A New York Times Editor's Choice
One of Newsweek's Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2021
Named a Bustle Best Book of 2021
An award-winning journalist's breathtaking mosaic of the tough-love
industry and the young adults it inevitably fails.
In the middle of the night, they are vanished.
Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control--suffering
from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage--are carted off against
their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across
the country. Desperate parents of these "troubled teens" fear it's their
only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps
break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever.
Acclaimed journalist Kenneth R. Rosen knows firsthand the brutal
emotional, physical, and sexual abuse carried out at these programs. He
lived it. In Troubled, Rosen unspools the stories of four graduates on
their own scarred journeys through the programs into adulthood. Based on
three years of reporting and more than one hundred interviews with other
clients, their parents, psychologists, and health-care professionals,
Troubled combines harrowing storytelling with investigative journalism
to expose the disturbing truth about the massively profitable, sometimes
fatal, grossly unchecked redirection industry.
Not without hope, Troubled ultimately delivers an emotional, crucial
tapestry of coming of age, neglect, exploitation, trauma, and fraught
redemption.
