Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs

In Troubled, Kenneth R. Rosen explores the dark world of private behavioral boot camps, where thousands of young adults are sent against their will, suffering emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Based on three years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, the book exposes the truth about this profitable but unchecked industry and offers hope for redemption.

Format: Hardback
Length: 254 pages
Publication date: 08 December 2020
Publisher: Amazon Publishing

A New York Times Editors Choice
One of Newsweeks 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 vanish. 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.

Weight: 372g
Dimension: 148 x 217 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781542007887