EMPOWER

I was in my senior year of high school and spiraling fast. I had several stays at the local psychiatric hospital for self-harm and suicidal ideation due to my treatment-resistant depression. I was failing classes, I had no friends, and I could barely stay awake through the day. I had been in therapy and on medication for six years already, and my situation was getting desperate. My parents, therapists, and I agreed that residential was the necessary next step for me; after some research, we decided on New Haven.

New Haven made me a brand new person. I do not mean this in a positive way. If New Haven disagreed with a part of your identity, if they considered it "shallow" or "inauthentic" –let alone harmful– it was stripped away from you. I went to New Haven proud of my Queer identity, but at New Haven it was forbidden to talk about being Queer. Before being sent there, I had been exploring my gender identity. The therapists and staff capitalized on my insecurities and convinced me that I was not trans. When I left, I was so deep in the closet I believed that I wasn't. I have now been living out as a nonbinary person for six years.

After New Haven, I was ashamed to have any interests because at New Haven you were condemned for "identifying with things too much." Everything was scrutinized: the music we listened to, the books we read, the movies we watched, our hobbies, even our favorite foods. If New Haven deemed these interests to be "inauthentic" or "distracting from the real issues", they would step in and place you on a "block." Being on a block meant you were forbidden from interacting with whatever it was—reading it, watching it, listening to it, writing it, talking about it, eating it. When another student was put on crouton block and not allowed to have croutons in her salad for over a month, it just drove into my head that anything could be taken away at any time and it would be justified as therapeutic.

At New Haven, anything could be taken away from you as a punishment, except they didn't call it a punishment, they called it a "consequence." Early on in my stay, I forgot to do an assignment for individual therapy. My consequence was that I didn't get to have therapy until next week, when they would check if it had been completed. I learned that I had to do everything that was asked of me or my necessary therapy would be taken away. So when my therapist gave me an assignment to write out how I was raped in explicit detail, I didn't feel that I had any choice. My next assignment was to tell my parents the story in family therapy and I was faced with the same dilemma: either comply or face a "consequence." Repeated non-compliance was met with additional consequences of lost privileges or being held back in the program (called being "dropped a level"). There was too much on the line. So I had to tell my parents the details of my rape in front of two male therapists, one I had never worked with before because he was in training and the other I kind of knew who was supervising the one in training. Later, my therapist made me choose between one of the two male therapists to talk to about my sex life. I complied out of fear.

New Haven claims to be secular and Queer friendly (which is why my parents, like many others, chose it), but this is false. The majority of therapists and staff are members of a conservative, fundamentalist religion, and this informs their method. Their values are projected onto the students, from how we dressed to how we ate. We were told that we were not allowed to have caffeine because it would mess with our medication, but research after leaving shows that caffeine is not contraindicated with the psychiatric medication we were prescribed. I suspect they wouldn't allow us to have caffeine because of their religion. We had strict dress codes enforced for the sole purpose of aligning with their standards of modesty. We were told that people who had multiple piercings, facial piercings, tattoos, or colored hair were attention-seeking or mentally unwell. We were also inundated with pseudoscience about sex in order to encourage chastity, but this only encouraged shame.

New Haven broke my internal safety barometer. New Haven was a place that was unsafe, but we were told over and over was safe, so I learned that I couldn't trust myself when I felt that something was unsafe. We were told by therapists about the importance of holding boundaries, but we were not allowed to hold boundaries with the therapists or staff. I learned that I was unable to hold boundaries with people who held power over me or sought to control me. We were not allowed to have bodily autonomy and were subjected to strip searches, pee tests, having to count out loud or sing while using the toilet or shower or even have the door cracked open –all under threat of physical restraint. My disordered eating worsened considerably as food was only doled out at specific times in specific portions and was locked up at all other times. There was no grievance process for students. Complaints or concerns had to be communicated to Treatment Team, who only met once a week and did not speak directly with students.

New Haven engages in conduct that is not acceptable to therapists outside of the troubled teen industry: therapists and staff frequently hug students, students are encouraged to view staff and therapists as their family, students are invited to personal events by staff (weddings, family visits), and therapists visit with families inside their homes for family therapy.

New Haven does not prepare students for a life in society because students are kept isolated from society. My relationship with my family fell apart after New Haven. I ended up back in the psych hospital, then at another RTC. When I finished that program I stopped speaking with my parents for two years. It has taken us a combined two additional years of family therapy to have the relationship that we have today. I just saw them in person for the first time in five years