September 28, 2025 • 56 mins
#233 today’s guest is dr. will dobud— a social worker, researcher, and educator who has worked with adolescents and families in the united states, australia, and norway. he is dedicated to improving adolescent therapy outcomes and promoting safe, ethical practices and is an advocate for youth impacted by america’s troubled teen industry.
in this episode, we break down the dangers of the troubled teen industry and why adolescents deserve better mental health care options.
we talk about:
• what inspired will to advocate against the troubled teen industry (tti)
• how tti programs are organized to reduce legal responsibility
• why gen z mental health is still so bad despite efforts to help
• wilderness therapy + how it became so popular
• who gets sent to wilderness therapy programs + why
• the lack of oversight + government regulations over the tti
• how tti programs market themselves + why it’s not accurate
• if stigma plays a role in getting adolescents proper mental health care
• whether the tti can ever truly be reformed
• ways to improve mental health care for gen z
mentioned:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Sheep Persisted, the Gen.
Z mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton.
Let's get into it. You cannot force therapy onto
people. That is torture.
Where were the adults to actually know what they were
regulating, what they were accrediting?
What you're doing is stealing childhood.
You're taking this under the guise of mental health care.
(00:21):
We have to dismantle this narrative of sitting idly by
while the troubled teen industrydominates.
Kids were dying. The programs were awful.
You're misleading the public. You're misleading the concerned
parent who is going to pay for that program.
How many near misses were there that someone could have stood up
(00:42):
and raised their voice? And we not have hurt kids.
Every year, this industry receives over $23 billion in
funding and enrolls over 120,000minors in their programs.
Yet it is one of our most unregulated and dangerous
industries. Yes, I'm talking about the
troubled teen industry. And here is everything you need
to know. Hello, hello, and welcome back
(01:04):
to Cheap Assisted. If you've listened to the
podcast before, you'll know thatI am a survivor of the troubled
teen industry. I spent 14 months at a
therapeutic boarding school in Montana called Chrysalis School.
Despite all the mental health challenges I've navigated, that
was the lowest of lows. We will link other episodes
about the troubled teen industryand about my experience there in
(01:24):
the show notes, but I want you to know that this hits
incredibly close to home. As someone who plans to become a
psychologist, one of the most shocking and disheartening
things in the field of psychology is how the troubled
teen industry exploits minor mental health problems for their
gain. And what's even more shocking is
how they've been doing it so virtually unchecked and
unregulated for decades. One of my goals, both in my
(01:47):
career and with the podcast is to raise awareness about these
programs and provide actual reputable mental health
resources for kids and teens whoare struggling like I once was
and have access to compassionate, evidence based
care. I was unique in that I saw both
sides of the spectrum. I had the best of the best
mental health treatment at 3 E McLean Hospital and a number of
(02:07):
local resources I utilized. And the other side of the
spectrum, the troubled teen industry.
This episode offers an unfiltered look at the troubled
teen industry. We talk about how these programs
run, how they've managed to scamfamilies and kids for over 80
years, and what mental health options should actually be
available for kids. Instead.
Our guest today is Doctor Will De Budd, a social worker,
(02:29):
researcher, and educator who hasworked with adolescents and
families in the United States, Australia, and Norway.
He is dedicated to improving adolescent therapy outcomes and
promoting safe ethical practicesand is an advocate for youth
impacted by America's troubled teen industry.
His book, Kids these Days Understanding and Supporting
Youth Mental Health, is out September 30th, and it is all
(02:50):
about why most attempts to help teenagers fail and what we can
do about that. So if this conversation
resonates with you, you're left wanting Morehead to the link in
the show notes to order kids these days.
This is an incredibly meaningfulconversation, and I hope it
serves as a warning for teens and their parents on avoiding
these programs and also inspiration for people who want
to pursue a career in psychologyand ethical ways to practice
(03:13):
adolescent mental health care. So with that, let's dive in.
Well, doctor Debud, thank you somuch for joining me on super
assisted. This has been so long in the
making. I am really excited for this
conversation. I think it's one that not a lot
of people are having but should be.
And so I want to start with yourbackground because if others
have not spent 10s of hours on Google Scholar going on a deep
(03:36):
dive looking for literature gapswith the trouble teen industry
and finding your articles and just absolutely loving the work
that you're doing. Can you give us some background
about how you ended up in academia, why you became
interested in studying this intersection of like kids,
outdoor therapy, mental health, benefits of being in nature, and
(03:56):
how you got to where you are today?
Sure. So I grew up with quite a
outdoorsy childhood. I grew up going to summer camp
and had pretty turbulent teenageyears.
I would say I was couch surfed from therapist to therapist all
the time. And when I turned 18, I wanted
(04:18):
to do something different and I wanted to, I guess.
I don't think I ever had a bad therapy experience per SE.
I had a lot of bad therapy, but nothing where I was like I was
like, oh, therapy is really interesting to me.
So I started studying social work.
I started working on it and at therapeutic programs and I did
(04:38):
that from about 2005 to 2012. And I was a bit of a golden
child of wilderness therapy because I went and worked
everywhere. I just wanted to be a field
guide for the rest of my life. And people said, will you cannot
make Burger King wages and live in the woods for half your life
forever. So go to go to college and get a
(05:00):
social work degree. And I did that and I met my now
partner Renee and she was in Australia.
I went to Australia and I workedat a adventure therapy program
there, a large nonprofit workingwith drastically different
clients than I met at the trebleteen industry programs.
(05:20):
And I felt duped. I thought that the the first
time I had a outpatient client, I went, wait, hold on a second,
they can leave and they they don't have to be here.
We're not in the middle of nowhere.
Like they're not in the middle of we're not stealing their
shoes and we're. Not tell them what time it is.
We don't tell them how long the hikes are.
What, what are we doing here? And I looked back and thought,
(05:44):
how could adults have taken a social work student and teach
them this was the right way to work?
And so in essence, what that started is all of my, I was very
confident working with young people.
And I was also really confident as a young staff.
I, I was, I was very good at calling bullshit on things where
(06:08):
I thought, they're not going to,we don't need to take their
boots. They're not going to run away.
It's snowing and we're in the middle of nowhere like I was
because I had grown up in such adifferent outdoor experience.
But so one of the things is it led me, I was just so curious
about how psychotherapy worked. And in essence, a lot of my
(06:31):
research about critiquing the troubled teen industry, there's
a big component of it that is about safety, no doubt about
that, and ethics and not harmingchildren.
There's also a big part of it that this is just bad therapy.
This is you cannot force therapyonto people.
That is called torture. So there's a big component when
(06:53):
I learned more and more about how therapy works, then I
started reading the the wilderness therapy literature
also. And I went, these people don't
have a psychotherapy 101 understanding of of how to do
this work. And So what got me really riled
up was actually trying to progress research about outdoor
(07:19):
therapies because we all get, I mean, we all get lumped in to
what the troubled teen industry is doing.
And so I started saying we need to draw a line in the scene and
we actually have to all become better researchers because we
have to dismantle this narrativeof sitting idly by while the
troubled teen industry dominatesall adventure therapy
(07:43):
literature. So that to me was we have to
write because our passion for outdoor therapy work will vanish
if we're stuck under the umbrella of the worst style of
this work. And part of that is bridging
research and practice. And put it when we put those two
(08:05):
things together, what we have torealize is not everybody needs
outdoor therapy. Not everybody needs to be
kidnapped from their home and thrown into a therapeutic
boarding school. What we need is to kind of
believe less in our treatments and more in the people that we
want to work with and, and the people that we want to say that
(08:26):
we're helping. And the funniest thing is that
the, all the research for 100 years about therapy endorses
that 100%. And what do we still do?
We still believe that the trees are talking to people and
they're healing them while we simultaneously torture them in
the outdoors. It's, it's ludicrous.
It makes no sense. And I just, I, I don't know, I
(08:48):
guess I was born with such an oppositional attitude where I
view writing as a protest. I read something and I go, that
sounds like bullshit, I'm going to write something about it.
Yeah, yeah. I've thought so much about how
pronounced the troubled teen hasbecome and how independent it is
of traditional psychology, especially after we originally
(09:11):
connected. And my understanding and like my
current school of thought is that it just operates completely
independently. It's not like it was a sector of
some psychology research that has been done.
It just is completely independent and yet labels
itself as treatment, mental health care research.
And so as a result, the field ofpsychology and treatment doesn't
(09:32):
take accountability or responsibility or oversight or
interest in this industry, despite the fact that the people
that we serve and work to help and that are struggling and need
guidance are unbeknownst to them, going down this path of
something that's not even remotely research backed or can
be described as treatment. And I completely agree with you
(09:54):
that that's exactly the oppositeof what should be occurring.
Like if we do have these ways ofevaluating if interventions are
effective and we know how to look at what's happening and
saying this is wrong. And This is why based on what we
know, we should be the ones having those conversations and
passing commentary and criticismwhen necessary on what's going
(10:14):
on there. And yet that hasn't happened in
the past 80 years, which we're going to dive into.
Let me say something to this because this is really
interesting and I wrote a sub stack about this with Nevin
Harper, who's someone I write with a lot.
There's a German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, who wrote about
this concept of organized irresponsibility, which I love.
(10:39):
And I used it as a metaphor for the trouble teen industry where
you have licensing bodies, the Joint Commission, state
licenses, accreditation, mental health professionals who are
trained and licensed and have all their clinical hours that
they need. And whenever anything bad
(10:59):
happens. But a treble teen industry
program, somehow no one has the responsibility for it.
Yeah. So it looks organized.
It looks like there's a lot of oversight.
You know, these are regulated programs.
But still, how has this not changed?
Yeah. And so this organized
irresponsibility to me is a really interesting way to think
(11:22):
about it, which how can, For instance, the National
Association of Social Workers have licensed social workers
writing about endorsing the legalized kidnapping of children
when those social workers have no legal right to hold a child
against their will? Like that has so many checks and
(11:43):
balances. But these programs have operated
in this Gray zone of are we a school?
Are we a hospital? Are we a Correctional Facility?
And so there's it all looks goodon paper, but the truth is it's
totally irresponsible what is happening.
Yeah, yeah. And we're going to get into how
(12:05):
we can even, like map out and understand the scale of
irresponsibility and why what's happening is irresponsible.
But I want to touch on somethingyou mentioned, which is that we
do know a good amount about whatdoes work for young adults and
what works from a mental health intervention perspective.
(12:26):
We know that there are ways to help teens that are struggling.
And your book talks a lot about why the ways that we attempt to,
quote UN quote, fix teenagers don't work, that they fail.
And I think we can kind of just continue in this conversation
understanding that we know the Gen.
