My daughter, Colleen, is 28 and still has nightmares nearly every night from her time at Island View residential treatment center in Utah.
Sending her there is one of the biggest regrets of my life.
When Colleen was a teenager, she got into so much trouble that I didn’t think she’d live to see her 21st birthday.
Colleen’s dad and I were divorced, but we were united in our desire to help Colleen get on a better path. Her dad hired an education consultant because we thought she might do better in a different school. We were very clear with the EC that we did not want anything punitive like a boot camp or military school. Both her dad and I recognized that for a child to be as troubled as Colleen was at the time, we as her parents had to take responsibility for our part. We did not want to punish her; we wanted to help her. We wanted her in a supportive, nurturing environment where she would thrive.
The education consultant agreed that Colleen needed to get out of her current environment.
He recommended a wilderness program in Utah and said we should hire transporters to take her there. Transporters are men in black who come in the middle of the night to catch kids off guard so they won’t run away. The kids have no idea what’s happening and their parents are told in advance to ignore their cries for help. If kids don’t cooperate, they are restrained with handcuffs or zip ties. The EC said it would be much easier on everyone to use transporters to get Colleen to Utah.
These transporters were the same guys who kidnapped Paris Hilton when she was a teenager, which she describes about an hour into her new documentary #ThisIsParis.
Both Colleen’s dad and I were adamantly opposed to hiring transporters. It just sounded like a horrible thing to do to a child.
We thought it would be much better to talk to Colleen about the wilderness program ahead of time to prepare her, and then to take her there ourselves.
In retrospect, that transporter recommendation should have been a huge red flag for us. Knowing what we wanted for Colleen, what psychologist would tell us to hire men in black to kidnap our child in the middle of the night to take her to a program to help her?
The EC also told us that not all kids are ready to go straight home after the wilderness program, but I was reasonably certain Colleen would be ready, and I really wanted her to come home.
But at some point before wilderness graduation, the EC told us it would not be fair to Colleen to bring her straight home. He said that going from complete wilderness right back into the environment where she got in so much trouble would set her up to fail. That made sense to us so we agreed to send her to an intermediary program.
We trusted the EC when he said IV was the best program in the country and the best fit for Colleen. He said studies showed that 90-some percent of kids who graduate from IV are still doing well six months after graduation.
What the EC didn’t tell us was that the reason so many IV grads did so well after graduation is because nearly all of them went straight from IV to another residential treatment program so they had no opportunity to get into trouble.
But we didn’t know that at the time. We researched the programs online and found a few negative reviews but our EC explained them away.
So after getting positive references about IV from a few other parents, we agreed to send Colleen there. She was about 16 1/2 years old at the time.
As much as I knew I’d miss her, it was a huge relief to know she was somewhere safe where no one could hurt her and she wouldn’t have access to anything she could use to hurt herself. In retrospect, I can see I was only half right.
I am so sorry we didn’t believe Colleen when she tried to tell us how bad it was.
We had been prepared by IV to expect manipulation from Colleen and not to fall for it, so we didn’t take her seriously.
IV had given us a list of the typical things that kids new to IV say to manipulate their parents into letting them come home. We were told everything she would say to us was either an exaggeration or a lie.
I think that’s one of the worst things these programs do to families: they set parents against their kids so parents don’t believe what their kids say and kids learn they can’t trust their parents to help them.
The first letter we got from Colleen had a whole paragraph blacked out by her therapist, who had added a note in the margin that she thought it was best to delete that part because Colleen was so angry and it wasn’t productive.
In retrospect, that should have been another red flag. How is it acceptable to censor a kid’s letters to her own parents?
The first phone call we were supposed to have with Colleen was a few days later, right around Thanksgiving. Her therapist cancelled the call, though, saying Colleen was so angry with us that she didn’t want to talk to us so she thought it best to cancel the call and she needed us to support her on this decision.
Last week I found the therapist’s email and forwarded it to Colleen to ask her if it was true. Colleen said it was not true; she really wanted to talk to us to tell us what was going on. She had many years of therapy before she got to IV and she knew what they were doing was wrong and she really wanted to tell us about it.
