Maia Szalavitz wrote an excellent book analyzing the "troubled teen" industry, "Help at Any Cost". She has continuted publish critiques of the industry. Exerpts from, and links to, a recent three-part blog post on "tough love" are below the fold.
This Sunday, the Washington Post ran my op-ed, The Trouble With Tough Love, and ever since, I've been trying to handle the onslaught of email from terrified parents seeking alternative help for troubled teens.
My story laid out how 'tough love' residential programs -- like boot camps, harsh wilderness programs, emotional growth boarding schools and behavior modification centers -- have never been proven safe or effective by research.
Tough Talk On 'Tough Love'part I
So how do parents determine, first of all, whether their children actually need residential care and secondly, if they do, how to find a program that is, at minimum, unlikely to be harmful? The first step is to refuse to allow the treatment industry -- including the consultants -- to induce panic or force hurried decision-making. The industry is built on largely unrealistic fears, often telling parents that their children will be dead within weeks if they don't get help immediately.
Fear-mongering by the treatment industry and what parents should do:
Educational consultants, drug prevention and treatment experts, teen residential treatment providers all tend to stress to parents that their children are at great risk if they do not receive immediate residential care.
Fortunately, this is rarely true. So how's a parent to tell whether a child genuinely does have an addiction or behavioral problem that warrants residential treatment? The following summarizes what I've learned in nearly two decades covering addiction and mental illness and the research on the best treatments.
Read the rest of the article for a reasoned approach to problematic teen behavior.
In the last of the three-part story, Szalavitz heps parents formulate a way of evaluting the treatment options
Excerpted from the book, here are the key questions to ask of any residential care provider you are considering, after you have gotten an initial psychiatric evaluation from an independent provider who concurs with the need for residential treatment.
Liz's previous posts on therapeutic schools.
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