Z struggling, unprecedented rates of mental health
challenges. Although what's really
(12:46):
interesting, as far as I know, we're smoking less, we're
drinking less, and I think teen pregnancy is down, which is
fascinating. People will be like, well,
people just don't socialize witheach other.
But I'm like, there's good things happening maybe.
But other than that, we're kind of on the up and up in a bad
way, which is that depression, anxiety, loneliness, all these
things are, are rising for Gen. Z.
(13:06):
And yet we've never had more research.
There's never been more resources, there's never been
more advocacy in this space, butit's not working.
And so I'd love to get your thoughts on what isn't working
because it's not for lack of trying.
Like there's so much going on, There's so much research,
there's so much conversation, there's so many options out
(13:27):
there, and yet we've never seen higher rates of mental health.
So why? Why are we even in this
position? This I think is 1 of this is
where I sound like a conspiracy theorist Gordle bit.
So for instance, school and and kind of compulsory education is
a very new thing. And I'm not advocating that
(13:49):
school stinks or anything, but what ended up happening was
thinking of school like BenjaminFranklin mastered the printing
press and didn't go to high school, right?
So there's this essence of kids need something.
They need something that we haveto offer them, so children are
(14:11):
treated always as passive, emptyvessels that have to be filled
by somebody else's knowledge. And that's new.
Like, you look at historical portraits and you'll see like,
kids dressed as adults treated as adults.
Like when you look at how in media we portray kids, it's
fascinating to see how infantilized they are now.
They're so infantilized and, andthis gets into when it gets to
(14:35):
mental health is First off, we live on planet mental health.
You know, like when you were studying psychology, I remember
my first psychology class, the teacher walked in and said
you're going to learn about OCD and you're all going to think
you have OCD, but you do not have OCD.
The white coat syndrome, Yeah. Yes, you're all going to read
(14:55):
these ideas and start internalizing everything.
So in the early days of the early 1900s, kids were all in
factories, right? They're all working.
It's stunk. They were sick.
It was brutal. They made no money because they
couldn't unionize because they were kids.
And social workers, pastors, advocates said we got to get
(15:18):
these kids out of factories not for an ethical reason, because
it's bad for childhood not to play, not to adventure, not to
have fun, not to socialize. What we replaced that with is
the school. And So what happens in school is
school is really good for good students.
(15:39):
It really sucks for people like me who are oppositional and
annoying to teachers and can't sit still.
And so at the same time as we replaced the factory with the
classroom, psychiatry was booming.
And what happened is social work, a profession that was
(16:00):
started under the the, the spirit of democracy of doing
things together, of stop puttingpeople in ghettos and siloing
everybody come together and do things.
Everything got overshadowed by psychiatry.
Now I am not an anti psychiatry person, I'm very critical of it.
But psychiatry had to do something in order to maintain
(16:23):
legitimacy, which is create books of disorders.
You have to know what's wrong with people in order to have any
kind of value for your profession.
Now, what's sad to me is that all the other helping
professions followed suit. So social work, you know, we,
(16:44):
we, we want to look at everybody's traumatized, but in
the 90s, everybody was chemically imbalanced.
Like, we fall for these trends of what's wrong with people and
for how much we talk about the importance of being strength
spaced. The truth is, all I hear about
is our theories of pathology of what's wrong with people.
(17:07):
Look no further than just blaming the phones.
Like, it's so boring, you know? Yeah, the TV was going to rot
your brain, too. And the calculator means no
one's good at math anymore. And Elvis shook his hips too
much. Like, we look back at these
things and we go, this is such aboring narrative that kids can't
(17:28):
figure it out. Yeah.
And so one of the the fascinating things is I do think
there is really something going on, but I don't think it's
between the ears of children andyoung adults.
I think it's something deeply cultural.
And look no further than watching the news and what do
(17:50):
you see? You see othering of people
nonstop. That's a red person.
That's an anti vexed person. That's of this person and it's
such a thin description of complicated ideas that it's to
me young people not having sex as often or not going out
drinking as often. We've scared the shit out of
(18:10):
them because we've imposed our own anxieties onto young people.
Yeah, well, it's a very adaptiveresponse on Gen.
ZS part. Totally.
I would be terrified. And so I think there's something
deeply socio cultural political that is way more at play here.
(18:31):
Then there's something wrong with the kids.
And so not to harp on the phones, but when I read articles
about when you phone free schools, right.
And I read an article and a teacher was writing and saying
is the first time the kids said hello to me when we got rich.
And I was sitting there going, you must be a really non
engaging teacher. Like I, I've never had to ask a
(18:53):
young bird like, Hey, can you please put your phone down?
Like it's, it's remarkable to methat, and this is like the joke
of the title of our book kids these days.
The last words of the book is adults these days, right?
It's nothing about the kids because if there's something
wrong with the kids, that's about the environment that we've
(19:13):
created as adults. So for instance, we have a
chapter about environmental toxins, which was an arena I had
no interest of getting into. But we talked to a a leading
expert, a top 1% sided scholar in the world about environmental
toxins. And what he said, it just
resonated with me so much that the saying Canary in a coal
(19:37):
mine, you bring a Canary into the coal mine because they sense
the fumes before the human does,right?
So in the Canary starts freakingout, it means get the hell out
of the coal mine. This is what we're doing with
kids. They're freaking out, and what
are we doing? Medicating, intervening, and
we're trying to force them to fit into this environment that
(20:00):
isn't good for them. And so that part to me was the
deeply troubling aspect of kids.If there's something wrong with
kids these days, the solution isn't to sedate them through
childhood. I think there's something much
more simple, which is. Figure out what they want to do
and do more of it. And that is where you asked me a
(20:21):
question about how that we know how therapy works.
And the the most simplest thing my mentor Scott Miller said to
me is engagement predicts outcome.
The therapeutic alliance predicts engagement.
So if if everyone's unhappy, look to your relationship with
(20:44):
those people and then find out how to engage them in something.
But you cannot force engagement.You you talked about these
interventions aren't working andwe also mentioned that in the
beginning that there are quote UN quote interventions for
people that are labeled it at risk or struggling that are
(21:05):
actually causing harm. So for people that haven't been
to wilderness, aren't familiar with the troubled teen industry,
can you kind of give us that quick overview of like, what are
these programs? How are they different from like
the work that you're currently doing or evidence based
interventions? So sort of the up and up of the
(21:26):
troubled teen industry. And let's start with wilderness
therapy, which is often the first program that many people
are sent to. Wilderness therapy grew in
popularity in many ways out of Corrections.
And so it was a correctional approach, an alternative to
incarceration of youth. A lot of it was informed by
Outward Bound, which is wonderful and for the most part
(21:49):
great ideas. And isn't it interesting how
people choose to go there? They choose and they want to
engage and it's, yeah, it's a miracle.
So what ended up happening and I, I do think it's this simple,
is that it made a lot of money. And so if we go back to the 90s
and the late 80s with youth crime out of control, it made
(22:12):
sense that this correctional intervention flourished.
What happened is we turned our sights into mental health.
And so young people that didn't go to school, young people that
were substance using self harming, these programs were
popping up when other therapy wasn't working as a well, we'll
take your young person, we'll keep them safe for a minimum 28
(22:35):
days in the woods, which is that's the way the Army funded
mental health care for soldiers.28 days, one moon cycle hardly
and evidenced it's four weeks, right.
So these programs grew and what started happening is parents,
particularly anxious parents andalso quite affluent parents
(23:00):
could fund for their child. And in some cases, I know I
differ with some of the survivorcommunity on this, where I can
understand why a parent would dothis because they're, they've
been, they've been duped. The hard part is there's no
advocate for the child. That's a, that's another talking
point, I think. So these programs grew, and what
(23:21):
also grew simultaneously were residential treatment
facilities, therapeutic boardingschools.
And in the early 2000s, they allgot slammed because by the
government, kids were dying. Either the programs were awful.
And what they did is they just sort of rebranded and everything
went from wilderness therapy to outdoor behavioral healthcare.
(23:44):
And it was like, well, the outdoor behavioral healthcare
were the safe ones. Yeah, but they were all the same
players that were there from thestart.
And so. When you say same players, it's
like same location, same staff, everything is identical, it's
just a different. Name just a different name
that's right and then they got backed by private equity firms
(24:05):
and and conglomerates and so they just persisted and and and
stayed around and So what happens it's it's actually
almost like a playbook. A parent can ring a wilderness
therapy program and say well. First they Google what do I do?
And they're served up a perfect website saying we have this
(24:28):
evidence based, this works here at the parent testimonies like
we've done this for 80 years. They seek help and they're
served this up on a silver platter, being told exactly what
they want to hear. Exactly.
And then what if I can't get my child to the program?
Don't worry, we'll come and get them.
It's better if we do this at night and that's safer and
(24:48):
quicker. And then I mean, I encourage
everybody if you go to YouTube, you can YouTube Doctor Phil
transport and they filmed a transport where you can see a
bunch of mental health professionals endorse this
practice. Like it's remarkable to me.
So kid goes to the woods for about an average 90 days, about
(25:12):
500 U.S. dollars per day. We're talking an exorbitant of,
you know, you're remortgaging your home here 90 days in the
woods and then this thing happens that is incredible.
At the end of this so-called very effective treatment, that
child needs to go to longer residential care and then they
wind up in a therapeutic boarding school or a residential
(25:35):
treatment Center for two more years.
So what we've done and I think Ithink teenagers are hard.
I get it. I've been one.
I probably still am one. What you're doing is kind of
stealing childhood. You're stealing going to prom, a
first kiss, learning to drive. Like you're taking this under
(25:57):
the guise of mental health care.And I don't mean that to say
these young people aren't struggling and have really big
family conflict. But I've also done the research
that there are many kids that are drinking beer and
skateboarding and it's like thatkid sounds awesome that are sent
to a residential treatment facility.
(26:19):
Come on, it doesn't add up. Yeah.
How does that happen? And this is something you've
talked about in the research you've done where a lot of the
kids that are admitted and treated in this insanely
intensive context or subclinical, like, what does
that mean? How do they get there?
Like, why would someone even be placed in that sort of context
when they're not even depressed or anxious or suicidal or
(26:41):
whatever it is? Yeah.
And we wrote about this in a response to a paper that was
saying, no, there's safe ways for us to transport these
children, which is ridiculous, right?
And what I wrote is these programs will take anybody
except for anyone actually warranting and involved, like
(27:03):
someone who is experiencing anorexia at a level where
they're going to die tomorrow. Yes.
Do everything you can to keep them alive.
If my child was standing on the edge of a bridge every night, I
would do anything to keep that child alive.
If your kid is skateboarding anddrinking beer, we cannot take
them involuntarily like it's andit's human rights.
