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

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.

Kenneth R. Rosen has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, VQR, and the Atlantic. He is a contributing writer at WIRED and the author of Bulletproof Vest. He spent six years at the New York Times, his hometown newspaper, and now divides his time between northern Italy and Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.kennethrrosen.com.