Hell that is the latter day saints

The place was congested with “troubled” teenagers whose parents' perception of them was as skewed as the generations before. My friends and I would try to troubleshoot why they resented us so much and shipped us 2,174.1  miles away but every answer we came up with always led us to as dead of end as Oakley, Utah. If you are unaware of the therapeutic programs that the holy state of Utah procures, I would count your blessings. And in short, I would explain it as hell for the slightly defiant made more traumatized by the state itself. As Utah treats its citizens that they are not only Americans but the chosen ones by The Church of the Latter Day Saints. Caffeine, Social Media, Alcohol, Drugs, Parties, Unsupervised Coeds, “risque clothing” which could be classified as not wearing thick layered leggings under your already ankle length skirt were considered sins in the Mormon community. Attending church, obeying curfew, obstaining from sexual relations until marriage, and even polygamy were rewarded. If you believe the inappropriate fondling of the catholic church is bad I would not advise you to take a look at the small suburbs that lie outside of Salt Lake. The smaller the population the more clinically insane and unfortunately the more self righteous they feel.  

I spent 14 months in a quaint town in the southwest corner of Utah. The last factual population was in 2010 and reaching 1,470 residents. (They now “estimate” to be 1,600 as 2020). Sometimes it felt like I came face to face with the devil and had to scare him off with my  DBT skills (dialectical behavior therapy, one of the many skills that teaches you how to calm yourself in a therapeutic setting) and in this case the devil were a series of early to mid twenties aged prophets who believed themself to be self righteous enough to boss 14-17 year olds around. The everchanging website of the Oakley school stated that they offered assistance in a diverse range of problematic adolescent behaviors and or general diagnoses. Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, Eating disorders, Self-Harm, Depression, Anxiety, Promiscuity, OCD, ADHD, Bipolar oh and my favorite ODD. Also known as Oppositional Defiance Disorder which may or may not be a real diagnosis but typically used in therapeutic settings when the inmate refuses the institution's diabolical rules. Besides these guidelines, there were two types of patients at Oakley: The seemingly normal and the batshit insane.(With a few outliers of course) One can infer which category you fall into by skimming your transcript papers. Legally, there were people who had to be there. Human injuring DUIs, excessive run ins with the cops, skeletons gagging at the sight of food everyday and were taken into the hospital due to malnutrition, neglective parents who let their kids fall off the deep end because they did not have the funding or emotional intelligence to address what was going on. The state was paying for their stays and these kids had no choice but to abide until their therapists wrote one sentence that consistently changed lives “They are no longer a danger to themselves or others”. For the rest of us, the 6 figure salary going towards the rewiring of our brains was no scum off our guardians backs. It was a very out of sight out of mind solution. Let’s throw money at a problem and not ask any questions. It’s expensive so it must be effective, right? I am sure that’s how they approached shocked therapy in the late 1930s. We were a bunch of privileged mainly white kids from the Tri-state area who were recreations of our makers in an unsettling array of colors. We were products of our own environment and way too blunt of a spitting image for our parents to handle. We were the highly sensitive kids of these fucked up adults. Our families had to endure a couple seminars a year where they could twiddle their thumbs, apologize insincerely a couple times, take the minimum amount of accountability but of course follow it up with “but all my other kids ended up perfect.” And maybe it was just that. That to them you were just the runt of the litter, to them your DNA got slightly switched up in the making which allowed them to feel better when they got on their first class flight back to JFK and tell their “friends” that I am having a great time at summer camp. When Summer was over and it was time to come up with a new excuse, and I would get a call everyday from the landline and have to sit on a throwaway couch anxiously picking at the itchy stuffing coming out of burn holes in the fabric, enduring her yelling of shame…Or embarrassment yet keeping me away was better for her reputation than telling a few white lies about me saving kids in Africa or trying out a new type of yoga in Sedona. To her, even to Utah, I wasn't the child of divorce, or an addict or two. To her, I didn't stand over a dead body of someone I loved when I was 10. I wasn’t sexually assaulted at 14. To her, the phrase “get over it.” wasn't a reflection of me but it was a projection of her. Her father who abused her, her stepmother who scorned her and her loving mother who died in a slow fight of cancer. I was years and years of abuse staring back at her as a weakened depressed child, carrying the weight of generations on my back, my shoulders, my legs, my feet.