(27:26):
This is one of the concerns withtreating mental health as
medicine. What happens is if I know I have
the intervention, I am going to impose it on everybody under the
virtue of helping, but it might not be helping.
Homogenizing everybody into the best researched or the most
(27:48):
popular intervention is still not a good idea.
And we see this with, for instance, social emotional
learning programs in schools when they're rolled out over
whole districts. What we find in clinical trials
is the kids who are forced to engage in these usually
cognitive behavioral interventions without anyone
(28:11):
thinking, do they all need this?What happens is the kids who can
just go to school as usual are better off than the ones who are
intervened with. And so it's not like that's
harmful on the level of troubledteen industry.
But what we see at the end of itis just because this sounds like
a good idea, it doesn't mean it is a good idea in the long run.
(28:31):
And in the toxins literature, wethey call this a regrettable
substitution. So for instance, people used to
fall asleep smoking in their homes like the couch on fire.
I learned everything now. So we put flame retardants in
everything. Because cigarettes lobbied
against putting a label on the box saying actually this thing
that catches on fire is highly flammable.
(28:53):
Please don't smoke and fall asleep and catch your house on
fire. And so then we put flame
retardants in everything and guess what?
We had birth defects galore. It was solved.
One problem created, another regrettable substitution.
So the troubled teen industry isfirst.
I think that it gets into a deeper cultural discussion about
(29:16):
how we think about children and young people.
That there's a notion that they should be locked away somewhere
is remarkable to me. At the same time, I guess this
gives me hope is what Paris Hilton did by really coming out
and talking about it. It created the greatest revenge
(29:38):
of the clients. It's it's so empowering that for
the mental health community onceagain, and we wrote about this
in the book to go back to a different topic as well.
It showed that's still the most important factor when it comes
to mental health is the people that someone like me works with.
(29:58):
It's not me. We have treated clients of as
passive recipients as neglected factors where the truth is they
are the wild card of all of this.
And So what we're seeing now is these troubled teen industry
programs are closing. Why?
Because of the kids, Because they knew that was wrong and
(30:22):
what happened to me was wrong. And so for mental health
professionals, I think even those with no affiliation to the
troubled teen industry, it's a very important lesson that you
maintain a serious focus on whatare my clients experiencing?
Because you can think what I'm doing is wonderful.
(30:43):
And at the end of the day, they could go, that was horrible.
And I was, I didn't, I didn't want to talk about that.
I was forced to talk about that.I did not want to be put on that
medication. But the person in power
convinced me of this. So in essence, big part of this
is I don't think many people really understand how much power
you really have where your client has no idea what's in
(31:08):
store. And so we need to go slowly,
much slower of a process. And so that's the the part where
the trouble team, like people will say about my research,
like, Will, you've implicated that the research is so positive
because it's industry funded. And I go, yeah, but we all say
(31:29):
that when Marlboro does their own research or Coca-Cola does
their own research, we all say this, but it's just not OK when
it's in the mental health world.And so that's one of the I mean,
that's the organized irresponsibility.
The research looks good, but if you have a general understanding
and reading bullshit, you can gohold on a second.
(31:49):
They're whining. For sure, and I want to get your
your thoughts there, but I just,every time you say something,
I'm like the common thread is engagement predicts outcome and
you think about the research that's been produced, who's most
engaged in that? It's the programs themselves.
And so you see the outcome there.
You talked about the work in advocacy and that really started
in a big way with Paris Hilton. The level of engagement there
(32:11):
has led to that outcome. And even Gen.
Z, like one of my biggest theories there is that we lack
agency on a huge scale. The belief that we can make
change in our own lives or is this society like our actions
will not have an impact. And so when you're not engaged
in those things, you don't see that outcome.
I want to get your, your thoughts on this, the research
(32:31):
side of things because it's a really fascinating situation and
it is organized irresponsibility.
It's a failure of psychology from my perspective.
And This is why we connected because I've got on so many
Google Scholar rabbit holes being like, surely someone must
have done some type of research.There must be some information
like this has been going on for 85 years.
(32:52):
Wilderness therapies have been around for 85 years.
How could we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
kids going through these programs, receiving these
treatments, using federal funds,state funds, school district
funding these things, insurance covering these treatments and
not know if they work or not, not have true rigorous
(33:14):
evaluation of these interventions?
And I'm really curious your thoughts there and like, how is
it even possible? We don't have research on what
is happening And then why don't we have any information on
potentially the harm that's caused, which is what what we
need and what we should have andwhat would happen if this was a
medical intervention. It was a medication that was
(33:36):
being taken or a surgery that was being done or any of these
other domains that you've mentioned.
More mental health care is just for some reason gets a double
standard. It's you're absolutely right.
But what happens is we live in evidence based times and you
have to pretend that these are medical interventions.
Yeah. So what happens is we keep
(33:57):
measuring, you know, the outcomes of these things without
actually really thinking about what we're measuring.
So the first study I did with Nevin, I had been talking about
how there's no difference in outcomes based on the type of
therapy. I'd been arguing them from about
2012. And I had this like, I woke up
in the middle of a night sleep and I went, I should probably
(34:18):
research this so that outdoor therapy, like I'm just saying
it. I haven't really looked.
And so we found every time outdoor therapy was compared in
a study, and these are not greatstudies, of course, every time
it was compared to an indoor intervention, what we found no
difference in outcomes. I got accused of misrepresenting
(34:38):
data for that. I was like, it's not my data.
I read your papers, you know, Sowe still have to believe in our
intervention. It's like, I have the answer.
Outdoors is the answer. Why aren't more things outdoors?
Why is it where the truth is So what happens is when we think we
have the intervention and our intervention is better, why
(35:00):
isn't everybody working outside?Isn't this, you know, it's
wonderful. What happens is we'll start
researching from a vanity perspective of I have to prove
my intervention is the best. SO in wilderness therapy,
especially from the American troubled teenaster perspective,
what some of the researchers didwas a very good start.
(35:22):
They used the Youth Outcome Questionnaire, great measure,
widely used, and they started using that and then they could
show wilderness therapy is really effective.
The problem is they stopped right there where they could
have said, how do we get better?And what they learned, like the
(35:43):
study you brought up that Nevin and I did with Doug, we could
take the client's intake score and their perception.
This is a young person who is sent away involuntarily and they
were asked, does it make sense for me to be in a therapeutic
program? We could take that question and
their intake score and predict their outcome.
(36:06):
So that's the first few days of being in the woods.
We could predict, is this a goodplace for you to be?
We've never met these people. Yeah, right.
That is how you become a data-driven therapist.
Your doctor ideally takes your blood pressure every visit, even
if you're there for something totally unrelated to blood
pressure. They're doing that to make sure
(36:28):
there's not something else that's really off here.
And so the issue with wildernesstherapy in the practice, and
this I think where the research has enabled this practice,
they've given them talking points, given them ways to
market. They can use terms like evidence
based and empirically supported and all this, all these words
that sounds really good. What happened in practice is
(36:51):
your Intex score. The client comes in, fills out
the, I mean, the outcome question is 45 questions.
It's way too long. It's it's it's thorough.
But I mean, they're not letting you leave unless you do it so.
And they're not going to change the structure of the program no
matter what. Yeah.
So the only reason research was done was to prove that what they
(37:12):
did worked, where the truth is, what do we know about teenagers?
Like UNICEF, the United Nations funded research, says if you're
trying to fix teenagers and you're not treating them as
resources and as important to the intervention, it's not going
to work. So we had the data to show we're
(37:33):
going about this the wrong way, and the data even supports it.
Yeah. And So what was interesting when
we did that study, I remember sitting in a meeting with the
other researchers and I said we should look at how many people
are subclinical because I bet you we can predict who gets
worse in care pretty easily. And that's like, it wasn't hard
(37:54):
to find this question. So I think when we're throwing
around terms like evidence based, it's, we treat them as
this noun, like a stamp of approval, evidence based.
But the truth is, we should think of evidence based as a
verb. Is what I'm doing evidence
based, which usually means it's relational, taking into account
(38:17):
cultural perspectives and clientpreferences, having some
consensus about why are we in this relationship together.
And if the The interesting thingis, if you don't know why you're
in a relationship with your client, in a professional
relationship, news flash, you don't know.
(38:37):
So stop it. That's a slippery slope to being
quite an oppressive person. We need to know what they want.
I mean, therapy is 2 people figuring out what the hell the
other person wants, right? So the interesting thing is this
is deeply in many ways so simple.
But the evidence has encouraged bad practice.
(39:01):
And that was the part where I was like, we have to write
because we have to deconstruct this.
To this day if you go to Google Scholar and type adventure
therapy in, most things that come up are troubled teen
industry programs. Yeah.
So, you know, that's not who themajority of people working
outdoors are, right? We have surf therapy with
(39:23):
veterans. They don't have a lot of
research. Forest therapy in Japan and
South Korea is amazing. Again, a deeply cultural
perspective. People working with young people
who had their adolescents impacted by getting cancer, like
taking them and giving them fun adventures and having letting
them meet other people with similar lived experience.
(39:45):
There's so many wonderful adventure based ideas, but we're
dominated by this practice that had the money to fund to get
more research done. Yeah.
So the most popular therapies are just the most researched.
Yeah. Is that you think why this is
such an uphill battle? It's just the amount of
financial resources in the troubled teen industry, like the
(40:05):
fact that there's academic articles that are released
saying that involuntary transport is ethical.
And here's how you like. It, it truly is an uphill
battle. The fact that it's do you think
it's just funding is the reason?Well, no, I think it's the
number of clients they had. If I wanted to do a study of,
(40:28):
let's say, surf therapy with veterans, how many people am I
going to find? Yeah, not many.
But if I want, if I have a conglomerate of 17 programs that
are all seeing 1000 kids a year,I now have data galore.
So big numbers, big data sets are the great book called
(40:48):
Calling Bullshit and it talks about big spreadsheets are a
trap. That's how you get things like
the happiest countries have the most heavy metal bands.
Is it heavy metal creates happiness?
Does happiness create heavy metal or is it just a ridiculous
correlation? Right.
So if you have big data sets in something like psychotherapy,
(41:10):
which because humans are amazing, accidentally works for
the most part it looks like gooddata.
But if you say face, and this isin the peer reviewed literature,
if someone writes wilderness therapy is more effective for
teenagers because of treatment completion rates without saying
(41:31):
anything about involuntary, whatdid they actually complete?
You're misleading the public. You're misleading the concerned
parent who is going to pay for that program.
So it it looks good on paper, but we have to know as advocates
for a safer and more effective practice that we have to do our
(41:52):
homework to really know what arethey claiming here?
Yeah, right. Because jail has good completion
rates. Yeah, and my rights, Then the
trouble is true. Yeah, probably more playing,
yeah. It's, it's so frustrating.
