Troubled Teens Resources

Can violent juvenile offenders be rehabilitated? If there were enough schools for troubled teens, military teen boot camps and rehabs - not to mention funding - could you actually extract the killer from the teen who murdered a family, or the juvenile rapist who slit the throat of their victim?

That debate is ongoing, with one side insisting that violent juveniles can be rehabilitated, the other side stating that returning these youths to society, at any time, would place innocent people at risk.

The comments following the article excerpted below paint a clear portrait of how deeply divisive the issue of violent teens is.

“According to a new report produced by the Equal Justice Initiative (a non-profit group dedicated to helping prisoners denied fair treatment by the system), American prisons are home to 73 inmates locked up for life for crimes they committed when they were 13 or 14. Bump that age limit up three years and we have 2,225 prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives for crimes they committed when they were 17 or younger.

These crimes aren’t minor — and the nature of our violent culture is an entirely different story — but some of the children confess under duress or, worse yet, are developmentally disabled. They languish in lockdown, without hope.

But are they proof that these children can’t be rehabilitated, that they can’t benefit from help and that they are beyond redemption?”
(source)

Sometimes all of the help in the world will not bring a drug addict around. Not schools for troubled teens, not rehab, not the tears of their mother nor the deaths of their friends.

“Right now, it’s tough love. I cannot continue funding. It’s not helping him.

“Once you’ve paid for nearly six rehabs, seen your mother distraught and frustrated watching her son waste his life with the abuse of drugs, they have to reach an all-time rock bottom that’s got no dependency on drugs.”

The quote above is from celebrity Chef Ramsay who has had to struggle with his brother’s heroin addiction for decades. Addicts are always extremely selfish. They will put the satisfaction for their cravings above all that they claim to hold dear and before all whom they swear that they love. Addiction not only ravages the mind and the body. It simply turns the user into an ugly cipher, a user and a deceiver. The friends that you see at an addict’s funeral are usually old friends, friends who had to turn away. Addicts have no real friends, just people that they share their drugs, needles and diseases with.

Isn’t that a lovely picture?

What teens absolutely do not realize is that their week-end parties and their “harmless pot” can turn them into somebody that they themselves would loathe. Someone that they would cross the street to avoid. And it doesn’t end until they have the guts to end it.

“They’ve got to have that self-belief that they’re strong enough to fight it.”
[…]
“Anyone using drugs anywhere in the world has a choice. It’s not a disease.

(source)

Related:

• Teen Drug Abuse Enslaves
  

There is something that has been bugging me lately , during my research I have been reading a lot of comments from parents that make me question who’s really to blame for teen age drug abuse. The most alarming comments have been “my teen is just experimenting, that’s what teens do”. When I was a teen I would have agreed, but now that I am an adult and a parent I feel very different. When I started to mature and become an adult I realized that when I was a teen I was learning who I was, and drug use was something that did nothing to help me find myself at all. I watched a few of my friends become addicts, and one of those friends is now living in a group home due to his teen drug abuse that continued into his early twenties. My friends parents where the parents who said “he’s just trying new things; it’s a part of growing up”. My friend’s parents did nothing but ignore the first warning signs, and even after a trip to the hospital and a week in the psychiatric ward his parents still denied he had a problem with drugs. I guess they did not want to admit they might have been part of the problem since the beginning.

Many parents say that they think their teens at risk of having a drug problem but are afraid of what will happen if they confront there teen. What parents need to realize is that it does not matter if your teen tells you they hate you for sending them to a boarding school for troubled teens, at least they will have a better chance at living to see their eighteenth birthday.

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Parents these days are running out of options when it comes to dealing with a “problem teen”. Parents are unable to use physical punishment at the risk of being charged with child abuse, and trying to enforce “grounding” can be a challenge unless you have the time and money to build a place to put your teen under lock and key, which can also be seen as child abuse. What is a parent to do?

There are new options for parents to choose from when dealing with a troubled teen that are safe and effective. Schools for troubled teens are starting to become an option a large number of parents are using, not only do teens at risk get a great education but they learn respect and other very important skills that will help them become mature honest adults.

“My Troubled Teen is a directory of teen boarding schools, private schools, boot camps, military schools, residential treatment centers, wilderness programs, or Christian programs. Each of these programs vary in the level of therapy and services that they provide to teens.”

(source)
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A diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder does not instantly sentence your teen to years of Ritalin or Adderall. Many parents are dismayed to contemplate the possibility of medicating their teenager, concerned about possible drug dependencies later in life as well as possible health ramifications.

Parents who wish to exhaust every “natural”, non-medicated alternative choose to work with those mental health professionals who have developed programs that teach the ADHD teen behavioral “tricks”, e.g., harnessing the energy of ADHD, learning to utilize hyper focus and gaining mastery over restlessness and anxiety. Schools for troubled teens and specialty schools have emerged, over the years, specializing in “non-medicinal interventions”.

“A U.S. study shows non-medicinal interventions help prevent behavioral and academic problems associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Researchers from Lehigh Valley Hospital… focused on 135 children aged 3 to 5 who showed significant symptoms of ADHD — a mental disorder that makes it difficult for children to control their behavior and pay attention. Early intervention techniques included highly individualized programs that often rely on positive supports to reinforce behavior.

