“In March 2005, I was sent to Island View, a residential treatment center operated by Aspen Education Group, in Syracuse, Utah. I was 14 years old. I was not a disobedient kid. My parents were in the middle of a terrible divorce. I was depressed and suicidal. I needed a safe environment and therapeutic tools, but I became trapped in an abusive and predatory system.
When I arrived at Island View, I was immediately strip-searched and my hair was treated with lice shampoo. During my 15 months there, strip-searches were one of the most consistent practices I endured. All the doors of the facility were locked. The hallway lights were always on, including throughout the night. At night, staff would shine flashlights on us every 20-30 minutes as “checks.” There had been a suicide on one of the boys’ units in July 2004, and there was dark energy over the facility.
Social contact was basically forbidden. Talking with anyone outside your unit was prohibited. Eye contact with the opposite sex was prohibited. Trying to integrate into high school for the first time after experiencing these restrictions was extremely challenging. Even now I will be struck with onset social anxiety that I developed in this environment.
I was overly medicated to the extreme. I took a cocktail of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, uppers, downers, and anti-psychotics four times a day. I could not think. I felt like a lab experiment. The drugs made me numb, overweight, and complacent.
The therapeutic practices at Island View were questionable at best, and at times overtly abusive. Some of the staff were well-intentioned, many were not qualified, and some were predatory. My math teacher during my time there was later fired for child pornography found on his work computer. One of the therapists went on to have an ongoing serious relationship with a resident on my unit who had been his patient. It was well-known among the girls in my unit that there was sexual contact happening between one of the girls and a male night staffman. It was not appropriate to leave us under the supervision of only men in their late 20s or early 30s overnight consistently, but that was the norm. I felt completely unsafe. I was also too young and naïve to fully understand or express my fears.
On one occasion, I woke up in the middle of the night to a scream from my roommate. A male night-staff member was in our room, standing over her, even though the staff were supposed to stand in the doorway and not enter our rooms to do checks. When I saw him, I screamed too, and he immediately left. When we reported it, the staff told us we must have been dreaming.
One of our weekly groups was called Problem Solving Group, or PSG. We were required to “write slips” about our fellow residents’ problematic behaviors. During PSG, the slips would be read out loud, and we were required to “confront” each other and encouraged to shame each other and ourselves. If you did not write slips on the other residents, you were punished.
Worse than PSG was a tactic called Individual Focus, or IF. During IF you were “put on silence,” which means you were not allowed to speak, at all. There was no constraint to how long you could be on IF. On IF, your clothes were taken away and you had to wear grey sweats. You had to spend your days alone, writing about what you did wrong. If at the end of the day, the staff felt like you “hadn’t taken accountability,” you were still on IF.
When tackling residents, staff would perform what they called “Personal Intervention 4”, or “PI4.” One time a resident had run away, been hit by a car, and sent back with a broken arm in a cast. On the unit, she threw a tantrum and the staff gave her a PI4. They seriously injured her arm and kept her in the timeout room for hours until the shift change. I will always remember her whimpers and her screams of pain because she sounded like a wild animal.
I became trapped in the system. Due to my parents’ custody battle, a guardian ad litem had been appointed to me, and my parents were not in a position to pull me out. Island View was incentivized to keep me inside and reap the benefit of my insurance. When I entered the program, I truly wanted help and did well in the program. For months, I naively asked to begin discussing an exit plan. I was finally told that it was not clear when I would be able to leave and that I would need to come up with more issues to work on, or I would get in trouble. I was constantly pressured to shame and deprecate myself under threat of punitive action. Under the fear that the few resources I had gained through good behavior would be taken away, I began to exaggerate my thoughts and behaviors around depression and self-harm due to the staff’s reinforcement.
On my monitored phone calls with my mom, she would try to reassure me that I was a good kid and that she was trying everything within her power to get me out, but the more I looked at the reality of the situation, the more afraid I became that I would be locked up until I was 18. I was highly psychologically indoctrinated, but all the instructions to continue to shame myself were too much. I felt like if I did not get out, I would go insane.
In this period, I entered the dark night of my soul. After I realized I was being held indefinitely, I tried to run away twice. The first time I drank a bottle of shampoo in the hope of being taken offsite. I was clearly physically ill, but I was never taken to a doctor. I was instead put on Yellow Zone – the highest punishment at Island View. After my next attempt to get free, I was put in solitary confinement in a freezing cinderblock box.
It was only when my mom sent a team of psychologists, psychiatrists, and lawyers to Island View to investigate my situation, that they told me I was ready for an exit plan. I was released from Island View in June 2006. Due to my experience there, I was unprepared to reintegrate into society. I spent another year at a therapeutic boarding school.
Island View was shut down in 2014, but two new facilities opened on the same property under the names Elevations RTC and ViewPoint Center (a mental hospital), that same year, with many of the same program directors. The programs now operate independently of Aspen Education Group, which was bought by the private equity firm Bain Capital in 2006. There are serious concerns regarding the ethics of a multi-billion-dollar venture capital corporation with a vested interest in increasing shareholder profits owning a conglomeration of privatized troubled teen programs.
I am speaking out for all the survivors who have been ashamed and afraid to come forward. You are not alone. I am speaking up for our peers who suffered but are no longer with us; too many of you. We love you; you are not forgotten. I am speaking up because this industry profits by silence and those who need help most are taken advantage of instead. I am speaking up to push for oversight and regulations of adolescent treatment centers and therapeutic boarding schools. I am speaking up to end the cycle of trauma and abuse rampant in these facilities to the extent that there is now a generation of us who have survived.”
-Valerie