This again goes back to why I think psychology has failed in
this aspect, because it's not the responsibility of the
(42:13):
consumer and the parents and thechild themselves to be reading
the methodology section of thesearticles and being like, oh,
that actually doesn't make senseor that outcome isn't justified.
Like the fact that we as a fieldhave not held them to a higher
standard and said, OK, this is not actually a proper outcome.
This is not evidence based. Like here are all the weaknesses
(42:36):
in this critical intervention that you are administering to
hundreds of thousands of kids. Like, I absolutely put that on
academia's shoulders as it's ourresponsibility to do that work.
And we have not in the 85 years that it's been around, which is
shocking because who else would be responsible for doing that?
(42:56):
Yes, and this doesn't mean I'm not saying this in the way that
I think I'm the world's greatestsocial worker.
By no means, because we've measured it and we know when I
started critiquing the troubled teen industry, I remember one
day going out on expedition withthe nonprofit I started in
Australia and it was myself, another staff and let's say 4
young people and they came voluntarily, but no kid wanted
(43:18):
to go. You know, he wasn't
involuntarily on this level. They came.
You're there, but you grumble. Yeah, they grumble, just like
all kids can. No one's ever Googled my name
and said, hey, mom, send me to go see, Will you know, it's
never happened. And I remember going outgoing.
Oh, my gosh, If this goes poorly, I cannot any longer
(43:39):
critique wilderness therapy. And I had this light bulb moment
of going my work, my clinical practice, which no one else
cares about, has to be a demonstration about safe
practice. And it wasn't that I wanted to
show off or anything like that. It was that if we're going to
make fun of every other therapist in the world, we have
(44:02):
to hold ourselves to the highestaccount.
And So what I think is scary andwhat has happened when you talk
about how we haven't held our peers to a high standard, Every
time I hear about a kid getting abused in child protection care,
I just go this person, it was paid by someone to harm
children. And how many near misses were
(44:25):
there that someone could have stood up and raised their voice?
And we not have we now have hurtkids.
And so one bad actor in psychology that no one held to a
high standard actually really hurts the collective of our
profession. It hurts our legitimacy.
And this gets into something really interesting about
(44:47):
psychological services or socialwork services in the United
States context, therapist. We say, why are people who could
benefit from our services not engaging?
And then we think stigma. Well, they can't be stigma if
every bestseller is a freaking mental health Bible, right?
Every non fiction best atomic habits anxious generation.
(45:08):
What happened to you? The boy raised as a dog.
We're in love with mental health.
When people are interviewed. This is a big study from the
APA. Like 10 years ago when people
were surveyed, about 1000 of them, the reason they didn't
engage in psychological serviceswas the cost.
Fair enough. But let me tell you, in the rest
of the world, this shit is free,right?
(45:30):
Cost. And then I don't believe it's
effective. I don't believe in the science.
So let's get rid of cost to something we can't fix right
Until the system changes. If the science is dodgy, we're
not going to convincingly tell people that it works right?
(45:51):
And so in essence, we keep free inventing the wheel as
researchers and not progressing anywhere.
You know, this is another funny one.
In a new book Searching for Normal, I think it's called, he
writes about how in medicine younever suffer from a like a
cancer disorder, a cold disorder, a headache disorder,
(46:13):
and all the mental health ones all have to prove to you their
disorders. Kneel dissociation identity
disorder. I promise you it's a disorder.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, general anxiety
disorder. You know where the other you
know, I had chicken pox as a kid.
Didn't say chicken pox disorder.You know, it's kind of like
(46:35):
chasing this legitimacy that we promise you what we're doing is
important. I actually, and I do think
because we had this experience in Maryland here where I am now,
we had an intensive outpatient program and the amount of
parents that would bring their kids to see us and say, I do not
want a disorder, so I'll pay outof pocket so that my health
(46:56):
insurance doesn't have my child with a label disorder on it.
Wow. So if we could get rid of that
part, a lot of people wouldn't be as apprehensive of going to
see the worker that they know isn't going to label your child.
Yeah. On the troubled teen front, I'm
curious, do you think that it's possible for the troubled teen
industry to reform or just like my perspective is that it's
(47:21):
completely antithetical to it's very existence.
Like again, engagement informs outcome and engagement is not at
all a part of their treatment modality and so they can never
reform to the point of being an evidence based intervention
because it's just the complete opposite of the model that they
practice. But what are your thoughts
there? Yeah, I, I tend to agree with
(47:42):
you where what they have done isthink about it the other way
around. They, they have tried to like
imagine on a scale of zero to 100, they're here in hurting
kids and they're trying to work their way back.
Like no, no, you need to start. Over.
Yeah, Yeah. If you want to stay in this
(48:04):
field, I had a meeting once witha a wilderness therapy
organization and I thought our writing would make a difference,
right? And I had this meeting and I
said to this organization, well,what would you do?
They wanted me to consult, to help them to get better.
And I said, what would you change if you knew in two weeks
(48:26):
all the young people could choose to go home if they wanted
to? And they, one of the directors
laughingly said, well, Will, we'd have to change everything.
And I went, are you willing to? And they went, no.
And I went, well, there you go. Yeah.
So I think regulation is, as a bit of an anarchist myself, I
(48:51):
don't think it will help becauseit could have helped before, It
should have helped before. I see things like when I, we
wrote about this in the book, like the World Health
Organization saying we need better access to gold standard
treatments like EMDR and CBT. And why are they gold standard?
Only because they're the most researched are they more
effective. In EMDR is only the meditation
(49:13):
piece. It's not even the EMDR, it's.
Like the medicalized view of this ends up, I think,
glorifying the role of the therapist in putting the client
down. And so if we're going to find a
way to regulate that, sure, get get warmer sleeping bags, don't
put kids in bivvies. And it's it's just like removing
the phones and then what? So I think in essence, the
(49:37):
scariest part to me, and this isprobably a bit sensation less
than too alarming. The scariest part to me is that
we need regulation for this. With therapy, we have all the
power and that means we're at risk of abusing it all the time.
And so regulating something is not going to change that.
(49:58):
The worst part to me is that when this happens, the response,
like, for instance, when that boy was killed in 2024, yes,
February last year when that boywas killed, the response to me
from many people in in my professional circles was not
(50:20):
nearly enough. And if that boy had died in,
let's say, an EMDR program, do you think all the EMDR
therapists would sit idly by andgo, well, shit happens, Yeah,
no, they go, that's not EMDR. That's not a good thing to hang
out, But what do you? But they say how is it even
possible? How's it even possible, exactly?
(50:41):
But in this troubled teen industry, it's so common that
it's like it happens. These people are at risk.
Yeah, so I'm with you where I don't know if they're going to
regulate their way through this.I mean, the program where that
boy died and that that rattled me so hard that, I mean, he was
(51:02):
12. It's ridiculous.
That program only lost their license after that.
That was a practice that every child went through at this
program, sleeping in a bivy sack, a piece of Alpine camping
equipment. I have bivvies.
I've slept in bivvies my whole adult life.
Every bivvy comes with skull andcrossbones on it.
(51:22):
And what'd they do? Part of our program, every kid
does this and you just go, wherewere the adults to actually know
what they were regulating, what they were accrediting, what are
they licensing? What are and and that to me is
where I'm with you, that our professional associations have
to have a bit more teeth. In the game.
(51:43):
Yeah. Wrapping up in the book, you do
offer some solutions because there are ways that we can help
Gen. Z.
It's not all doom and gloom, despite the many problems with
our mental health industry. Can you talk to me a bit about
the framework that you outline on how we can help youth that
are struggling and and approaches in a more effective
(52:03):
way? So engagement is the big one.
We know that young people, the younger the person, the harder
they are to engage in some sort of therapy.
So stop making therapy so boring.
Go do things together, be together.
And then the the bigger cultural1 is, as I said a bit earlier,
like I think the phones have a role to play in this, but I
(52:26):
think 24 hour news has a bigger role to play in this where we
have scared the crap out of everybody about the world where
it's the safest it's been ever, right.
And even when you get hurt, the medical intervention is probably
the safest. Said it's I think in many ways
with young people is we haven't.And I'm not going to say like,
(52:49):
oh, it's cancel culture and all these talking points that we
hear on the news. But in many ways, we've going
back to infantilizing them. I think young people can handle
this stuff. And so if we keep shielding them
from complicated conversations, I think no wonder then when
(53:10):
they're 20, they're all called fragile.
I'm going, you did it. It's not them.
And so for instance, when we talk about like safe places and,
and in the book, we call it likesafe enough place.
A safe place is like a lighthouse.
It tells you where safety is. At the same time, that's so you
(53:30):
can go take risks and go push yourself and challenge yourself.
So I think in many ways we couldreally bring back a culture,
especially in the schools where kids can say whatever they want
and we can go that might be hurtful.
Tell me more and and learn abouthow to engage in democracy,
(53:53):
which is inherently participating.
How do you get someone to participate?
You engage them. But we've started going
democracy only happens every four years on a Tuesday in
November. No, it's all the time.
So in many ways, I think for for, for young people, it's
really hard because First off, social media tells you all your
(54:15):
own beliefs anyway. And then we get siloed away.
And I think we can really do ourbest to inspire young people to
participate. But that's going to start with
engaging them because video games and all these dopamine
hijacking things are way easier to engage in.
I know it too when I'm sitting around scrolling on my phone.
(54:37):
You know. And it also starts with not
othering people as much. And so the less othering we can
do, I think that's the better. For sure.
Well, if people want to order the book or continue to follow
along with your work on social media on Sub Stack, where can
they find you and support your work?
Yeah, so my name and then all the will dobut and all the
(55:00):
social media stuff. You can go to
kidsthesedaysbook.com or pre-order it on Amazon as well.
If you to order the book, you can flip me a message, whether
through the social media or through my e-mail.
And you can join what we've called the the launch team for
the book, which what that means is you'll have access to
chapters as we will drip feed you the book leading up to its
(55:22):
release date. And it'll have a password
protected area on the Kids theseDays book website, which has
parenting resources, access to research articles, if that's
what you want to do, videos and interviews.
And then when the book comes out, we'll have a virtual Zoom
launch party. And so the experts that we
interviewed for this book, hopefully some of them will be
(55:44):
there and we can raise a glass and talk to them.
And but yeah, we really, we wanted that book to be a protest
about youth mental health in thesystem and, and how we've been
up against uncooperative systemsfor a long time.
And as you've said, and with your work, like how, how is it
that we get into clubs, whether it's the psychology club or the
(56:04):
social work club and then decide, hey, nothing can be
done, Let's just leave it as is.And so in many ways, it's a
progressive book, and it's kind of an honest look at maybe we
got some of this stuff wrong. Yeah, and I love that.
