Marked NSFW for a number of reasons - potentially triggering to anyone who’s been through this or something similar. Supplemental links contain some very dark, horrifying accounts.
Why you should know: Hundreds of thousands (possibly far more) of now adults carry that trauma with them. Many of these schools are still in operation, still abusing children.
You likely can’t fully appreciate what these kids went through and what many of them still carry around with them, but reading and watching accounts from past “students” can get you closer:
Webcomic about one man’s experience with Elan, another Troubled Teen program outside the WWASPS umbrella. I won’t spoil the many, many twists, but his story is something I couldn’t pull myself away from the entire time I read it. https://elan.school/
Watch “The Program” on Netflix. Shows multiple people that were sent to different schools in the WWASPS umbrella retelling their stories while exploring the now abandoned facility they were once prisoners in.
This is a risk of growing up in a family that is too wealthy. If those with money (or the ear of the moneyed folk) think somethings wrong with you, there are experts that will recommend kidnap brainwashing camps where they send you and they’re very good at convincing rich people they can fix their child.
It is the stuff nightmare fuel horror stories are made of, except it really happens all the fucking time.
It’s almost like these people saw gay conversion camps and decided the potential market was too small so they wanted to torture teenagers for any form of willfulness
I’m pretty sure the grift plays on rich Grandpa being aghast because rich grandson is his own person (e.g. doesn’t want to be a doctor or join the family business). And here comes this snappy looking salesman saying we can fix him for a price and make him the prodigy you want.
Partly but I recommend Joe Nobody vs Elan school for a view into a different way it went. It’s a really rough read, but his parents were advised by a judge to send him because he got caught with pot. It’s absolutely both of these situations.
And rich grandpa may be horrified about that, but it could be any number of things including that the kid is “too spoiled”.