Arizona is home to a number of facilities that claim to help so-called "troubled teens." One of them, called Spring Ridge Academy — which was located in the Yavapai County community of Mayer — was recently hit with a $2.5 million judgment in a case brought by the mother of a teenager who spent time there.
But, as Jerod MacDonald-Evoy has reported, victims say more accountability is needed in the so-called "troubled teen industry." MacDonald-Evoy is a reporter for the Arizona Mirror and has investigated this. He joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Let's start with how prevalent this industry is right now in Arizona.
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: It's pretty prevalent. Arizona is one of two states that kind of have the, some people would call the headquarters of these groups. that would be Arizona and Utah. A lot of people come from all over the country out to Arizona. in part because we have, you know, pretty good weather year round.
So we have quite a few of these different facilities throughout the state, mostly centered in northern Arizona, those areas where it's very temperate most of the year. But we do have some down here in the Valley as well. Arizona and Utah would be the two states that I, I hear about the most from people and also where it seems to be kind of the most concentrated.
BRODIE: So what happens to these kids who go to these programs? Because, and we should say not all of them are, are problematic, right? Like, but some of them really are.
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. And I, and also just to be fair, I have had some people reach out to me who had, you know, good experiences. I had one individual who reached out and said, you know, this place saved my daughter.
But on the flip side of that, you have kind of an overwhelming response from a lot of people that these facilities create a kind of pressure on these, these teens that already have issues whether that be they're dealing with trauma from sexual abuse, they're dealing with trauma from physical abuse or some sort of drug dependency and then they're put kind of in this pressure cooker of one of these facilities and it kind of creates a lot of different types of problems.
BRODIE: One of the methods of, I hesitate to even call it therapy, that you wrote about is basically a bunch of teens, get into a room and yell at each other, the things that, that are wrong with each other.
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. So this is called attack therapy, but each facility calls it something different. Like in the story Spring Ridge Academy, they called it group feedback. And what that basically meant was you all got kind of got in the common area and you would say, you know, one of your, your, for your people you're with, that you share the facility with, you know, they didn't clean the dishes that day properly. You're gonna yell at them now and tell them that they did a bad job and that they're selfish because they didn't do that. And the idea being it's supposed to kind of break people down.
But this, this idea of attack therapy isn't based in any peer reviewed science or literature. And it ends up being a way that a lot of these kids just take out their grievances on one another and even some of the administrators and adults in the room do as well.
BRODIE: What do the companies that operate these facilities and the people who, who run those companies say about all this? Like, do they, do they say that, that these kinds of things work?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Well, some of them have come out and said, no, we don't do this type of therapy, despite, you know, multiple survivors’ claims. Others say no, this type of therapy, it's not what it sounds like. It's not, you know, everyone just yelling at each other. It's a way for people to have this catharsis of letting their emotions out because there's this theory that, the, the reason these kids act out is because they're holding back everything and, you know, this is allowing them to release and get that off their chest. But it ends up being used as a tool of certain other people, whether that's the facility or other teenagers to kind of manipulate and abuse each other.
BRODIE: Am I right that there have been legal issues with at least some of these companies in the, not too distant past?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, we have, well, currently there's some legal issues with one of the groups here in Arizona. There's a lawsuit going through, a civil lawsuit but there's been other types of legal issues. One of the more well known one of ones is one in Maine called the Élan School. That one had a lot of legal issues come to it because they had a lot of kids that would try to run away and some of those kids died.
There's been some facilities here even in Arizona where kids have died and there's been questions raised about were the, the faculty at fault for this despite it was, you know, maybe the kid running away or, or something like that. So there's been a lot of kind of legal issues but never anything that tends to really come of it. It's more about liability and things like that.
BRODIE: You had the chance to talk to a few people who had been through some of these programs. Sounds like the more problematic programs, when they were kids. What kinds of things did they tell you?
MACDONALD-EVOY: It really runs the gamut. But one of the main things that you hear a lot about is things like the attack therapy. That's a big thing. And like, there is a through line with a lot of these different groups. And they told me about how that, that attack therapy was something that was strongly encouraged for them to participate in.
And these schools, you have levels, right? You have like phase one, two, three, four and you know, phase four being the highest and you get more perks being at that level, you get treated better, you might get better food even sometimes. And so they've been told, you know, to progress through these ranks, you need to work in this, this state therapy.
But it's more than just that a lot of these places have, the kids do manual labor, they'll be, you know, helping build on for the facility or they will engage in other types of therapy that are similar to attack therapy, but kind of aimed at themselves or at their parents even.
BRODIE: What did the, the people who had gone through these programs say about how it impacted them after they had left?
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, all the, the people I spoke to said that they have, you know, post traumatic stress disorder. That they, they, it took them, you know, years for some, some of them decades, to kind of realize, oh, I was kind of programmed into this type of thinking of, you know, I need to always ask for permission to do things. I need to always be, you know, I, I, they might have issues with yelling at their partner or significant other because they feel that that's the only way you're supposed to communicate your emotions is by shouting it in, in, in a moment and holding it all in.
And so it takes them years to kind of back to, I would say like a baseline of what, you know, you should be out emotionally because for years, they were kind of always at a high level of, of energy in their minds of whether it be paranoid about what's gonna happen to them or what, what someone might say to them.
BRODIE: That must make it difficult to have like actual human relationships.
MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. And, one other kind of through line I've noticed is a lot of these, these survivors have ended up kind of moving towards the professions of therapists or counselor because they feel this kind of urge to help others that may have gone through something similar or prevent others from falling down into a path of a therapeutic model that might not be beneficial for them in the long run.
BRODIE: What kind of role does the state have? What kind of oversight or regulations do do they have here?
MACDONALD-EVOY: So the, the main facility I wrote about, Spring Ridge Academy, they, they were a behavioral health facility, so they would be overseen by the Arizona Department of Health Services. As far as I can tell, all these facilities are kind of over, would be overseen by ADHS and not like say the school superintendents or anything like that because they're licensed as behavioral health facilities.
So people would make complaints sometimes and ADHS would investigate that led to some of the issues with the one in my story, Spring Ridge, because they were getting lots of complaints for a wide variety of issues, whether it be they weren't documenting things correctly or they were giving out wrong documents or children were getting injured in their care that were showing warning signs. And so the main investigative body for all these facilities is Arizona Department Health Services.
I'm still working to learn a little bit more about that and get more records out of this. But one of the issues that you cross into when looking into these facilities is you are talking about children. There's larger privacy implications on the records and the things that can be said.