Well, thank you so much for joining me.
I'm so glad we got to have this conversation and I feel so many
people are going to be helped bythis back and forth.
(56:27):
Thank you so much, it's wonderful to chat with you again
of. Course, if you enjoyed this
episode, if she persisted, make sure to leave a review,
subscribe and share with a friend or family member.
Follow along and at She Persist,a podcast on TikTok, Instagram,
YouTube and more for bonus content.
Thanks for listening and keep persisting.
Welcome to Sheep Persisted, the Gen.
Z mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton.
Let's get into it. You cannot force therapy onto
people. That is torture.
Where were the adults to actually know what they were
regulating, what they were accrediting?
What you're doing is stealing childhood.
You're taking this under the guise of mental health care.
(00:21):
We have to dismantle this narrative of sitting idly by
while the troubled teen industrydominates.
Kids were dying. The programs were awful.
You're misleading the public. You're misleading the concerned
parent who is going to pay for that program.
How many near misses were there that someone could have stood up
(00:42):
and raised their voice? And we not have hurt kids.
Every year, this industry receives over $23 billion in
funding and enrolls over 120,000minors in their programs.
Yet it is one of our most unregulated and dangerous
industries. Yes, I'm talking about the
troubled teen industry. And here is everything you need
to know. Hello, hello, and welcome back
(01:04):
to Cheap Assisted. If you've listened to the
podcast before, you'll know thatI am a survivor of the troubled
teen industry. I spent 14 months at a
therapeutic boarding school in Montana called Chrysalis School.
Despite all the mental health challenges I've navigated, that
was the lowest of lows. We will link other episodes
about the troubled teen industryand about my experience there in
(01:24):
the show notes, but I want you to know that this hits
incredibly close to home. As someone who plans to become a
psychologist, one of the most shocking and disheartening
things in the field of psychology is how the troubled
teen industry exploits minor mental health problems for their
gain. And what's even more shocking is
how they've been doing it so virtually unchecked and
unregulated for decades. One of my goals, both in my
(01:47):
career and with the podcast is to raise awareness about these
programs and provide actual reputable mental health
resources for kids and teens whoare struggling like I once was
and have access to compassionate, evidence based
care. I was unique in that I saw both
sides of the spectrum. I had the best of the best
mental health treatment at 3 E McLean Hospital and a number of
(02:07):
local resources I utilized. And the other side of the
spectrum, the troubled teen industry.
This episode offers an unfiltered look at the troubled
teen industry. We talk about how these programs
run, how they've managed to scamfamilies and kids for over 80
years, and what mental health options should actually be
available for kids. Instead.
Our guest today is Doctor Will De Budd, a social worker,
(02:29):
researcher, and educator who hasworked with adolescents and
families in the United States, Australia, and Norway.
He is dedicated to improving adolescent therapy outcomes and
promoting safe ethical practicesand is an advocate for youth
impacted by America's troubled teen industry.
His book, Kids these Days Understanding and Supporting
Youth Mental Health, is out September 30th, and it is all
(02:50):
about why most attempts to help teenagers fail and what we can
do about that. So if this conversation
resonates with you, you're left wanting Morehead to the link in
the show notes to order kids these days.
This is an incredibly meaningfulconversation, and I hope it
serves as a warning for teens and their parents on avoiding
these programs and also inspiration for people who want
to pursue a career in psychologyand ethical ways to practice
(03:13):
adolescent mental health care. So with that, let's dive in.
Well, doctor Debud, thank you somuch for joining me on super
assisted. This has been so long in the
making. I am really excited for this
conversation. I think it's one that not a lot
of people are having but should be.
And so I want to start with yourbackground because if others
have not spent 10s of hours on Google Scholar going on a deep
(03:36):
dive looking for literature gapswith the trouble teen industry
and finding your articles and just absolutely loving the work
that you're doing. Can you give us some background
about how you ended up in academia, why you became
interested in studying this intersection of like kids,
outdoor therapy, mental health, benefits of being in nature, and
(03:56):
how you got to where you are today?
Sure. So I grew up with quite a
outdoorsy childhood. I grew up going to summer camp
and had pretty turbulent teenageyears.
I would say I was couch surfed from therapist to therapist all
the time. And when I turned 18, I wanted
(04:18):
to do something different and I wanted to, I guess.
I don't think I ever had a bad therapy experience per SE.
I had a lot of bad therapy, but nothing where I was like I was
like, oh, therapy is really interesting to me.
So I started studying social work.
I started working on it and at therapeutic programs and I did
(04:38):
that from about 2005 to 2012. And I was a bit of a golden
child of wilderness therapy because I went and worked
everywhere. I just wanted to be a field
guide for the rest of my life. And people said, will you cannot
make Burger King wages and live in the woods for half your life
forever. So go to go to college and get a
(05:00):
social work degree. And I did that and I met my now
partner Renee and she was in Australia.
I went to Australia and I workedat a adventure therapy program
there, a large nonprofit workingwith drastically different
clients than I met at the trebleteen industry programs.
(05:20):
And I felt duped. I thought that the the first
time I had a outpatient client, I went, wait, hold on a second,
they can leave and they they don't have to be here.
We're not in the middle of nowhere.
Like they're not in the middle of we're not stealing their
shoes and we're. Not tell them what time it is.
We don't tell them how long the hikes are.
What, what are we doing here? And I looked back and thought,
(05:44):
how could adults have taken a social work student and teach
them this was the right way to work?
And so in essence, what that started is all of my, I was very
confident working with young people.
And I was also really confident as a young staff.
I, I was, I was very good at calling bullshit on things where
(06:08):
I thought, they're not going to,we don't need to take their
boots. They're not going to run away.
It's snowing and we're in the middle of nowhere like I was
because I had grown up in such adifferent outdoor experience.
But so one of the things is it led me, I was just so curious
about how psychotherapy worked. And in essence, a lot of my
(06:31):
research about critiquing the troubled teen industry, there's
a big component of it that is about safety, no doubt about
that, and ethics and not harmingchildren.
There's also a big part of it that this is just bad therapy.
This is you cannot force therapyonto people.
That is called torture. So there's a big component when
(06:53):
I learned more and more about how therapy works, then I
started reading the the wilderness therapy literature
also. And I went, these people don't
have a psychotherapy 101 understanding of of how to do
this work. And So what got me really riled
up was actually trying to progress research about outdoor
(07:19):
therapies because we all get, I mean, we all get lumped in to
what the troubled teen industry is doing.
And so I started saying we need to draw a line in the scene and
we actually have to all become better researchers because we
have to dismantle this narrativeof sitting idly by while the
troubled teen industry dominatesall adventure therapy
(07:43):
literature. So that to me was we have to
write because our passion for outdoor therapy work will vanish
if we're stuck under the umbrella of the worst style of
this work. And part of that is bridging
research and practice. And put it when we put those two
(08:05):
things together, what we have torealize is not everybody needs
outdoor therapy. Not everybody needs to be
kidnapped from their home and thrown into a therapeutic
boarding school. What we need is to kind of
believe less in our treatments and more in the people that we
want to work with and, and the people that we want to say that
(08:26):
we're helping. And the funniest thing is that
the, all the research for 100 years about therapy endorses
that 100%. And what do we still do?
We still believe that the trees are talking to people and
they're healing them while we simultaneously torture them in
the outdoors. It's, it's ludicrous.
It makes no sense. And I just, I, I don't know, I
(08:48):
guess I was born with such an oppositional attitude where I
view writing as a protest. I read something and I go, that
sounds like bullshit, I'm going to write something about it.
Yeah, yeah. I've thought so much about how
pronounced the troubled teen hasbecome and how independent it is
of traditional psychology, especially after we originally
(09:11):
connected. And my understanding and like my
current school of thought is that it just operates completely
independently. It's not like it was a sector of
some psychology research that has been done.
It just is completely independent and yet labels
itself as treatment, mental health care research.
And so as a result, the field ofpsychology and treatment doesn't
(09:32):
take accountability or responsibility or oversight or
interest in this industry, despite the fact that the people
that we serve and work to help and that are struggling and need
guidance are unbeknownst to them, going down this path of
something that's not even remotely research backed or can
be described as treatment. And I completely agree with you
(09:54):
that that's exactly the oppositeof what should be occurring.
Like if we do have these ways ofevaluating if interventions are
effective and we know how to look at what's happening and
saying this is wrong. And This is why based on what we
know, we should be the ones having those conversations and
passing commentary and criticismwhen necessary on what's going
(10:14):
on there. And yet that hasn't happened in
the past 80 years, which we're going to dive into.
Let me say something to this because this is really
interesting and I wrote a sub stack about this with Nevin
Harper, who's someone I write with a lot.
There's a German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, who wrote about
this concept of organized irresponsibility, which I love.
(10:39):
And I used it as a metaphor for the trouble teen industry where
you have licensing bodies, the Joint Commission, state
licenses, accreditation, mental health professionals who are
trained and licensed and have all their clinical hours that
they need. And whenever anything bad
(10:59):
happens. But a treble teen industry
program, somehow no one has the responsibility for it.
Yeah. So it looks organized.
It looks like there's a lot of oversight.
You know, these are regulated programs.
But still, how has this not changed?
Yeah. And so this organized
irresponsibility to me is a really interesting way to think
(11:22):
about it, which how can, For instance, the National
Association of Social Workers have licensed social workers
writing about endorsing the legalized kidnapping of children
when those social workers have no legal right to hold a child
against their will? Like that has so many checks and
(11:43):
balances. But these programs have operated
in this Gray zone of are we a school?
Are we a hospital? Are we a Correctional Facility?
And so there's it all looks goodon paper, but the truth is it's
totally irresponsible what is happening.
Yeah, yeah. And we're going to get into how
(12:05):
we can even, like map out and understand the scale of
irresponsibility and why what's happening is irresponsible.
But I want to touch on somethingyou mentioned, which is that we
do know a good amount about whatdoes work for young adults and
what works from a mental health intervention perspective.
(12:26):
We know that there are ways to help teens that are struggling.
And your book talks a lot about why the ways that we attempt to,
quote UN quote, fix teenagers don't work, that they fail.
And I think we can kind of just continue in this conversation
understanding that we know the Gen.
Z struggling, unprecedented rates of mental health
challenges. Although what's really
(12:46):
interesting, as far as I know, we're smoking less, we're
drinking less, and I think teen pregnancy is down, which is
fascinating. People will be like, well,
people just don't socialize witheach other.
But I'm like, there's good things happening maybe.
But other than that, we're kind of on the up and up in a bad
way, which is that depression, anxiety, loneliness, all these
things are, are rising for Gen. Z.
(13:06):
And yet we've never had more research.
