But you are the fucking unicorn. The ONE person with a story about a camp which had adequate mental health professionals, staffing and wasn’t abusive at all.
If I knowingly subjected my kid to abuse, I might try to rationalize it or pretend it wasn’t. To feel better about my choices.
Besides “This story isn’t true because of my personal experience” holds zero weight in an online discussion. Especially since you chimed into this site just to give such a view.
Let’s call it what it is. Human trafficking and abuse for profit. .
When I was a teen, birds of a feather flocked together, so I was close with all the abused, hurting, self-medicating other teens who either had an outright abusive home life or at the very least, had a physical and/or mental issue that was being ignored. Lots of lashing out, lots of destructive (and self-destructive) behavior, etc.
You know who made it? The ones who lived to adulthood without dying, going out on the streets, or ending up in legal trouble? It was the ones who had an adult somewhere who showed that they truly cared. Usually it was a teacher.
Yeah, teens act out. They all do; it’s a tough life stage. But at their core, they know when they don’t have support at home. When being at ‘home’ requires constant vigilance.
Subjecting them to black-site abduction just proves them right, that they are not safe with their family. Maybe they shouldn’t have admitted that they were gay, or that they’d been abused by the coach, or else figured out how to mask their neurodiversity better. Family isn’t there to love and support, but rather demand obedience.
Hell, Canada had an entire national system like this called Residential Schools whose stated purpose was to “re-educate” and “socialize” indigenous people. It was basically a government endorsed version of these “camps” for troubled teens. They are now finding horrifying things in the remains of those schools. Mass graves and worse.
This is on the short list of the worst things Canada has ever done and we’re only just now beginning the early stages of grappling with it. So, no…. we don’t learn from the past quickly enough. 
The family tree of Tough Love groups, including Elan.
We had much the same thing in Ireland with the Mother and Baby Homes, the Magdalene Laundries and a variety of religious institutions dedicated to “housing” the poor and destitute. The last of these institutions closed in the 90s and we still have generations of people traumatised and abused by them. And like in Canada, we’ve found dead children buried in unmarked graves as recently as the late 20th century. (edit to clarify, the graves date as recently as the late 20th century, and we’ve discovered them more recently)
… cults are fascinating because they’re like larval versions of the whole modern world 
A neighbor who was the adoptive [single] parent of an infant (whose [birth]mother was at the time of the pregnancy and delivery not yet fully dealing with a substance abuse disorder, in a U.S. open-adoption) had navigated–again, solo–the many many obstacles of raising a boy with major extra needs. She was an attentive, reasonable, deeply committed parent and dang yes he was really really hard work, that boy. She told me once that she was afraid for her own safety when he got angry.
Complicated.
She sent him to a similar kind of at-risk-youth outdoor-adventure camp-academy when he turned into a rather complicated teenager. He was somewhat overweight and may have had additional [hidden] health issues.
He died of a heat stroke there, on a hike, at that camp, after complaining he felt bad.
All very sad. No justice was served surrounding his death, on any level.
Her and his experiences with that camp was my introduction into the terrifying
and it boggles my mind how these places continue to operate.
She herself died a few years later when her cancer came back.
She was a very brave woman.
I often wonder how much the grief in her life affected her health overall.
May all beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.
ETA:
typos
and
adding this:
I wouldn’t say that, but be honest: for whatever research and advocacy you did, you chose (out of desperation) to put your child into the hands of a completely unregulated and highly corrupt industry, one notorious for attracting the worst kind of people as owners and staffers and “marketers”. You got lucky, but that’s not a basis to defend the industry any more than is a smoker who didn’t get lung cancer defending the tobacco industry.
These “camps” remind me a little bit of funeral homes that prey on people during their worst emotional anguish, forcing them to make really tough decisions ‘right now!’
Anyone I’ve ever heard reporting positive results was in the position, like @OldVagrant here, of being able to constantly advocate for their child. But what kind of system is that? Where, if you don’t have active advocates, you’re left to die? Seems like a pretty fucked up system.
Mod Note: we do not question the truth of posters here, even new ones. If you cannot take what someone posts at face value, your choices are to flag it if you have reason to believe it is intentional spam, or ignore the post (or the user if you wish.)
You are free (as you are with all posts) to criticize the opinions or conclusions of posters, but we draw the line at calling fellow mutants liars or frauds.
If you cannot give that basic level of respect to other posters here, then we ask that you do not post in this topic.
One of our nurse practitioners had a similar experience with her adopted, very disturbed (and currently incarcerated) son. He did not die, but the free access to drugs and the sexual and physical abuse remarkably did not cure his ills. RAD is a bear, and these kind of experiences do the sufferers no benefits at all.
same thing here in Australia.
So bad we called it The Stolen Generation
A result of the colonial idea that indigenous peoples had no inherent culture and must be “civilised”
For me the difference between Residential Schools is that it was state sponsored and most (all?) of the time against parents wills.
People is brainwashed to send their kids voluntarily to those camps. They are paying to get their kids life destroyed.
I hear you, but want to point out that a certain amount of societal brainwashing was involved in both the Magdalene Laundries and Residential Schools as well.
There were families who believed they were doing the best they could for their children under the circumstances. Because that’s what they’d been lead to believe.
Regarding the Magdalene laundries, there was a lot of societal pressure not to have a child out of wedlock. If you did chose to have a child while single you would be an outcast in every sense of the word. You could not get housing, you couldnt get employment, you would be shooed out of stores. The catholic church had a stranglehold over every aspect of Irish society. There was no brainwashing needed when the entire system was against you.
That’s really what I’m talking about. If you and everyone around you is raised to believe that having a baby out of wedlock is a sin that requires significant penance, then being sent to the Laundries makes ‘sense’. It’s the only way for your eternal soul to be redeemed.
With the Residential Schools in Canada, Native families – if and when they even had a choice – had to weigh all the positives of their children staying with them against the promise that they would get an education and have a better life if they learned the white man’s ways. As things were set up to make even subsistence living hard for members of the First Nations, this was a very pressured ‘promise’ that seemed to offer a way out for their children. Again, in those instances when they even had a choice at all.
Just like this movie…
That movie was great…
