Youth

 NY Times - Troubled-teen programs are receiving new scrutiny thanks to activism by Paris Hilton, who was sent to several facilities, and the Netflix documentary series “The Program,” which exposed abuse in a network of sites that claims to have treated 40,000 children. (I appear in the series as an expert.) One key issue is that with few exceptions, it’s nearly impossible for parents to know for certain what treatment their children will receive. Perhaps the most offensive fact is that even though annual fees per child can range from $110,000 to more than $400,000 per year, in some facilities, kids get just a few hours a week of professional therapy, and others provide none at all. When such care can be a matter of life and death, this is outrageous.

Residential centers should not be allowed to promote themselves as treatments for adolescent mental illnesses or addictions unless they can show that the child has a diagnosis that requires such intensive therapy and that their methods meet the standard of care for it. The only way to stop widespread harm is to ensure that abusive practices cannot be disguised as therapy or hidden from oversight. Pharmaceutical companies need to prove to the Food and Drug Administration that risky psychiatric medications are safe and effective before marketing them. The same should be true for residential therapy regimens for kids. We need an agency, or at least a set of federal rules, that acts as an F.D.A. for the treatment of troubled children.

Congress is paying attention. On June 12, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat who chairs the finance committee, held a hearing and released a report from a two-year investigation of existing residential programs. At any given time, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 teenagers are in the facilities operated by the companies examined in the investigation, though because of lack of regulation, the exact numbers are unknown. In just the past year, two of the chains that were investigated were ordered to pay over $1 billion in damages related to the rape of minors.