A new documentary film profiles survivors of the so-called “troubled teen industry,” which flourished in the 1980s and 1990s.
Over 100,000 kids nationwide were sent by their parents to a group of wilderness camps and self-proclaimed reform schools, which offered a regimen of intense physical conditioning; harsh, military-style discipline; and group therapy sessions focused on shaming attendees for their past behavior.
Filmmaker Mikaela Shwer grew up in Phoenix. She remembers classmates at Central High School being sent to these programs. And in particular, she remembers one of them — Aaron Bacon — who died while attending a “wilderness therapy” retreat in Utah.
Bacon’s story stuck with Shwer, and 20 years later, her documentary “The Kids Are Not Alright” profiles three families whose lives were upended by their experience with similar programs.
One of the film’s subjects is Cynthia Harvey, a Phoenix mom whose daughter, Erica, died while attending a wilderness camp called the Catherine Freer School. The film is showing at the Phoenix Film Festival Summer series on Aug. 4.
Harvey and Shwer joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
MIKAELA SHWER: I was looking for different types of stories. Obviously, we really wanted to have experiences of people who went through it, so the kids who went through these programs, and so we do follow survivors, but I also thought it was really important to share a parent's story.
You know, Cynthia had already been open about this. She had testified before Congress, and, and so we just started a conversation that's, you know, not an easy thing to be in a documentary and share these stories. And so we, we started slowly and started, started a conversation from there.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, Cynthia, let me ask you, obviously there's footage in the documentary of your testimony before Congress. It's a very powerful sequence in the film.
[Audio clip of Cynthia Harvey testifying]
CYNTHIA HARVEY: When Erica's eyes rolled into the back of her head and she fell off the trail headfirst into rocks and scrub brush.
She was left to lie where she fell for 45 minutes while two Freer staffers still unwilling or unable to recognize what was happening, watched Erica die a slow painful death.
[Audio clip ends]
DINGMAN: Can you talk a little bit about getting to the point where you didn't just feel comfortable speaking out, but it felt like something that was imperative to do?
CYNTHIA HARVEY: It took a few years after Erica's death. First of all, it took probably four years or more to actually find out what exactly had happened to Erica, the many failures, so.
DINGMAN: This is something you speak about in the testimony, that the wilderness facilitator didn't know the GPS coordinates of where they were.
HARVEY: Right. And so as we learned more and as I found out about the broader problem of the troubled teen industry, you know, once you know what you know, you can't unknow it, and I, you know, felt compelled.
DINGMAN: In the film we see you talking about the fact that the person who ran the school that your daughter went to was not really carefully vetting the people who were facilitating these wilderness programs.
Is that what you're talking about when you say once you knew once we knew what we knew?
HARVEY: Oh, that and not, not carefully vetting the participants of the programs, you know, Erica should definitely have been drug tested.
But also the color changing nature of programs. They tell each applicant, parents what they want to hear. When we placed Erica, you know, there was still a, a boot camp mentality at some places, you know, that was very up-front.
And of course, we were, we were horrified by that, but in practice, where Erica went was boot camp like enough to kill her. So it certainly wasn't what was presented to us.
DINGMAN: Right. One of the things that you look at in the film are some of the cultural circumstances that created an appetite for these schools to exist, in particular, the war on drugs. What else in your opinion, Mikaela, created an environment where these schools were able to expand and thrive?
SHWER: I mean, I do think there were a couple of different, you know, cultural factors, certainly the war on drugs, even just kind of the satanic panic kind of idea, you know, there were kids who were sent away literally just because they were wearing black nail polish. A lot of the behavior that kids were sent away for was very normal teenage behavior, you know, skipping class, like drinking a little bit.
[Audio clip from news story]
NARRATOR: What do you do if your child gets caught in a cycle of self-destructive or even dangerous behavior? Some desperate parents are turning to a drastic solution.
They're having their children abducted, taken against their will to a tough behavior modification program.
Who are you?
These people known as transporters have been hired to sneak into this home and seize a 16-year-old.
We're gonna hold your arms to the car.
I got my wrists really quick behind my back.
They've got flashlights, beanies, gloves. I literally was thrown in to the back of the truck. And we just disappeared.
[Audio clip ends]
SHWER: Now, there are also kids who really, really needed help, and I think these places just marketed themselves as a one-stop shop for any problem your teen has.
DINGMAN: And to be clear, these were, these are, these are for-profit institutions, right?
SHWER: For profit institutions that are very similar to, you know, private prison systems. They have to fill beds.
DINGMAN: Right.
SHWER: And it was also, you know, school counselors and educational consultants, and there was a whole industry built around it to funnel kids into these places.
DINGMAN: Cynthia, if you're comfortable talking about it, what made you and your husband feel like the program that Erica went to was going to be a good choice?
HARVEY: Erica had been under the care of a psychiatrist and a psychologist and we were told she needed a drug treatment program.
DINGMAN: And if I’m not mistaken, she was also dealing suicidal ideation, right?
HARVEY: I'm not you know, she was diagnosed as bipolar disorder and, and now of course in so much retrospect of, of so many years, you know, you're like, why would you even think to send someone, you know, with bipolar disorder out in the wilderness?
But there was a sense too, that, you know, this was a short-term program. We knew she was a, a strong healthy young woman. And we thought maybe three weeks of backpacking, there's just that, that mythology of, you know, that get out in nature and many of us have had experiences where we've had some experience in, in nature that has been revelatory or healing or all of the above. So that was part of it.
It was, you know, they were supposed to be master's level counselors out there with her. It was actually run by a Ph.D. level psychologist. So there were people that appeared to have credentials.
They were one of the, that program was one of the very first that was accredited, so like hospitals that you go to it, that seemed to be so on paper they looked like a very sound therapeutic choice.
We took months to research this decision and talk to different programs. I will say that, you know, like we looked at an outward bound, a more intensive outward bound. And to their credit, with our honesty about where Erica was at, you know, they said this is not a good fit.
DINGMAN: Is that in reference to drug issues?
HARVEY: Drug issues and probably the suicidal ideation. I would think.
DINGMAN: But if I'm hearing you right, Cynthia, it sounds like by the time you had reached the place where you were looking for something like this, you had tried a lot of more quote unquote “traditional psychologists.”
HARVEY: Family therapy, you know, as I said, psychologists, psychiatrists of medication, different schools because she had been asked to leave more than one school. That's another story, but we were triers, you know.
DINGMAN: Thank you for sharing that. I ask in part because Mikaela, for me, lot of what Cynthia is alluding to here speaks to what ends up being a really central thread in the film that we've already talked about a little bit, which is the questionable methods and the underqualified staff who were running these programs in the case of the other two central figures in the documentary that also led to sexual assault and abuse, because some of these people were known sex offenders who had not received background checks.
How did you arrive, Mikaela, at the feeling that the nature of the staffing and the lack of oversight in the staffing was something you really wanted to highlight in the film itself?
SHWER: I met with a lot of survivors and a lot of people in making this film. I've been, you know, working on it for about 10 years, and the words that continuously came up from so many conversations was accountability.
A lot of these programs had closed. So great, they closed them. But the programs would shut down, those people would move across state lines and go work somewhere else with new children.
You know, in Rob Cooley's case, which, who ran Catherine Freer, I mean, there were multiple deaths after Erica's. And they continued to run for another decade. That's the pattern that has happened with the people who work in these programs for decades.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Mikaela Shwer's name.