There's never been more resources, there's never been
more advocacy in this space, butit's not working.
And so I'd love to get your thoughts on what isn't working
because it's not for lack of trying.
Like there's so much going on, There's so much research,
there's so much conversation, there's so many options out
(13:27):
there, and yet we've never seen higher rates of mental health.
So why? Why are we even in this
position? This I think is 1 of this is
where I sound like a conspiracy theorist Gordle bit.
So for instance, school and and kind of compulsory education is
a very new thing. And I'm not advocating that
(13:49):
school stinks or anything, but what ended up happening was
thinking of school like BenjaminFranklin mastered the printing
press and didn't go to high school, right?
So there's this essence of kids need something.
They need something that we haveto offer them, so children are
(14:11):
treated always as passive, emptyvessels that have to be filled
by somebody else's knowledge. And that's new.
Like, you look at historical portraits and you'll see like,
kids dressed as adults treated as adults.
Like when you look at how in media we portray kids, it's
fascinating to see how infantilized they are now.
They're so infantilized and, andthis gets into when it gets to
(14:35):
mental health is First off, we live on planet mental health.
You know, like when you were studying psychology, I remember
my first psychology class, the teacher walked in and said
you're going to learn about OCD and you're all going to think
you have OCD, but you do not have OCD.
The white coat syndrome, Yeah. Yes, you're all going to read
(14:55):
these ideas and start internalizing everything.
So in the early days of the early 1900s, kids were all in
factories, right? They're all working.
It's stunk. They were sick.
It was brutal. They made no money because they
couldn't unionize because they were kids.
And social workers, pastors, advocates said we got to get
(15:18):
these kids out of factories not for an ethical reason, because
it's bad for childhood not to play, not to adventure, not to
have fun, not to socialize. What we replaced that with is
the school. And So what happens in school is
school is really good for good students.
(15:39):
It really sucks for people like me who are oppositional and
annoying to teachers and can't sit still.
And so at the same time as we replaced the factory with the
classroom, psychiatry was booming.
And what happened is social work, a profession that was
(16:00):
started under the the, the spirit of democracy of doing
things together, of stop puttingpeople in ghettos and siloing
everybody come together and do things.
Everything got overshadowed by psychiatry.
Now I am not an anti psychiatry person, I'm very critical of it.
But psychiatry had to do something in order to maintain
(16:23):
legitimacy, which is create books of disorders.
You have to know what's wrong with people in order to have any
kind of value for your profession.
Now, what's sad to me is that all the other helping
professions followed suit. So social work, you know, we,
(16:44):
we, we want to look at everybody's traumatized, but in
the 90s, everybody was chemically imbalanced.
Like, we fall for these trends of what's wrong with people and
for how much we talk about the importance of being strength
spaced. The truth is, all I hear about
is our theories of pathology of what's wrong with people.
(17:07):
Look no further than just blaming the phones.
Like, it's so boring, you know? Yeah, the TV was going to rot
your brain, too. And the calculator means no
one's good at math anymore. And Elvis shook his hips too
much. Like, we look back at these
things and we go, this is such aboring narrative that kids can't
(17:28):
figure it out. Yeah.
And so one of the the fascinating things is I do think
there is really something going on, but I don't think it's
between the ears of children andyoung adults.
I think it's something deeply cultural.
And look no further than watching the news and what do
(17:50):
you see? You see othering of people
nonstop. That's a red person.
That's an anti vexed person. That's of this person and it's
such a thin description of complicated ideas that it's to
me young people not having sex as often or not going out
drinking as often. We've scared the shit out of
(18:10):
them because we've imposed our own anxieties onto young people.
Yeah, well, it's a very adaptiveresponse on Gen.
ZS part. Totally.
I would be terrified. And so I think there's something
deeply socio cultural political that is way more at play here.
(18:31):
Then there's something wrong with the kids.
And so not to harp on the phones, but when I read articles
about when you phone free schools, right.
And I read an article and a teacher was writing and saying
is the first time the kids said hello to me when we got rich.
And I was sitting there going, you must be a really non
engaging teacher. Like I, I've never had to ask a
(18:53):
young bird like, Hey, can you please put your phone down?
Like it's, it's remarkable to methat, and this is like the joke
of the title of our book kids these days.
The last words of the book is adults these days, right?
It's nothing about the kids because if there's something
wrong with the kids, that's about the environment that we've
(19:13):
created as adults. So for instance, we have a
chapter about environmental toxins, which was an arena I had
no interest of getting into. But we talked to a a leading
expert, a top 1% sided scholar in the world about environmental
toxins. And what he said, it just
resonated with me so much that the saying Canary in a coal
(19:37):
mine, you bring a Canary into the coal mine because they sense
the fumes before the human does,right?
So in the Canary starts freakingout, it means get the hell out
of the coal mine. This is what we're doing with
kids. They're freaking out, and what
are we doing? Medicating, intervening, and
we're trying to force them to fit into this environment that
(20:00):
isn't good for them. And so that part to me was the
deeply troubling aspect of kids.If there's something wrong with
kids these days, the solution isn't to sedate them through
childhood. I think there's something much
more simple, which is. Figure out what they want to do
and do more of it. And that is where you asked me a
(20:21):
question about how that we know how therapy works.
And the the most simplest thing my mentor Scott Miller said to
me is engagement predicts outcome.
The therapeutic alliance predicts engagement.
So if if everyone's unhappy, look to your relationship with
(20:44):
those people and then find out how to engage them in something.
But you cannot force engagement.You you talked about these
interventions aren't working andwe also mentioned that in the
beginning that there are quote UN quote interventions for
people that are labeled it at risk or struggling that are
(21:05):
actually causing harm. So for people that haven't been
to wilderness, aren't familiar with the troubled teen industry,
can you kind of give us that quick overview of like, what are
these programs? How are they different from like
the work that you're currently doing or evidence based
interventions? So sort of the up and up of the
(21:26):
troubled teen industry. And let's start with wilderness
therapy, which is often the first program that many people
are sent to. Wilderness therapy grew in
popularity in many ways out of Corrections.
And so it was a correctional approach, an alternative to
incarceration of youth. A lot of it was informed by
Outward Bound, which is wonderful and for the most part
(21:49):
great ideas. And isn't it interesting how
people choose to go there? They choose and they want to
engage and it's, yeah, it's a miracle.
So what ended up happening and I, I do think it's this simple,
is that it made a lot of money. And so if we go back to the 90s
and the late 80s with youth crime out of control, it made
(22:12):
sense that this correctional intervention flourished.
What happened is we turned our sights into mental health.
And so young people that didn't go to school, young people that
were substance using self harming, these programs were
popping up when other therapy wasn't working as a well, we'll
take your young person, we'll keep them safe for a minimum 28
(22:35):
days in the woods, which is that's the way the Army funded
mental health care for soldiers.28 days, one moon cycle hardly
and evidenced it's four weeks, right.
So these programs grew and what started happening is parents,
particularly anxious parents andalso quite affluent parents
(23:00):
could fund for their child. And in some cases, I know I
differ with some of the survivorcommunity on this, where I can
understand why a parent would dothis because they're, they've
been, they've been duped. The hard part is there's no
advocate for the child. That's a, that's another talking
point, I think. So these programs grew, and what
(23:21):
also grew simultaneously were residential treatment
facilities, therapeutic boardingschools.
And in the early 2000s, they allgot slammed because by the
government, kids were dying. Either the programs were awful.
And what they did is they just sort of rebranded and everything
went from wilderness therapy to outdoor behavioral healthcare.
(23:44):
And it was like, well, the outdoor behavioral healthcare
were the safe ones. Yeah, but they were all the same
players that were there from thestart.
And so. When you say same players, it's
like same location, same staff, everything is identical, it's
just a different. Name just a different name
that's right and then they got backed by private equity firms
(24:05):
and and conglomerates and so they just persisted and and and
stayed around and So what happens it's it's actually
almost like a playbook. A parent can ring a wilderness
therapy program and say well. First they Google what do I do?
And they're served up a perfect website saying we have this
(24:28):
evidence based, this works here at the parent testimonies like
we've done this for 80 years. They seek help and they're
served this up on a silver platter, being told exactly what
they want to hear. Exactly.
And then what if I can't get my child to the program?
Don't worry, we'll come and get them.
It's better if we do this at night and that's safer and
(24:48):
quicker. And then I mean, I encourage
everybody if you go to YouTube, you can YouTube Doctor Phil
transport and they filmed a transport where you can see a
bunch of mental health professionals endorse this
practice. Like it's remarkable to me.
So kid goes to the woods for about an average 90 days, about
(25:12):
500 U.S. dollars per day. We're talking an exorbitant of,
you know, you're remortgaging your home here 90 days in the
woods and then this thing happens that is incredible.
At the end of this so-called very effective treatment, that
child needs to go to longer residential care and then they
wind up in a therapeutic boarding school or a residential
(25:35):
treatment Center for two more years.
So what we've done and I think Ithink teenagers are hard.
I get it. I've been one.
I probably still am one. What you're doing is kind of
stealing childhood. You're stealing going to prom, a
first kiss, learning to drive. Like you're taking this under
(25:57):
the guise of mental health care.And I don't mean that to say
these young people aren't struggling and have really big
family conflict. But I've also done the research
that there are many kids that are drinking beer and
skateboarding and it's like thatkid sounds awesome that are sent
to a residential treatment facility.
(26:19):
Come on, it doesn't add up. Yeah.
How does that happen? And this is something you've
talked about in the research you've done where a lot of the
kids that are admitted and treated in this insanely
intensive context or subclinical, like, what does
that mean? How do they get there?
Like, why would someone even be placed in that sort of context
when they're not even depressed or anxious or suicidal or
(26:41):
whatever it is? Yeah.
And we wrote about this in a response to a paper that was
saying, no, there's safe ways for us to transport these
children, which is ridiculous, right?
And what I wrote is these programs will take anybody
except for anyone actually warranting and involved, like
(27:03):
someone who is experiencing anorexia at a level where
they're going to die tomorrow. Yes.
Do everything you can to keep them alive.
If my child was standing on the edge of a bridge every night, I
would do anything to keep that child alive.
If your kid is skateboarding anddrinking beer, we cannot take
them involuntarily like it's andit's human rights.
(27:26):
This is one of the concerns withtreating mental health as
medicine. What happens is if I know I have
the intervention, I am going to impose it on everybody under the
virtue of helping, but it might not be helping.
Homogenizing everybody into the best researched or the most
(27:48):
popular intervention is still not a good idea.
And we see this with, for instance, social emotional
learning programs in schools when they're rolled out over
whole districts. What we find in clinical trials
is the kids who are forced to engage in these usually
cognitive behavioral interventions without anyone
(28:11):
thinking, do they all need this?What happens is the kids who can
just go to school as usual are better off than the ones who are
intervened with. And so it's not like that's
harmful on the level of troubledteen industry.