Diagnosis after diagnosis came to my front door via post for the first 16 years of my life. My parents spent a pretty penny on trying to figure out why I took blades to my wrists and numbing drugs in over prescribed amounts to not only mute the sound but turn off the movie forever. After middle school, 95% of my class went to a pretentious private boarding schools in New England to satisfy their need of getting into a Ivy allowing their parents to vacation in Capri and get a silent yet civil divorce without the kids being home. So I settled upon a boarding school in the Berkshires nestled in the mountains directly on the Appalachian trail. I wont go into treacherous detail about what happened in Massachusetts but with little to no accountability I started to realize what utter sadness and despair looked like. Coming home for a parents weekend 6 months later I found myself asking for emotional help. I sat on the couch of a therapists office as lifeless as the swivel chair I was sitting in. If someone were to move the chair it might have danced for you but if no one were there to sit in it was it even there at all? My mother researched everything she could possibly find on getting someone in their primitive years to not kill themselves. She settled on a short term therapeutic program in Hawaii which sounded like a vacation to me and I went unknowingly. Pacific Quest of the main island of Hawaii was a 3 month program in which you gardened for your own food, were limited to one shower a week, and were forbidden to have any contact with the outside world. The intake of these therapeutic programs all have one thing in common and that is the process to get in is very similar to those of prisons. You are asked to strip down, jewelry and all, cough, take a drug test, hand over your phone and all our other devices. They even look at your body in a scientific experimental type of way and write in detail every mark born or self inflicted on your body so that weekly they can check if you are stealing whatever sharp object you can find (in the middle of nowhere typically it would be a plant stem) and cause yourself pain as relief. 

After you get through the stages of Pacific Quest, your therapist that you have been unwillingly assigned who may or may not be an asshole, recommends in the politest of manners to your parents whether or not you should be admitted to a long term treatment center for extensive therapy. There were little to no cases in which they did not recommend this because the world of adolescents seeking therapeutic help is so small and easily finesed by the most gullible of parents, therapists and guides (what they call people who have a slight background in therapy but no degree to show for it). Get a stipend of whatever program you float to next just by saying the words “I think your daughter needs more help”. Corrupt isn't it? 

When our rental car pulled up the massive ski lodge type building after the long weekend I earned in order to see my family my first thought was “I might die here”.  And even though I was reluctant I proceeded to give it a chance because I was a minor and I had no choice. Tapped phone calls and emails, your letters were read through by 19 year old staff members, frowned upon for making small talk with the boys, slapped upon the wrist for swearing and locked in a basement for having a sip of red bull on an outing. The words “I am going to hell” in writing as punishment were frequent. If you were lucky, your parents would recognize the abuse you were enduring but most were so inevitably brainwashed by the system. My therapist once took my parents into a large conference room, floor to ceiling windows. My therapist got them to sign another 6 month check for tuition because I was not obeying the rules of the system when in fact I had done nothing wrong. The isolation made just about everyone worse. I knew two people who overdosed after the events that took place there. Their memories of their time in Utah were too much to bear.  And in a way, I was right. A version of myself died in Oakley, Utah. That same version of myself that was so ignorant to everything around me. The Oakley School of Oakley Utah got shut down in 2017 for financial reasons yet under the table everyone knew the state stopped funding their institution due to child abuse. The nature of institutional abuse is still extremely apparent in vulnerable teens and families yet there are more people becoming aware of it. 


​​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakley,_Utah

https://thefilmstage.com/now-return-us-to-normal-review-a-poetic-personal-road-trip-reflecting-on-the-unintended-consequences-of-wilderness-schools/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/paris-hilton-abuse-testimony-utah


Previous
Previous

A little west of the end of the world

Next
Next

Dating app exhaustion is the new emotional burnout for singles... these pros are here to help you through it