But back then, when our call was cancelled, Colleen thought it was because we were mad at her for writing us a negative letter. She didn’t know that IV therapists open their students’ sealed envelopes and read their letters to make sure parents aren’t told anything IV doesn’t want them to know.
All Colleen knew was, at her next therapy session after she sent us the letter, her therapist had Colleen’s letter on her desk. Colleen assumed that we had gotten her letter and immediately faxed it back to her therapist.
Here’s what Colleen learned at IV: It is not safe to ask your parents for help because they will never believe you. No one will ever believe you.
You can’t trust anyone; not even people you think are your friends, because they will turn on you to save themselves. IV required students to report each other for any transgressions they witnessed, no matter how minor, and hearing another teammate saying something negative about IV was definitely something you were expected to report. If you didn’t report on your teammates, you lost privileges like visits and phone calls with parents. So you were forced to comply.
The program is set up so that you have to progress through a series of levels before
you can graduate. There is no way to progress from one level to the next without “dropping slips” on your teammates’ transgressions, which could be as minor as making eye contact with a student of the opposite sex while passing in the hallway.
Every Tuesday they had a “problem-solving” session where all the students sat in a circle and everyone who reported another student was required to confront that student in front of the group, a painful and humiliating experience for everyone.
I asked Colleen if they also had sessions in which students recognized each other for their progress and encouraged each other, but Colleen said she didn’t remember any positive meetings where students left feeling good about themselves. IV was about breaking your spirit until you were compliant. The students lived in fear of getting punished, not only with loss of contact with parents but also with isolation and extended solitary confinement.
For minor transgressions, kids had to sit at their desk in their room facing the wall all day with no contact with other kids or staff.
They may or may not have schoolwork to do. They were not allowed to talk or even make eye contact with anyone else. If they needed to use the bathroom they had to write their request on a slip of paper and put it outside their door and then wait until one of the staff eventually noticed and responded.
For more serious offenses such as trying to plan an escape, the staff took away all your personal belongings, including family photos, letters, books and all your clothes. You were given a pair of grey sweatpants and a grey sweatshirt to wear. You sat in your room at your desk facing the wall all day. At night you slept on a mattress on the floor in the hallway under fluorescent lights that were always on so staff could monitor you.
For some kids this punishment lasted days. Other kids spent months at their desks until staff deemed they were sufficiently punished. There was also a bare isolation room where students were confined. Students who acted out were tackled by staff and pinned down then sent to the isolation room.
There was little opportunity to speak freely with teammates as you didn’t know who, if anyone, you could trust. There was no way to talk privately with your parents because staff monitored all calls.
The last parent event I attended at IV was an outward bound type activity. Colleen, who is afraid of heights, as am I, was required to climb a tall pole, stand on top of it on a small platform, then jump off to catch a hoop to swing to next post. Colleen was terrified and the staff person was merciless, berating her and insulting her so harshly that I was in tears watching it. I appealed to her therapist and another staff person and they both told me that he knows what he’s doing and I should trust the process. It was heartbreaking to watch.
Colleen and I talked about it a few days ago and she said she had done outward bound type programs in other schools and found the experience very empowering. But Island View approached everything differently, she said. Any student who was unwilling or unable to do what staff asked them to do was shamed, humiliated, threatened and punished to keep them in their place.
When Colleen graduated from IV, her EC strongly recommended she go straight to another residential treatment program in Utah.
But neither her dad nor I liked the programs he recommended because they were so far away and so restrictive. We did not want Colleen away from home any longer, and we especially did not want her at another lockdown program. We both thought she had earned the right to more freedom and it was past time for her to come home.
So we did our own research to find a school we thought would be a better fit for Colleen. Her dad found a Friends [Quaker] boarding school close enough to our home that Colleen would be able to come home on weekends. The EC strongly recommended against that, though, so we kept looking and found an arts-based therapeutic boarding school in Vermont.
Colleen did very well there and we could visit as often as we liked. Students there had a lot more freedom and could even take a college course or two at a college in town.
We definitely made the right call by following our own instincts rather than the EC’s strong recommendations to keep Colleen in lockdown in Utah.
I am speaking out now for #BreakingCodeSilence to try to help kids and their families from making the same mistakes we did.
This article was written by Eileen Gillan and was republished with permission.
