molly
I would be very wary of any program that uses mandatory group therapy or uses group pressures for conformity, and I think there are several reasons that it carries with it a high risk of being harmful to your child as well as being utilized as a powerful tool of coercion by staff, something that can be very hard to identify by a novice outside observer. I think it is worth considering that if therapy does not help your child it is going to actually harm him. Depending on the nature and intensity of the therapy the effects may be negligible, or the damage done could last a lifetime and destroy your relationship, but do not assume that if it doesn’t work it will result in ‘no change’. Another point of concern is that it is not the child’s option to participate in therapy, it will be forced upon him, and lack of progress may come with punishment, shaming, which might exacerbate current issues, inhibit their resolution, and even create new issues. Troubled teen programs have an incredibly, incredibly disturbing history of employing coercive tactics and experimental therapies. If you see a possibility where the program could be motivating peer pressures, and those pressures can be used as motivation to achieve individual therapeutic goals, if you see that therapeutic progress is held in the context of peer group progress through level systems, then my advice is to not take a chance. It is not worth it.
To switch gears a bit here, I may have some advice that you may want to look into. I was also diagnosed add when I was young and went through the gamut of prescriptions. Take this for what it is, but as an adult looking back on it all, I think it is either pretty easy to misdiagnose, and/or the diagnosis itself and the search for treatment can be more problematic to overcome than the add itself and just letting the child learn to deal with it naturally, just personally.
That said I do recognize that you may need to keep exploring alternatives here. My advice is to look into Landmark College in VT, I don’t know if you can find something quite like this for minors but maybe they know of some that work in a similar way. It is academically focused but will incorporate learning disability issues like add into the process. Actually I think it would provide huge advantages in getting accepted at other colleges. It is not focused on solving behavior issues, just very structured, but also very flexible in considering individual needs in academic learning. It is less a group thing and the daily learning schedule is structured individually, as stated they have the highest faculty to student ratio in the country. I know your son may not be old enough to go yet, but I think you should look anyways and call them and see if they can point you in a good direction. Maybe it will lead you toward better options, hopefully some you can find at home. (Unless he wants a change of environment). I would prefer to see that any sort of therapy is individual and optional, and that the structuring of time is not dominated by group building excercises, but by academics, and a healthy amount of free time. Anyways, I feel this is a far better environment than Hyde by comparison, so just thought I’d offer.
http://www.landmark.edu/index.cfm .