But what we see at the end of itis just because this sounds like
a good idea, it doesn't mean it is a good idea in the long run.
(28:31):
And in the toxins literature, wethey call this a regrettable
substitution. So for instance, people used to
fall asleep smoking in their homes like the couch on fire.
I learned everything now. So we put flame retardants in
everything. Because cigarettes lobbied
against putting a label on the box saying actually this thing
that catches on fire is highly flammable.
(28:53):
Please don't smoke and fall asleep and catch your house on
fire. And so then we put flame
retardants in everything and guess what?
We had birth defects galore. It was solved.
One problem created, another regrettable substitution.
So the troubled teen industry isfirst.
I think that it gets into a deeper cultural discussion about
(29:16):
how we think about children and young people.
That there's a notion that they should be locked away somewhere
is remarkable to me. At the same time, I guess this
gives me hope is what Paris Hilton did by really coming out
and talking about it. It created the greatest revenge
(29:38):
of the clients. It's it's so empowering that for
the mental health community onceagain, and we wrote about this
in the book to go back to a different topic as well.
It showed that's still the most important factor when it comes
to mental health is the people that someone like me works with.
(29:58):
It's not me. We have treated clients of as
passive recipients as neglected factors where the truth is they
are the wild card of all of this.
And So what we're seeing now is these troubled teen industry
programs are closing. Why?
Because of the kids, Because they knew that was wrong and
(30:22):
what happened to me was wrong. And so for mental health
professionals, I think even those with no affiliation to the
troubled teen industry, it's a very important lesson that you
maintain a serious focus on whatare my clients experiencing?
Because you can think what I'm doing is wonderful.
(30:43):
And at the end of the day, they could go, that was horrible.
And I was, I didn't, I didn't want to talk about that.
I was forced to talk about that.I did not want to be put on that
medication. But the person in power
convinced me of this. So in essence, big part of this
is I don't think many people really understand how much power
you really have where your client has no idea what's in
(31:08):
store. And so we need to go slowly,
much slower of a process. And so that's the the part where
the trouble team, like people will say about my research,
like, Will, you've implicated that the research is so positive
because it's industry funded. And I go, yeah, but we all say
(31:29):
that when Marlboro does their own research or Coca-Cola does
their own research, we all say this, but it's just not OK when
it's in the mental health world.And so that's one of the I mean,
that's the organized irresponsibility.
The research looks good, but if you have a general understanding
and reading bullshit, you can gohold on a second.
(31:49):
They're whining. For sure, and I want to get your
your thoughts there, but I just,every time you say something,
I'm like the common thread is engagement predicts outcome and
you think about the research that's been produced, who's most
engaged in that? It's the programs themselves.
And so you see the outcome there.
You talked about the work in advocacy and that really started
in a big way with Paris Hilton. The level of engagement there
(32:11):
has led to that outcome. And even Gen.
Z, like one of my biggest theories there is that we lack
agency on a huge scale. The belief that we can make
change in our own lives or is this society like our actions
will not have an impact. And so when you're not engaged
in those things, you don't see that outcome.
I want to get your, your thoughts on this, the research
(32:31):
side of things because it's a really fascinating situation and
it is organized irresponsibility.
It's a failure of psychology from my perspective.
And This is why we connected because I've got on so many
Google Scholar rabbit holes being like, surely someone must
have done some type of research.There must be some information
like this has been going on for 85 years.
(32:52):
Wilderness therapies have been around for 85 years.
How could we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
kids going through these programs, receiving these
treatments, using federal funds,state funds, school district
funding these things, insurance covering these treatments and
not know if they work or not, not have true rigorous
(33:14):
evaluation of these interventions?
And I'm really curious your thoughts there and like, how is
it even possible? We don't have research on what
is happening And then why don't we have any information on
potentially the harm that's caused, which is what what we
need and what we should have andwhat would happen if this was a
medical intervention. It was a medication that was
(33:36):
being taken or a surgery that was being done or any of these
other domains that you've mentioned.
More mental health care is just for some reason gets a double
standard. It's you're absolutely right.
But what happens is we live in evidence based times and you
have to pretend that these are medical interventions.
Yeah. So what happens is we keep
(33:57):
measuring, you know, the outcomes of these things without
actually really thinking about what we're measuring.
So the first study I did with Nevin, I had been talking about
how there's no difference in outcomes based on the type of
therapy. I'd been arguing them from about
2012. And I had this like, I woke up
in the middle of a night sleep and I went, I should probably
(34:18):
research this so that outdoor therapy, like I'm just saying
it. I haven't really looked.
And so we found every time outdoor therapy was compared in
a study, and these are not greatstudies, of course, every time
it was compared to an indoor intervention, what we found no
difference in outcomes. I got accused of misrepresenting
(34:38):
data for that. I was like, it's not my data.
I read your papers, you know, Sowe still have to believe in our
intervention. It's like, I have the answer.
Outdoors is the answer. Why aren't more things outdoors?
Why is it where the truth is So what happens is when we think we
have the intervention and our intervention is better, why
(35:00):
isn't everybody working outside?Isn't this, you know, it's
wonderful. What happens is we'll start
researching from a vanity perspective of I have to prove
my intervention is the best. SO in wilderness therapy,
especially from the American troubled teenaster perspective,
what some of the researchers didwas a very good start.
(35:22):
They used the Youth Outcome Questionnaire, great measure,
widely used, and they started using that and then they could
show wilderness therapy is really effective.
The problem is they stopped right there where they could
have said, how do we get better?And what they learned, like the
(35:43):
study you brought up that Nevin and I did with Doug, we could
take the client's intake score and their perception.
This is a young person who is sent away involuntarily and they
were asked, does it make sense for me to be in a therapeutic
program? We could take that question and
their intake score and predict their outcome.
(36:06):
So that's the first few days of being in the woods.
We could predict, is this a goodplace for you to be?
We've never met these people. Yeah, right.
That is how you become a data-driven therapist.
Your doctor ideally takes your blood pressure every visit, even
if you're there for something totally unrelated to blood
pressure. They're doing that to make sure
(36:28):
there's not something else that's really off here.
And so the issue with wildernesstherapy in the practice, and
this I think where the research has enabled this practice,
they've given them talking points, given them ways to
market. They can use terms like evidence
based and empirically supported and all this, all these words
that sounds really good. What happened in practice is
(36:51):
your Intex score. The client comes in, fills out
the, I mean, the outcome question is 45 questions.
It's way too long. It's it's it's thorough.
But I mean, they're not letting you leave unless you do it so.
And they're not going to change the structure of the program no
matter what. Yeah.
So the only reason research was done was to prove that what they
(37:12):
did worked, where the truth is, what do we know about teenagers?
Like UNICEF, the United Nations funded research, says if you're
trying to fix teenagers and you're not treating them as
resources and as important to the intervention, it's not going
to work. So we had the data to show we're
(37:33):
going about this the wrong way, and the data even supports it.
Yeah. And So what was interesting when
we did that study, I remember sitting in a meeting with the
other researchers and I said we should look at how many people
are subclinical because I bet you we can predict who gets
worse in care pretty easily. And that's like, it wasn't hard
(37:54):
to find this question. So I think when we're throwing
around terms like evidence based, it's, we treat them as
this noun, like a stamp of approval, evidence based.
But the truth is, we should think of evidence based as a
verb. Is what I'm doing evidence
based, which usually means it's relational, taking into account
(38:17):
cultural perspectives and clientpreferences, having some
consensus about why are we in this relationship together.
And if the The interesting thingis, if you don't know why you're
in a relationship with your client, in a professional
relationship, news flash, you don't know.
(38:37):
So stop it. That's a slippery slope to being
quite an oppressive person. We need to know what they want.
I mean, therapy is 2 people figuring out what the hell the
other person wants, right? So the interesting thing is this
is deeply in many ways so simple.
But the evidence has encouraged bad practice.
(39:01):
And that was the part where I was like, we have to write
because we have to deconstruct this.
To this day if you go to Google Scholar and type adventure
therapy in, most things that come up are troubled teen
industry programs. Yeah.
So, you know, that's not who themajority of people working
outdoors are, right? We have surf therapy with
(39:23):
veterans. They don't have a lot of
research. Forest therapy in Japan and
South Korea is amazing. Again, a deeply cultural
perspective. People working with young people
who had their adolescents impacted by getting cancer, like
taking them and giving them fun adventures and having letting
them meet other people with similar lived experience.
(39:45):
There's so many wonderful adventure based ideas, but we're
dominated by this practice that had the money to fund to get
more research done. Yeah.
So the most popular therapies are just the most researched.
Yeah. Is that you think why this is
such an uphill battle? It's just the amount of
financial resources in the troubled teen industry, like the
(40:05):
fact that there's academic articles that are released
saying that involuntary transport is ethical.
And here's how you like. It, it truly is an uphill
battle. The fact that it's do you think
it's just funding is the reason?Well, no, I think it's the
number of clients they had. If I wanted to do a study of,
(40:28):
let's say, surf therapy with veterans, how many people am I
going to find? Yeah, not many.
But if I want, if I have a conglomerate of 17 programs that
are all seeing 1000 kids a year,I now have data galore.
So big numbers, big data sets are the great book called
(40:48):
Calling Bullshit and it talks about big spreadsheets are a
trap. That's how you get things like
the happiest countries have the most heavy metal bands.
Is it heavy metal creates happiness?
Does happiness create heavy metal or is it just a ridiculous
correlation? Right.
So if you have big data sets in something like psychotherapy,
(41:10):
which because humans are amazing, accidentally works for
the most part it looks like gooddata.
But if you say face, and this isin the peer reviewed literature,
if someone writes wilderness therapy is more effective for
teenagers because of treatment completion rates without saying
(41:31):
anything about involuntary, whatdid they actually complete?
You're misleading the public. You're misleading the concerned
parent who is going to pay for that program.
So it it looks good on paper, but we have to know as advocates
for a safer and more effective practice that we have to do our
(41:52):
homework to really know what arethey claiming here?
Yeah, right. Because jail has good completion
rates. Yeah, and my rights, Then the
trouble is true. Yeah, probably more playing,
yeah. It's, it's so frustrating.
This again goes back to why I think psychology has failed in
this aspect, because it's not the responsibility of the
(42:13):
consumer and the parents and thechild themselves to be reading
the methodology section of thesearticles and being like, oh,
that actually doesn't make senseor that outcome isn't justified.
Like the fact that we as a fieldhave not held them to a higher
standard and said, OK, this is not actually a proper outcome.
