Does it take one suicide attempt? No? How about three sex offenses? Possibly one overdose, four assaults, three runaways, two reports of child abuse, one report of neglect and one missing juvenile over a period of a decade before such a place could be shut down?
Would that do it?
Just like Asheville Academy, it took the death of a child to finally shut Trails Carolina down.
Apparently not, because the Asheville Academy in North Carolina, a residential treatment facility for troubled young girls, managed to keep right on operating with all the above notches in its abusive belt until two suicides—one 13-year-old on May 3 and a 12-year-old on May 29—finally forced the concentration camp for kids to close its doors and give up its license.
The 12-year-old’s suicide occurred just two days after North Carolina authorities finally ordered the school to stop taking in new patients. Two days later, they sent the remaining girls home.
It took two deaths. Of children. By suicide.
Imagine the depth of their desperation—and what caused it.
But Asheville Academy’s owner, Family Help & Wellness, is very familiar with death. It’s practically an old friend.
Last year, a 12-year-old boy died at Trails Carolina—another of the company’s facilities—after staff bound him as punishment in a restraint they called “the burrito.” He suffocated to death.
Another Trails Carolina student described the sensation of the restraint. “It felt like I was suffocating in it,” Georgie Cash said. “I had a few panic attacks just being in the burrito because the feeling of not being able to escape is horrible.”
Just like Asheville Academy, it took the death of a child to finally shut Trails Carolina down.
The only response Asheville Academy could muster after two children took their own lives at their facility was this: “We are utterly heartbroken by the loss of a young life and share our deepest condolences with the family and everyone touched by this tragedy. Out of respect for those grieving and in deference to ongoing investigations, we cannot provide further comment at this time.”
How nice. Possibly their reticence was influenced by the fact that Asheville and Trails Carolina are the targets of multiple lawsuits, with the latest alleging that Trails misled parents, charged huge fees for treatment and failed to disclose abuses like depriving children of food and clothing.
Death had also come knocking at Trails Carolina’s door before, when a 17-year-old boy died after trying to escape the camp in 2014.
Both Asheville Academy and Trails Carolina are part of the “troubled teen industry.” As attorney Kim Dougherty said: “Former residents of the shuttered Trails program and their parents have come forward in droves to reveal horrific stories of ongoing abuse, neglect and assault at the hands of both staff and senior operators of these so-called ‘troubled teen’ wellness programs.
“Instead of providing residents with the treatment promised in its marketing and promotional materials, Trails and its employees subjected our client to severe neglect, inhumane conditions, emotional and sexual abuse.
“Every parent alive should be warned about these seedy, abusive programs that prey on vulnerable and desperate parents seeking beneficial treatments for their children.”
Asheville Academy has also become the target of a lawsuit alleging “abuse, humiliation, sexual assault, forced labor and false advertising.”
“Let’s get this place shut down forever so they could not harm any more vulnerable girls.”
The suit states that there is a “web of interconnected entities and investment entities that operated these facilities as profit centers while systematically failing to protect the children in their care.”
“It was actually a really traumatizing experience,” said Gabrielle Mayer, a former patient—read “prisoner”—at Asheville. “I tried to run away the first day and I got tackled to the ground by a woman, and it was very common for them to restrain people. I was restrained on the ground to the point where I couldn’t breathe.”
Asheville staffers threatened patients with restraints or isolated confinement in a windowless basement, where the girls could be heard screaming.
One girl said she spent three months in the basement in solitary confinement.
“The reason why I have nightmares and trouble sleeping at night is because I can still hear people screaming from restraints or solitary confinement,” Mayer said. “Of course, it just makes you crazier, you know, makes you sicker and totally has the opposite effect. I don’t know how you can call that treatment or healing.”
“Let’s get this place shut down forever so they could not harm any more vulnerable girls, because I know what it was like to go there and come out 10 times worse.”
Government inspectors found that Asheville (then named Solstice East) committed 115 drug errors between March and October in 2020.
Yet, other than a $6,000 fine, nothing was done, and the woodland torture chamber continued to operate.
At a tuition charge of $66,250 a year, $6,000 is chump change.
But the government may finally start acting on these so-called psychiatric wilderness “treatment” centers.
The federal Stop Child Institutional Abuse Act became law in December, requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to “identify the nature, prevalence, severity and scope of child abuse, neglect and deaths in youth residential programs,” and “to study and make recommendations about various aspects of youth residential programs.”
Kody Kinsley, North Carolina’s outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services, urged a complete ban on wilderness “therapy” camps.
“I don’t think wilderness therapy camps have a place in our continuum of care in North Carolina,” Kinsley said. “The law needs to be changed to permanently remove these licenses so that they don’t exist.”
But the problem is far greater than one state. Indeed, there are about 700 residential treatment centers in the US, providing 24-hour mental health “care” to children. Many of the programs that are part of the troubled teen industry sell their “services” for fees ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 per child, per year.
And it isn’t just local watchdogs sounding the alarm. The US Senate released a report entitled, “Warehouses of Neglect: How Taxpayers Are Funding Systemic Abuse in Youth Residential Treatment Facilities (RTFs),” about the same kinds of money-driven horrors that just killed children in North Carolina.
“Children suffer routine harm inside RTFs,” the report stated. “These harms include sexual, physical and emotional abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions and inadequate provision of behavioral health treatment.”
Why? Simple—hard, cold cash. The report concludes that children’s happiness and their very lives are being traded for filthy profit. “The risk of harm to children in RTFs is endemic to the operating model,” the report reads. “The harms children in RTFs experienced are the direct, causal result of an operating model that incentivizes providers to optimize revenues and operating and profit margin. RTF providers offer minimal therapeutic treatment in deficient physical settings with lean staff composed of nonprofessionals, which maximizes per diem margins.”
In other words, it’s cheaper to run these homes like Soviet gulags, understaffed by unqualified people and poorly maintained, to maximize profit.
It’s shameful that America would allow its youth to be treated like this.
Now is the time to take action—before more young people die.
