About Kenneth R. Rosen
Kenneth R. Rosen is a contributing writer at WIRED and the journalist-in-residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the author of two books of narrative nonfiction, an Executive-in-Residence at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and a 2021 Alicia Patterson Fellow. Previously, he spent six years on staff at The New York Times.
Kenneth R. Rosen is a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award in international reporting. Among other honors, he received the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for War Correspondents for his reporting on Iraq in 2018 and was a finalist for his reporting on Syria in 2019.
He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and VQR. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, and Japanese.
As a foreign correspondent and magazine writer, he has reported from more than 13 countries, appeared on NPR, PRI’s “The World,” The Guardian‘s daily podcast, and NRC‘s (Netherlands) podcast, among others. And he has briefed the State Department on his reporting from the Levant.
He has received generous support from MacDowell (Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grantee), the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Literary Journalist-in-Residence), the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (Grantee ’17, ’20), the Fulbright Program, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, the Fund for American Studies (Robert Novak Fellow), the Steven Joel Sotloff Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation with John Jay’s Center on Media, Crime, and Justice, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute for Global Good.
Educated at Columbia University and the Savannah College of Art and Design, he lectured at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has held workshops on creative nonfiction for Catapult magazine, and has volunteered with troubled teens seeking to return to school and complete their bachelor’s degrees.
Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs
In the middle of the night, they are vanished.
Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control—suffering from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage—are carted off against their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across the country. Desperate parents of these “troubled teens” fear it’s their only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever.
Acclaimed journalist Kenneth R. Rosen knows firsthand the brutal emotional, physical, and sexual abuse carried out at these programs. He lived it. In Troubled, Rosen unspools the stories of four graduates on their own scarred journeys through the programs into adulthood. Based on three years of reporting and more than one hundred interviews with other clients, their parents, psychologists, and health-care professionals, Troubled combines harrowing storytelling with investigative journalism to expose the disturbing truth about the massively profitable, sometimes fatal, grossly unchecked redirection industry.
Not without hope, Troubled ultimately delivers an emotional, crucial tapestry of coming of age, neglect, exploitation, trauma, and fraught redemption.
As I set a spade to dirt, I thought back to the moment I had arrived at this dusty working ranch in southern Utah. I stepped off the plane knowing very little about what lay ahead — only that this rehabilitation program would include long periods of hard labor.
It was 2007, and my parents had sent me to this therapeutic ranch, which was three hours south of Salt Lake City. I’d spent more than a year away in similar programs and lockups, but nothing quite like this.
I was into drugs and disregarding authority figures. The ranch sought to use equine therapy, combined with working therapy, to teach teenagers like me how to manage their anger, anxiety, depression and unhealthy impulses.
It used to be that young troublemakers were sent to their grandparents’ house to develop discipline and a work ethic. Now some parents, if they could afford it, sent their troubled children to physically intensive outdoor programs around the country.
In a program in upstate New York, I climbed the High Peaks of the Adirondacks with packs weighing 50 pounds. In the Berkshires, I was coached in self-discipline and accountability. At the ranch in Utah, my fellow troubled teenagers and I were taught to wrangle and train the horses. Tame a wild beast, the theory went, and you could tame the beast inside of you.
When I got to the ranch, there was plenty I did not know about horses, and at first they terrified me. All I wanted to do was go home.
Growing up on the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan I had held few jobs, and none of them involved much physical exertion. A lemonade stand outside my parents’ apartment building, selling my immature artwork in the building’s lobby, working in I.T. at a law firm near Bryant Park — that was the extent of my work history.
The closest I’d ever come to a horse before was at a petting zoo, and those animals were just miniature ponies. The ranch horses were strong and barrel-chested Arabians, American Quarters, Spotted Saddles, Buckskins, Palominos — each with its own temperament and personality.
An instructor explained that through our work with the horses, he was trying to teach us how to face the obstacles in our lives back home. Learning to do things we didn’t want to do would be more beneficial to us than we could currently imagine, he said. As it turns out, he was right.
At the ranch, I learned to rein a horse. I learned lead changes, stops, rollbacks and backups. I trotted, cantered, loped and galloped. I learned how to groom and feed a horse, along with how to change a horseshoe and the proper way to use a horse pick.
Over time, I learned that if I was to have a good cattle drive free of worry and stumbles, then the extra work I put in beforehand would save me time and sweat on the trail.
I was there in the colder part of the year, when working outside after a morning shower meant your hair froze into ice splinters, so I spent much of my time inside the riding pavilion, shoveling manure, organizing tacking and nurturing the horses. This was in addition to our kitchen and cabin cleaning duties, and the one-on-one sessions we had with our individual therapists.
When we did go outside, we were often given the job of digging holes.
Wooden post and rail fences forming the corral would often break, or a pen would need enlarging, requiring new post holes to be dug. The ranch staff gave us shovels, post-hold diggers, wheelbarrows, a cement mixture and gloves to get the job done, but didn’t tell us much about how to do it.
The digging went slow. The ground was tough, and sometimes a rock was particularly stubborn. I would work with two other boys about my age, 17, and we would take turns slamming our spades into dirt. Churning up the sometimes-wet loam meant the walls of the hole were unstable. They often crumbled, a frustrating development, especially when we knew that our dinner was getting colder.
With enough time, we were able to get the holes as deep and as wide as the posts required. I would shoulder a large cedar post and heave it down the hole. As I held the post upward, one of the other boys would load the hole with mixed gravel, another would pour the mixed cement around the base, and we would wait until it set. Then onto the next one, with our waiting dinners a powerful incentive to get the work done efficiently. In the past, dinner had never seemed like a reward to me, because in the city it was so often preceded by hours of wandering around aimlessly and getting into trouble.
I applied myself to those holes, setting myself up to get the job done right the first time without running into too many problems. Digging post holes gave me a sense of purpose, although I didn’t see it that way at the time. As calluses formed on my hands, I wondered: Why couldn’t the ranch hands do this work? To make it worse, I wasn’t even being paid. In fact, my parents were paying a big bill for me to dig holes.
The payday came several months later when I left the program. I was now equipped with the knowledge that with the right set of tools and the right preparation, it was possible to set a goal and reach it, one post hole at a time.
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