International Adoptees, RAD, and Residential Boarding School for “Troubled Teens”

“She was 13 years old and scared of the dark when she arrived at a residential treatment center that had promised her adoptive parents it would help her heal — from the pain of not knowing who her mother was or why she’d given her away.

Kate plugged in a night light in the dorm room. She had needed one since she was sexually assaulted at another facility, she said.

Her roommate turned it off. She panicked. She ran and then curled into a ball, heaving, weeping. Three employees followed her — to comfort her, Kate thought.

Instead, they threw her face first into the carpet, she said, yelling that she was “OIC” — “out of instructional control.” For what seemed like an hour, they held her down, Kate said, one on each arm, the third holding her legs.

Kate would be institutionalized for most of her adolescence — until she could sign herself out as an adult. The Utah facility was her third stop in a sprawling network of loosely regulated, for-profit residential treatment centers, wilderness programs and boarding schools that’s become known as the “troubled teen industry.”

An Associated Press investigation finds that a business known for tough-love boarding schools for rebellious, rich teenagers has also set its sights on a different demographic: adopted kids. Experts say adoptees, only 2% of American children, account for an estimated 25-40% of those in residential treatment.

Adoptees told the AP they believe they’ve been enmeshed in a shadow orphanage system where children end up with the very fate that adoption was supposed to spare them — promised ‘forever homes’ but institutionalized instead, some for years, in oppressive and sometimes abusive facilities.

Charging as much as $20,000 a month, many of these facilities promise in their marketing pitches to treat adopted children for reactive attachment disorder, often called RAD. They offer a salve for desperate adoptive parents, claiming the child’s behavioral problems are caused by a pathological failure to connect with their caregivers, and they can learn to attach in faraway treatment.

But experts say most teenagers confined in these facilities almost certainly don’t have RAD, and that the treatment offered wouldn’t fix it even if they did.

The AP interviewed dozens of program attendees and their families, former employees, public officials, attorneys and experts, and obtained hundreds of government and business records to examine why and how adopted kids land in such facilities despite the companies’ disturbing track records.

Police reports reveal children as young as 9 experience or witness violence, chaos, self-harm and sexual abuse inside facilities. Adoptees and adoptive parents said children left more traumatized than when they arrived — if, that is, they ever left. Some have died inside the facilities that promised they would keep them safe.

Children are strip-searched, regularly restrained and punished with manual labor, the AP found. Communication with the outside world, including their parents, is limited and tightly monitored.

Many said it felt like prison, except they had not been convicted of any crime, they have no sentence and no judge monitors their confinement. Parents alone usually decide to send their children away and for how long.

The AP is using only Kate’s first name because it does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault. When she was 12, she says, she was assaulted by another girl in the middle of the night at her first residential center.

She finally checked herself out of treatment four years ago, when she was 18, but she cries even now as she recounts the night in 2017 when she says she was held to the ground, screaming “I can’t breathe” as snot poured from her nose.

Eventually, she went silent, exhausted, she said, and she was released. She went to bed, without a night light.

She lived in that place for another two years.

“We were afraid all of the time,” she said.

A corrupted diagnosis

Adopted by a Kentucky couple, Kate longed to know her birth family, and resented their absence. She lashed out, sometimes violently. She was never in trouble with the law, she didn’t do drugs, but she knows she was a difficult child to parent.

She struggled with depression, anxiety and trichotillomania, a psychiatric condition that led her to pull out her hair.

Kate’s parents went looking for answers. Like many adoptive parents, they thought they found them when they learned about RAD.

The diagnosis is meant for young children who were so neglected in early life that they struggle to bond with caregivers, said Brian Allen, a psychologist who runs the mental health program at Penn State’s Center for the Protection of Children.

It originally described the effects of confinement in orphanages abroad that were so understaffed that babies were rarely held and received no affection, Allen said. Today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the catalog of mental illnesses known as the DSM — says it applies to children who’ve become so withdrawn, they seek no comfort when they are distressed or scared. The DSM specifies the diagnosis is extremely rare and applies to children under 5 — not older children who suffer neglect when small and misbehave years later.

Kate experienced no physical deprivation as a baby. Her adoptive mother was in the room when she was born and took her home right away, she said. But once she arrived in residential treatment, program therapists introduced her parents to reactive attachment disorder.

That’s a common misinterpretation, Allen said, to apply RAD to virtually any adopted preteen or teenager with behavioral challenges. Allen’s clinic studied 100 adopted and foster children brought in for treatment. Around 40% of them had been diagnosed with RAD, but not a single one fit the criteria, their study found.

Some proponents of the wider definition say it makes children manipulative and dangerous, and they must be corrected with obedience-based therapies. That, Allen said, is either a misunderstanding or an intentional bastardization of the diagnosis.

Allen argues the DSM should delete RAD from its listings. The diagnosis has been too “corrupted,” he said, and it is demonizing adopted children who could be better served by researched diagnoses like post-traumatic stress disorder or oppositional defiant disorder, for which there are studied treatments.

“We should absolutely not be doing those types of heavy-handed, obedience-focused, boot camp kinds of things,” Allen said. “There’s no empirical or theoretical basis for that.”

Yet many facilities advertise treatment for RAD.

“You have really fearful parents who are seeking rapid results and answers,” said Sloan Nova, a psychologist and director of a family therapy program at the University of California in San Francisco, who was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and ended up in a treatment facility as a teenager.

“Often what sweeps in is this overpromise, a very seductive promise from residential treatment centers,” Nova said. “So it just sounds almost too good to be true.”

Life and death in one company’s facilities

Uinta Academy in Utah practices equine therapy, telling parents that if their daughters can learn to connect with animals, they can learn to connect with people. By the time Kate left there, she said, she felt like the horses they’d trained: broken.

“I had no feelings,” she said. “I was a robot.”

The girls there were required to do what they were told without question, with a neutral expression on their faces — no sighing, no frowning, no crying, she said. Break the rules and they had to scrub the floor on their knees with a toothbrush for hours or go outside in 100-degree heat, rake moldy hay or pull weeds all day, she said. The smell of freshly pulled weeds still makes her sick.

Uinta is one of more than a dozen facilities across the country operated by Family Help & Wellness, a company which faces multiple lawsuits alleging abuse. FHW has denied wrongdoing in connection to those claims.

FHW did not respond to a detailed list of questions outlining the allegations in this story, and Uinta’s administrators did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement to the AP, the parent company said its programs are independently operated, and the company provides funding and support while the facilities determine “clinical models, admissions decisions and day-to-day care” and abide by local licensing laws and regulations. The company said it supports legislation to tighten industry regulations and is committed to strengthening oversight and improving quality of care that aligns with evolving best practices.

“The safety, well-being, and long-term success of every young person and family are our priority,” it wrote in a statement. “We recognize this is an area of increasing public attention and scrutiny, understandably so, given the real impact on young lives.”

The stakes are extraordinarily high: In the last two years, two of the company’s properties shuttered after children died there.”

Adopted and Locked Away: Kids promised ‘forever homes’ instead confined in for-profit institutions
[Kare 11 4/28/26 by CLAIRE GALOFARO and SALLY HO, AP]

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