PrimeWire

Excellent interviews. I’d been wanting to see this for a while. Anything that further exposes this disgusting, weird industry and its perversion of therapy/medical treatment is worth checking out, but in particular this is a good doc. I really liked the inclusion of clips from “For the Child’s Own Good” and “Children of Darkness” cut between interview segments, as well as some other footage I’d never seen before. Pretty wild to see footage of the weird rituals and protocols as the former inmates are describing it.
For anyone curious, Elan was a very controversial “boarding school” that also proclaimed to be a residential behavioral treatment center, prep school, an alternative to psychiatric treatment, and a general warehouse for “troubled teens”. It employed methods like encounter groups, physical, psychological and emotional manipulation, spanking, humiliation (including costumes) and an environment high on stress, devoid of privacy or personal space. They claimed to treat everything from depression to autism to pedophilia, took in runaways, depressed kids, pregnant teens, actual delinquents and kids that some parents just didn’t want.
For decades this place made its owners millions while the former residents were often left no better off than before they came, completely bewildered by what they’d experienced.
This is a fascinating look into a very dark and seldom discussed dusty corner of ‘alternative therapy’ and different approaches to ‘dealing with’ the various problems teenagers might face.