Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids - Hardcover

Szalavitz, Maia

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9781594489105: Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594489106 ISBN 13: 9781594489105

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2006

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The troubled-teen industry, with its scaremongering and claims of miraculous changes in behavior through harsh discipline, has existed in one form or another for decades, despite a dearth of evidence supporting its methods. And the growing number of programs that make up this industry are today finding more customers than ever.

Maia Szalavitz's Help at Any Cost is the first in-depth investigation of this industry and its practices, starting with its roots in the cultlike sixties rehabilitation program Synanon and Large Group Awareness Training organizations likeest in the seventies; continuing with Straight, Inc., which received Nancy Reagan's seal of approval in the eighties; and culminating with a look at the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs-the leading force in the industry today-which has begun setting up shop in foreign countries to avoid regulation. Szalavitz uncovers disturbing findings about these programs' methods, including allegation of physical and verbal abuse, and presents us with moving, often horrifying, first-person accounts of kids who made it through-as well as stories of those who didn't survive. The book also contains a thoughtfully compiled guide for parents, which details effective treatment alternatives.

Weaving careful reporting with astute analysis, Maia Szalavitz has written an important and timely survey that will change the way we look at rebellious teens-and the people to whom we entrust them. Help at Any Cost is a vital resource with an urgent message that will draw attention to a compelling issue long overlooked.

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About the Author:

Maia Szalavitz is the coauthor, with Joseph Volpicelli, M.D., of Recovery Options: The Complete Guide and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, New York, O: The Oprah Magazine, Salon, New Scientist, and the Village Voice, among other publications. A former producer for Charlie Rose and researcher for Bill Moyers, Szalavitz is a senior fellow at stats.org, a media watchdog group that investigates the coverage of science and statistics.

From Scientific American:

In 1958 a residential treatment program for heroin addicts, called Synanon, initiated a radical methodology to break the addiction cycle. Using "attack therapy"in an environment of "tough love," counselors forced drug users to alter their self-destructive behaviors. Such methods became so popular that in 1982 counselors Phyllis and David York argued in their bestseller Toughlove that families should also embrace harsh measures. Hundreds of tough love–style residential programs have since emerged. Yet no scientifically supportable evidence has ever shown that these methods are effective. In fact, some data suggest they may do harm.

In Help at Any Cost, Maia Szalavitz, a senior fellow of the Statistical Assessment Service at George Mason University, shows how "abusive, dehumanizing practices that reformers of mental hospitals and prisons have attempted to stamp out for centuries" have been repackaged and sold to desperate parents. "Thousands of well-meaning, caring, and intelligent parents have been taken in by a business that uses exaggerated claims of risk to teens to sell its services." All of this has amounted to a multibilliondollar industry. This is a story, she says, "of splintered families; of parents convinced by program operators that extreme, even traumatically stressful treatments are their children’s only hope." Homing in on several leading programs, Szalavitz carefully documents cases of reckless punishment that physically and psychologically hurts youths. Military-style boot camps and wilderness programs that pursue extreme "rehabilitation" measures have left teens dead of illnesses and dehydration, spawnin numerous lawsuits. Such "professional" programs operate nationally and charge college-equivalent tuitions. Yet there is no regulatory oversight or medical or legal evaluation of the quality, competency or effectiveness of such programs, even though they assume responsibility for the lives of minors.

Citing a draft consensus report by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, among other studies, Szalavitz says such programs simply do not work. The evidence that exists "offers no reason to believe that group detention centers, boot camps, and other ‘get tough’ programs do anything more than provide an opportunity for delinquent youth to amplify negative effects on each other."

Szalavitz concludes her book gently with practical guidance for parents of troubled teens, including ways to get more sophisticated help. Ultimately, she urges parents not to yield to desperation and to recall the leading principle of medical ethics: "First, do no harm."

Richard Lipkin

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