Documentaries

Youth In Disorder is a starting point for parents and communities to learn about the issue of the "Troubled Teen" Industry (TTI) and Institutional Child Abuse (ICA). 

WWASP Survivors is run by a dedicated group of concerned alumni of WWASP-affiliated programs. Their mission is to raise awareness of the true dangers of WWASP Programs, to advocate for those still being held and abused in WWASP affiliated programs, and to provide validation and support to survivors of WWASP programs.

Chelsea wrote the WWASP Diaries while being held against her will at a behavior modification program called Tranquility Bay. Often considered one of the harshest of WWASP’s facilities, Tranquility Bay was a coeducational behavior modification school located in rural Jamaica.  The school operated from 1997 until 2009.  It housed children (mainly American) ranging from age 12 to over 19. 

Elizabeth is a survivor of Mount Bachelor Academy. She has been involved in mental health advocacy since 2009.

A true story about a boy who attended the abusive and corrupt Bethel Boys Academy. The story is captivating and heartbreaking. Author Allen Knoll tells his captivating story of surviving an incredibly abusive school that hid behind religion. He walks you through his experience and it's as if you are at the school itself.

Haywood Robinson was just seventeen when she was sent to a behavioral modification program in Montana-a horrible and painful experience. This raw and emotional memoir chronicles Haywood's struggles with mental illness and her lack of a diagnosis until her thirties. 

A survivor of the Troubled Teen Industry exposes the truth about the dark side of a billion-dollar industry's institutionalized abuse—and shares the story of her own fight for justice. Liz Ianelli, known around the world as Survivor993, spent years at the Family Foundation—labeled an “institution for troubled teens.” The children who went through The Family School like her were good people. They had potential and dreams, but they came out with lifelong trauma: anxious, angry, paranoid, self-hating and in pain. Most of them have suffered lives of hardship, unable to integrate back into society. Hundreds have died, mostly by overdose and suicide. 

In his poetic memoir Colin Buckley recounts his tumultuous journey from birth, marked by loss and traumatic changes that lead to the tyranny of an abusive father and the manipulation of the Academy at Ivy Ridge and Eagle Point Christian Academy. Determined to reclaim his identity amidst the suffocating grip of coercion, Colin bravely challenges the forces that seek to mold him into someone he is not.  

Despite enduring emotional and physical torment, Colin refuses to succumb to silence.  His story is a testament to the indomitable spirit that refuses to be extinguished, 

Fifteen-year-old varsity cheerleader Alysia Jayne is in an escalating spiral of drug abuse, truancy and deception. One morning in 2003, she is roused from her bed by strangers, handcuffed, and rushed across the Mexican border. Here, she is incarcerated in a disciplinary school for delinquents, called Casa by the Sea, hidden behind whitewashed walls near the resort town of Ensenada. Growing rumors of abuse and violence at the Casa facility soon prompt a full-scale raid by the Mexican Federales and the FBI, an event that forces Alysia to acknowledge the still precarious fragility of her sense of self. She voluntarily submits to another severe treatment program at Ivy Ridge Academy in Upstate New York. Clinging to her tenuous relationship with other girls in the program (though forbidden to speak).

The Dead, Insane, or in Jail memoir series tells Zack Bonnie’s story of his years at the Rocky Mountain Academy (a CEDU school) in Northern Idaho in the late 1980s. Tricked into going there at age fourteen, Zack ran away after several weeks, only to be returned there later that summer, where he remained for over two more years. Combining Zack’s personal narrative with excerpts from personal correspondence, school communications, expert opinion, news items, personal journal entries, and school writing assignments, the book adds layers of meaning and third-party objectivity to the Zack’s story.

Straight described itself as a drug rehab, a "direction for youth." Strictly false advertising. An accurate description came from the ACLU, which called it "A concentration camp for throwaway teens." Inside the windowless warehouse, Straight used bizarre and intimidating methods to "treat" us; to turn us into the type of kids our parents wanted. Dead Inside takes readers behind Straight's closed doors, illustrating why the program was eventually investigated, sued, and closed down for abusing children. 

At the age of 16, Jeneen Miller was prosecuted without a fair trial for telling a family-kept secret about a wrong-doing that was perpetrated at the hands of her uncle. After bravely coming forth to her family, they were not open to the truth. Jeneen's justifiable rage was wrongfully mistaken by her parents when they assumed she was experimenting with drugs and alcohol. In 1988, Jeneen's parents used trickery to achieve the ultimate betrayal. Instead of the therapy they promised Jeneen, they turned her over to a prison camp in spite of her self-discipline, excellent academics and responsible behavior.