Meg Appelgate
speaker
102 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Meg Appelgate’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, pretty much. Many of the punitive and isolative tactics that they use create barriers for teens and are especially damaging to teenage brains. A primary example is conversion and aversion therapy that attempt to change youth's sexual or gender identities.
If you can even call it school.
For me, it was more like babysitting with a side of manual labor. The staff were often unqualified, and I personally didn't learn much beyond how to follow orders and stay out of trouble. My education in the program consisted of having me sit at a desk for 12 hours a day writing papers on topics they'd give me. I wasn't allowed to speak. I wasn't allowed to get up.
I had to do exactly what they told me to do. I had no free will. Every day they just put us all in a room, give us handouts and told us, when you've learned everything here, we will give you a test.
Yeah, exactly. And you touched on something important. The troubled teen industry does have ties to cults. The roots of the industry are wild. So get this. Many modern day programs were actually inspired by a cult called Synanon.
Pretty much. Synanon started in 1958 as an offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous. They had this twisted group therapy called The Game, in which members would verbally attack each other until they broke down. Not exactly a Hallmark moment.
Child care and colts are a bad mix, generally.
And when I talk about the game, that's actually in reference to that attack therapy that I talked about earlier. It's the same exact thing.
Yeah, that's actually pretty accurate. You'd sit in a circle for two to three hours and hear everything that is wrong with you, everything you need to change and how you're not good enough.
Yep. And Synanon was no different. Members of Synanon had to shave their heads, mate with people who weren't their spouses, and some were even forced to have sterilizations and abortions. When the LAPD finally caught on to the severe abuse and violence, Synanon's leadership collapsed. But not before some of its followers took those techniques and created spinoff programs on youth.
And voila, the modern troubled teen industry was born.
Oh, yeah, it is nuts. And that doesn't even touch on the roots of wilderness programs like your friend in high school found himself in.
Yeah, that sounds pretty accurate, actually. But it basically started in 1966 when school officials at Brigham Young University created a course called Youth Leadership 480. And they paid a former student $90 to teach survival skills to university students who were failing school. It was essentially a month-long backpacking trip in the Utah desert.
Yeah. But then, after leaving BYU, that student, along with other peers, started the first wilderness therapy program, charging $500 for a 30-day outing. So from 90 to 500, that's a nice markup they got going. It gets crazier. Another BYU graduate took it a step further and started the Challenger Foundation. They raised the price to almost $10,000. Ten grand for a month in the woods.
Better be gold-plated s'mores. There surely wasn't. But Challenger and all of its spinoffs were based on a very punitive approach.
Essentially, it didn't take long for youth in these programs to start dying from things like malnutrition, falling off of a cliff, extreme medical neglect, and even dehydration.
All wilderness therapy programs today are descendants of this challenger foundation.
Yeah, there actually are a zillion of these. But in 1967, two former Synanon members went on to found CEDU, known as CEDU. CEDU marked the beginning of therapeutic boarding schools, behavior modification programs, and group homes.
Seadoo took children who struggled with behavioral or substance abuse issues and applied the same tactics that Synanon used, only they also threw in things like forced cuddling that they called smushing. This is when the industry started its heavy focus on youth.
Yeah, I don't blame you on that. Another program that focused on youth, The Seed, was started in 1970. It incorporated all of its predecessors' punitive tactics but took the abuse to a whole new level. In fact, a Senate report in 1974 compared The Seed's techniques to brainwashing techniques used on prisoners of war in Korea. This report is what primarily caused The Seed's collapse.
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