eccentric themselves that to them I seemed merely eccentric, not nutty as a fruitcake. (Which, off my meds, I am---which is why since being put on them I've *never* gone off my meds, except once on doctor's orders when I was pregnant with our daughter.)
They rode out my sister's teenage rebellion. Didn't approve, but dealt with it in normal parental ways. It was pretty much as bad as almost anything here, but I'm not going to tell specifics out of school on my sister. Let's just skip to the happy ending to tell you that she's happily married, churchgoing, she and her husband of many years have two terrific sons together, and live in a nice house in semi-rural Virginia. (Rural, but dad commutes).
When I was in high school, we had a couple of kids die in a car wreck on a bad curve. Had a kid suicide in or a bit after college. But the overwhelming majority of people I knew, even the wildest ones, survived their turbulent adolescences and settled into responsible adults. Even the college drug dealer and the college Satanist. They grew out of it. Oddly enough, both of *them* ended up working on highly classified stuff with high end government security clearances. They were absolutely truthful on the polygraph about what they'd been into and that they were now out of it, and that was enough.
But then look at all the program kids who have had much more difficult outcomes from the psychiatric after-effects of the program. The programs have permanently fractured a lot more families than they want you to know about. They lead to a lot of suicides. It doesn't seem infrequent at all for program families to have lifelong financial hardships both because of the program leaching all the family's hard-built capital *and* from it fracturing the bonds that would lead them to support each other in financially difficult times---support that is invaluable in weathering those times with the least long-term financial damage.
There *are* conditions that require putting someone in a lockdown situation for awhile. Someone who's actively suicidal, homicidal, or physically hurting people (causing actual physical damage) or breaking and entering to steal---those mean you have to lock people up for awhile to protect themselves or the community. Mental illness and criminality require different approaches, but.....
Other than that, locking someone away seems to do far more harm than good.
Timoclea