Using a variety of early intervention strategies, parents reported, on average, a 17-percent decrease in aggression and a 21-percent improvement in their children’s social skills. In the classroom, teachers saw a 28-percent improvement in both categories. Early literacy skills improved up to three times over their baseline status.

The researchers suggest a multi-tiered approach to intervention…”Medication may address the symptoms of ADHD, but it does not necessarily improve children’s academic and social skills,” study leader George DuPaul said in a statement.”

(Source)

Any parent who has researched Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder will tell you that it can be a depressing venture. Worse case scenarios are that an undiagnosed ADHD teen will be more likely to do drugs, deal with more severe emotional issues and may even end up attending schools for troubled teens, or drug rehab.

Then some speculative research is interesting and, if nothing else, gives food for thought.Much has been said in the last year about the fact that technology exacerbates conditions such as ADHD.

“In his book, Cleary cites research performed Oxford University neuroscience professor Susan Greenfield as noting in part “that the ubiquity of digital technology is altering the shape and chemistry of our brains, and that violent video games and intense online interactivity can generate mental disorders such as autism, attention deficit disorder, and hyperactivity.”

Another viewpoint hypothesizes that ADHD might be a “favorable evolutionary adaptation to our tech-centric world…”

“…the increase in ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) among the “Millennium Generation” of younger people could actually be the start of an “evolutionary adaptation” to the increasingly fast-paced world of digital technology.

…video games, texting, and other online applications are best performed by minds with the circuitry to jump at a nanosecond’s notice back and forth from screen to screen and application to application.

Following this proposition forward, the seeming inability of some younger folks to concentrate on just one thing, one thought, one application, could be attributed to a rewiring of neurons to keep up with the herky-jerky pace of life.”

(Source)

Do you need an argument to convince yourself and your husband that looking into schools for troubled teens is the right decision for your Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder teen. After all, he has already abused his Ritalin by selling it to make enough money to buy pot, combining the two. He’s admitted to drinking. He is remorseful, you are angry and his Dad places a great deal of blame on the public school system. And Dad would be right.

Consider this excerpt from the just released National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse XII: Teens and Parents conducted by CASA.

“This fall more than 16 million teens will return to middle and high schools where drug dealing, possession, use and students high on alcohol or drugs are part of the fabric of their school,”…“Too many of our nation’s high and middle schools have become marijuana marts and pill palaces. Parents should wake up to this reality and realize more likely than not, your teen is going to school each day in a building where drug use, sale and possession is as much a part of the curriculum as math or English and do something about it. For many of our middle and high school students, school days have become school daze.”

(Source)

Teens at risk typically do not wake up one morning and rob their neighbor. There is a long road a troubled teen must travel before their life degenerates into that of a thief, or worse, a murderer. But it is a road usually fueled by addiction and addiction usually starts innocently enough. A joint here, a small dime bag there, troubles at home, troubles at school - for emotionally immature teens, all of these factors can rapidly snowball to stimulate more drug use, robberies to support the drug abuse, and the beat goes on, we all know this too common tale.

“Cory Miller is a 17-year old inmate. Last year, he was charged as an adult for two armed robberies and sentenced to six years. Today instead of just serving time, he’s taking the time to tell teens how to stay out of trouble. Miller says, “Trying to meet them and help them see that the streets and all the crime ain’t worth it. It’s going to amount to being here.”

Ironically, Miller was in this same classroom four years ago, listening to an inmate tell him how to stay out of jail. He didn’t listen. Plotkin says, “Unfortunately he made some wrong choices and ended up exactly where that inmate was, he saw, as a youngster.”

(Source)

Though parents often cringe at the idea of schools for troubled teens, a jail sentence is far more severe. If you suspect that your teenager is going rapidly down that road to crime and addiction, start doing your research into troubled teen boarding schools that will offer your teen the detour he needs to take before he takes that road directly to jail.

Troubled teenagers are often diagnosed with ADHD or ODD. Parents are then set with the task of reviewing that diagnosis and accepting or rejecting it’s conclusions. They then may opt for a program of prescribed medication or one of the many emerging behavioral programs designed to assist the at risk teen with the symptoms of ADHD or ODD.

Like every issue there are two sides and there is a very large group of mental health professionals, as well as parents, who have problems with such diagnosis and challenge the conclusions that dictate that ADD/ODD symptoms represent behavioral problems or that such behavior requires psychiatric care.

“Over six million children in the US are on drugs that control the symptoms of so-called Attention Deficit Disorder - ADD. There are millions of kids on anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs. Despite the clinical hype surrounding these drugs, the actual clinical methods employed for diagnosis are bogus to non-existent. For the most part the average psychiatrist bases his/her clinical assessments on guidelines that support the preconceptions and prejudices of the profession.

There is absolutely no basis for describing ADD or ADHD as “a disease”, because psychiatry cannot establish any clinical data that offers a clear biological cause for this behavior across-the- board. Clinical jargon to justify their efforts to render non-conformist behavior “pathological”, is a long way from proving ADD is a disease.”

(Source)

Specialty schools and schools for troubled teens often have behavioral programs that address what some call simple rebellion. They concentrate on teaching the teen how to manage conflicting emotions, criticism and failure. They train the teen in the disciplines necessary to live a productive life.

Parents simply must study both sides of the issue and then see which school of thought best addresses the behavioral problems that their troubled teenagers are exhibiting.