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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Nope. Of course not. In 1976, two men who felt inspired by the seed started Straight Incorporated. They claimed to rehabilitate teenage drug users using tough love tactics. which included coercive thought reform methods such as public humiliation, sleep and food deprivation, and confrontational tactics too.
Unfortunately, and not unsurprisingly, these kids actually received no counseling or therapy at all, and most of the kids had never even done drugs. It's pretty crazy when you think about it. It has been reported by survivors that when they arrive at Straight Incorporated, they'd be separated from their parents where other peers would question them about their drug use.
If the youth indicated that they had never done drugs, many times they would be verbally and physically abused until they agreed that they had a drug problem and signed a confession to that effect. Then they'd return the kid to their parents and show them the signed confession and say something along the lines of, thank God you brought your child. Look at all the drugs that they're doing.
And there are obviously other types of programs, such as religious academies and boot camps, which have different origin stories. But one thing remains the same. Regardless of how these programs were founded, many have patterns of rampant abuse and claim to fix struggling youth using these ineffective and non-evidence-based practices.
Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that your friend didn't have any lasting trauma from being there. You bring up such an important point. There are some who go to these programs and come out having had a great experience. While I am so thankful for that, the reality is that these programs are not federally regulated, severely lacking in oversight.
And they also don't have proper reporting policies that would ensure the safety for every single youth. In health care, everything should be driven by outcomes. Until we can guarantee that every youth who enters these programs receives actual treatment and has a good experience, then alternative methods need to be used.
Not to mention, we know now that even in the absence of abuse for these children, the act of being institutionalized itself can be harmful. The kids who go into these facilities have every aspect of their lives monitored, contact with the outside world is cut off, and have a complete loss of free will.
The very fact that communication is limited to the outside world, that there's no due process, and that these children are extremely removed from their support systems will often breed abuse, even if it's not intended.
Yeah, exactly. And most people don't understand that kids in prison actually have more rights than kids in these programs. Ripping a teen away from their closest relationships, or should I say kidnapping, as that's often what is done, can cause major disruptions in their ability to function in important ways, both internally and externally.
Exactly. But instead of a plant, it's a teenager's mental and emotional well-being we're talking about. And trust me, it gets worse when that adversity or trauma hits during childhood, especially without a caring adult to help them through it.
Exactly. It's something called toxic stress. It's like regular stress's evil twin. It changes the way our brain is wired right down to the genetic level and basically remodels the brain in all the wrong ways. It goes after key areas in the brain like the amygdala, hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex.
Those are the parts that handle things like stress response, emotional regulation, focus, decision-making, and memory. When toxic stress messes with those, it's like trying to run a computer on a corrupted hard drive. Nothing works the way it should.
Yeah, exactly. Our brains are like super sponges when we're young, soaking up everything around us. If that everything is chaos and stress, the brain rewires itself to survive in that kind of environment and not in a good way.
Yeah, you're not far off. When survivors of the industry finally get out of these programs, we're starting to see the full scope of damage. We're talking mental health issues like complex PTSD, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and personality disorders. But it doesn't stop there. Housing insecurity, lack of job training, poor educational outcomes— and even higher chances of suicide.
It's like a nightmare bingo card of long-term effects, all tied to something called adverse childhood experiences.
Yeah. So basically, they're traumatic events that happen before you turn 18 and can mess with your entire life, your health, your opportunities, your stability. They're grouped into three categories, abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction.
The original study and decades of follow-up research has linked these experiences to a greater chance of chronic disorders, obesity, behavioral changes, autoimmune disease, depression, alcoholism, you name it.
Yeah, childhood trauma is like a ghost that haunts you well into adulthood. And get this, there's a questionnaire for adverse childhood experiences. It's like a trauma scorecard with 10 different types of abuse scenarios that can happen in childhood. For every one you check off, you get a point. And trust me, you really don't want a high score on this test.
What's even more mind-blowing is that many of the scenarios on that list match up perfectly with the kinds of abuse happening in these programs.
Yep, pretty much nailed it. To give you an idea of how true that is, if I myself had filled out the questionnaire before I was sent away, my score would have been a 1 out of 10. Now, because of what I had to go through during three and a half years in institutions, my score is now a seven. And higher scores aren't just a bad look. They can literally kill you.
Showing 61–80 of 102 · page 4 of 6
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