This is not evidence based. Like here are all the weaknesses
(42:36):
in this critical intervention that you are administering to
hundreds of thousands of kids. Like, I absolutely put that on
academia's shoulders as it's ourresponsibility to do that work.
And we have not in the 85 years that it's been around, which is
shocking because who else would be responsible for doing that?
(42:56):
Yes, and this doesn't mean I'm not saying this in the way that
I think I'm the world's greatestsocial worker.
By no means, because we've measured it and we know when I
started critiquing the troubled teen industry, I remember one
day going out on expedition withthe nonprofit I started in
Australia and it was myself, another staff and let's say 4
young people and they came voluntarily, but no kid wanted
(43:18):
to go. You know, he wasn't
involuntarily on this level. They came.
You're there, but you grumble. Yeah, they grumble, just like
all kids can. No one's ever Googled my name
and said, hey, mom, send me to go see, Will you know, it's
never happened. And I remember going outgoing.
Oh, my gosh, If this goes poorly, I cannot any longer
(43:39):
critique wilderness therapy. And I had this light bulb moment
of going my work, my clinical practice, which no one else
cares about, has to be a demonstration about safe
practice. And it wasn't that I wanted to
show off or anything like that. It was that if we're going to
make fun of every other therapist in the world, we have
(44:02):
to hold ourselves to the highestaccount.
And So what I think is scary andwhat has happened when you talk
about how we haven't held our peers to a high standard, Every
time I hear about a kid getting abused in child protection care,
I just go this person, it was paid by someone to harm
children. And how many near misses were
(44:25):
there that someone could have stood up and raised their voice?
And we not have we now have hurtkids.
And so one bad actor in psychology that no one held to a
high standard actually really hurts the collective of our
profession. It hurts our legitimacy.
And this gets into something really interesting about
(44:47):
psychological services or socialwork services in the United
States context, therapist. We say, why are people who could
benefit from our services not engaging?
And then we think stigma. Well, they can't be stigma if
every bestseller is a freaking mental health Bible, right?
Every non fiction best atomic habits anxious generation.
(45:08):
What happened to you? The boy raised as a dog.
We're in love with mental health.
When people are interviewed. This is a big study from the
APA. Like 10 years ago when people
were surveyed, about 1000 of them, the reason they didn't
engage in psychological serviceswas the cost.
Fair enough. But let me tell you, in the rest
of the world, this shit is free,right?
(45:30):
Cost. And then I don't believe it's
effective. I don't believe in the science.
So let's get rid of cost to something we can't fix right
Until the system changes. If the science is dodgy, we're
not going to convincingly tell people that it works right?
(45:51):
And so in essence, we keep free inventing the wheel as
researchers and not progressing anywhere.
You know, this is another funny one.
In a new book Searching for Normal, I think it's called, he
writes about how in medicine younever suffer from a like a
cancer disorder, a cold disorder, a headache disorder,
(46:13):
and all the mental health ones all have to prove to you their
disorders. Kneel dissociation identity
disorder. I promise you it's a disorder.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, general anxiety
disorder. You know where the other you
know, I had chicken pox as a kid.
Didn't say chicken pox disorder.You know, it's kind of like
(46:35):
chasing this legitimacy that we promise you what we're doing is
important. I actually, and I do think
because we had this experience in Maryland here where I am now,
we had an intensive outpatient program and the amount of
parents that would bring their kids to see us and say, I do not
want a disorder, so I'll pay outof pocket so that my health
(46:56):
insurance doesn't have my child with a label disorder on it.
Wow. So if we could get rid of that
part, a lot of people wouldn't be as apprehensive of going to
see the worker that they know isn't going to label your child.
Yeah. On the troubled teen front, I'm
curious, do you think that it's possible for the troubled teen
industry to reform or just like my perspective is that it's
(47:21):
completely antithetical to it's very existence.
Like again, engagement informs outcome and engagement is not at
all a part of their treatment modality and so they can never
reform to the point of being an evidence based intervention
because it's just the complete opposite of the model that they
practice. But what are your thoughts
there? Yeah, I, I tend to agree with
(47:42):
you where what they have done isthink about it the other way
around. They, they have tried to like
imagine on a scale of zero to 100, they're here in hurting
kids and they're trying to work their way back.
Like no, no, you need to start. Over.
Yeah, Yeah. If you want to stay in this
(48:04):
field, I had a meeting once witha a wilderness therapy
organization and I thought our writing would make a difference,
right? And I had this meeting and I
said to this organization, well,what would you do?
They wanted me to consult, to help them to get better.
And I said, what would you change if you knew in two weeks
(48:26):
all the young people could choose to go home if they wanted
to? And they, one of the directors
laughingly said, well, Will, we'd have to change everything.
And I went, are you willing to? And they went, no.
And I went, well, there you go. Yeah.
So I think regulation is, as a bit of an anarchist myself, I
(48:51):
don't think it will help becauseit could have helped before, It
should have helped before. I see things like when I, we
wrote about this in the book, like the World Health
Organization saying we need better access to gold standard
treatments like EMDR and CBT. And why are they gold standard?
Only because they're the most researched are they more
effective. In EMDR is only the meditation
(49:13):
piece. It's not even the EMDR, it's.
Like the medicalized view of this ends up, I think,
glorifying the role of the therapist in putting the client
down. And so if we're going to find a
way to regulate that, sure, get get warmer sleeping bags, don't
put kids in bivvies. And it's it's just like removing
the phones and then what? So I think in essence, the
(49:37):
scariest part to me, and this isprobably a bit sensation less
than too alarming. The scariest part to me is that
we need regulation for this. With therapy, we have all the
power and that means we're at risk of abusing it all the time.
And so regulating something is not going to change that.
(49:58):
The worst part to me is that when this happens, the response,
like, for instance, when that boy was killed in 2024, yes,
February last year when that boywas killed, the response to me
from many people in in my professional circles was not
(50:20):
nearly enough. And if that boy had died in,
let's say, an EMDR program, do you think all the EMDR
therapists would sit idly by andgo, well, shit happens, Yeah,
no, they go, that's not EMDR. That's not a good thing to hang
out, But what do you? But they say how is it even
possible? How's it even possible, exactly?
(50:41):
But in this troubled teen industry, it's so common that
it's like it happens. These people are at risk.
Yeah, so I'm with you where I don't know if they're going to
regulate their way through this.I mean, the program where that
boy died and that that rattled me so hard that, I mean, he was
(51:02):
12. It's ridiculous.
That program only lost their license after that.
That was a practice that every child went through at this
program, sleeping in a bivy sack, a piece of Alpine camping
equipment. I have bivvies.
I've slept in bivvies my whole adult life.
Every bivvy comes with skull andcrossbones on it.
(51:22):
And what'd they do? Part of our program, every kid
does this and you just go, wherewere the adults to actually know
what they were regulating, what they were accrediting, what are
they licensing? What are and and that to me is
where I'm with you, that our professional associations have
to have a bit more teeth. In the game.
(51:43):
Yeah. Wrapping up in the book, you do
offer some solutions because there are ways that we can help
Gen. Z.
It's not all doom and gloom, despite the many problems with
our mental health industry. Can you talk to me a bit about
the framework that you outline on how we can help youth that
are struggling and and approaches in a more effective
(52:03):
way? So engagement is the big one.
We know that young people, the younger the person, the harder
they are to engage in some sort of therapy.
So stop making therapy so boring.
Go do things together, be together.
And then the the bigger cultural1 is, as I said a bit earlier,
like I think the phones have a role to play in this, but I
(52:26):
think 24 hour news has a bigger role to play in this where we
have scared the crap out of everybody about the world where
it's the safest it's been ever, right.
And even when you get hurt, the medical intervention is probably
the safest. Said it's I think in many ways
with young people is we haven't.And I'm not going to say like,
(52:49):
oh, it's cancel culture and all these talking points that we
hear on the news. But in many ways, we've going
back to infantilizing them. I think young people can handle
this stuff. And so if we keep shielding them
from complicated conversations, I think no wonder then when
(53:10):
they're 20, they're all called fragile.
I'm going, you did it. It's not them.
And so for instance, when we talk about like safe places and,
and in the book, we call it likesafe enough place.
A safe place is like a lighthouse.
It tells you where safety is. At the same time, that's so you
(53:30):
can go take risks and go push yourself and challenge yourself.
So I think in many ways we couldreally bring back a culture,
especially in the schools where kids can say whatever they want
and we can go that might be hurtful.
Tell me more and and learn abouthow to engage in democracy,
(53:53):
which is inherently participating.
How do you get someone to participate?
You engage them. But we've started going
democracy only happens every four years on a Tuesday in
November. No, it's all the time.
So in many ways, I think for for, for young people, it's
really hard because First off, social media tells you all your
(54:15):
own beliefs anyway. And then we get siloed away.
And I think we can really do ourbest to inspire young people to
participate. But that's going to start with
engaging them because video games and all these dopamine
hijacking things are way easier to engage in.
I know it too when I'm sitting around scrolling on my phone.
(54:37):
You know. And it also starts with not
othering people as much. And so the less othering we can
do, I think that's the better. For sure.
Well, if people want to order the book or continue to follow
along with your work on social media on Sub Stack, where can
they find you and support your work?
Yeah, so my name and then all the will dobut and all the
(55:00):
social media stuff. You can go to
kidsthesedaysbook.com or pre-order it on Amazon as well.
If you to order the book, you can flip me a message, whether
through the social media or through my e-mail.
And you can join what we've called the the launch team for
the book, which what that means is you'll have access to
chapters as we will drip feed you the book leading up to its
(55:22):
release date. And it'll have a password
protected area on the Kids theseDays book website, which has
parenting resources, access to research articles, if that's
what you want to do, videos and interviews.
And then when the book comes out, we'll have a virtual Zoom
launch party. And so the experts that we
interviewed for this book, hopefully some of them will be
(55:44):
there and we can raise a glass and talk to them.
And but yeah, we really, we wanted that book to be a protest
about youth mental health in thesystem and, and how we've been
up against uncooperative systemsfor a long time.
And as you've said, and with your work, like how, how is it
that we get into clubs, whether it's the psychology club or the
(56:04):
social work club and then decide, hey, nothing can be
done, Let's just leave it as is.And so in many ways, it's a
progressive book, and it's kind of an honest look at maybe we
got some of this stuff wrong. Yeah, and I love that.
Well, thank you so much for joining me.
I'm so glad we got to have this conversation and I feel so many
people are going to be helped bythis back and forth.
(56:27):
Thank you so much, it's wonderful to chat with you again
of. Course, if you enjoyed this
episode, if she persisted, make sure to leave a review,
subscribe and share with a friend or family member.
Follow along and at She Persist,a podcast on TikTok, Instagram,
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