Marked NSFW for a number of reasons - potentially triggering to anyone who’s been through this or something similar. Supplemental links contain some very dark, horrifying accounts.
Why you should know: Hundreds of thousands (possibly far more) of now adults carry that trauma with them. Many of these schools are still in operation, still abusing children.
You likely can’t fully appreciate what these kids went through and what many of them still carry around with them, but reading and watching accounts from past “students” can get you closer:
Webcomic about one man’s experience with Elan, another Troubled Teen program outside the WWASPS umbrella. I won’t spoil the many, many twists, but his story is something I couldn’t pull myself away from the entire time I read it. https://elan.school/
Watch “The Program” on Netflix. Shows multiple people that were sent to different schools in the WWASPS umbrella retelling their stories while exploring the now abandoned facility they were once prisoners in.
YSAK - Very, very, very few of the people complicit in this industry ever had any real consequences for perpetuating a system of child abuse that lead to the destruction of so many lives going back to at least the late 60’s. Most of these monsters simply moved on to other things after their institutions were finally shut down.
Some were even publicly lauded by their communities and powerful leaders for their “contributions” to society.
Most evil acts go unpunished as long as the villain is wearing a suit and smiling.
Last Podcast on the Left did a series on this and it’s horrifying. I will never understand the capacity for humans to be so intolerably cruel to others.
Behind the Bastards also did a podcast on this and it spans multiple bastards, Dr Phil being the one i remember
I was sent to a series of the ‘better’ programs—i.e., the ones without deaths attached to them. It took a decade of therapy to deal with the worst of the trauma and I still experience PTSD episodes several times each year. It’s astounding how these facilities carry on functioning with merely a name change. There’s almost no regulation, let alone patient rights. My first program was truly one of the better ones and they had patient rights information posted through the facility and hard copies provided in your welcome packet. When I was sent to my second program (wilderness), I asked what my patient rights were. I received dumbfounded stares followed by laughter.
I lived near the Elan School many years ago. One of my buddies even briefly worked there. That shit’s freaking TRAGIC!
Made it 30 chapters, thanks for nightmare fuel
There is a light af the end of the tunnel for Joe and the rest of Elan in this story. It’s not a perfect happy ending, but there’s plenty of positive by the end.
Joe was an absolute hero for shedding such a painful light on an industry and organization that thrive on raw human suffering. I hope creating this art was as healing for him as possible
I’ve spent most of my day reading this, thanks for sharing. Although the contents are quite rough, it’s amazing this person has been able to use his art skills for this purpose.
Tom Hanks sent one of his kids to one of these institutions.
Elan.school is a webcomic of the author’s experience at Elan. Well worth a read and the author is currently in the process of making it into a physical comic
This is a risk of growing up in a family that is too wealthy. If those with money (or the ear of the moneyed folk) think somethings wrong with you, there are experts that will recommend kidnap brainwashing camps where they send you and they’re very good at convincing rich people they can fix their child.
It is the stuff nightmare fuel horror stories are made of, except it really happens all the fucking time.
It’s almost like these people saw gay conversion camps and decided the potential market was too small so they wanted to torture teenagers for any form of willfulness
I’m pretty sure the grift plays on rich Grandpa being aghast because rich grandson is his own person (e.g. doesn’t want to be a doctor or join the family business). And here comes this snappy looking salesman saying we can fix him for a price and make him the prodigy you want.
Partly but I recommend Joe Nobody vs Elan school for a view into a different way it went. It’s a really rough read, but his parents were advised by a judge to send him because he got caught with pot. It’s absolutely both of these situations.
And rich grandpa may be horrified about that, but it could be any number of things including that the kid is “too spoiled”.
Nexpo made a video about Elan. I couldn’t watch it to the end.
I’ve got a pretty decent stomach for horrible stuff. Having unfettered internet access from a very young age tends to desensitize you to a lot of things.
I damn near couldn’t finish it, and honestly I wish I didn’t. It’s just so, so awful.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Nexpo made a video about Elan.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I was kidnapped in the night and taken to one of these in 2002. My mom finally figured out how awful it was after 14 months and came to get me. The school convinces the parents to not believe any bad things their kids might sneak through on one of their once-a-week call privileges, and they also make older students sit in the phone room and listen to the phone calls in case they need to cut you off.
If you’re being punished for anything (which is basically solitary confinement in public- you are limited to a booth 16 hours a day and nobody can talk to you unless they’re assigned to bring you homework from the school you’re forcefully missing) you also lose your rights to talk to your parents.
Further, there are a series of brainwashing events called propheets (some overnight or multi days long) that convince a LOT of students that they very very very much deserved to be taken away and that they must essentially repent and accept the program to “heal”. It was really upsetting to see kids who ordinarily struggled socially to 100% immediately fall im line and then become hall-monitor manipulative snitches.
I’m trying not to really get going about it bc I think the comic covers a lot of it, but only some of the kids come from rich families (and they’re ordinarily just spoiled, nothing more). Most of us learned that our parents mortgaged their houses or took out other high high interest loans. So, that got thrown in your face too “you’re such a piece of shit person that your own parents had to almost lose your house!”
And yeah they’d get in your face and scream as loud as adult men could scream until you’d break the fuck down and weep and scream as well.
I wish more parents would have been vocal when their kids told them the truth. They could’ve spared more families the trauma.
My school was in Idaho, where parents could petition for custody until their kids turned 19, so there were fucking ADULTS there that couldn’t leave without being tracked down and physically (violently) brought back and then put immediately “on a booth”.
Two of my friends I made there killed themselves not long after release.
How the fuck is that legal?
Why are we calling it “Troubled Teen” (even if in quotation marks) instead of what it actually was, Abuse Parents Industry?
big in the '90s* and 2000s*
