The Dawn Treader

What do you do when you find out that your teenage son or daughter is using drugs?  What do you do when the trust is gone?  What are your options when your teenager makes poor choices and the stakes get deadly serious?

Tough challenges.  Tough choices.  Two different families in our former church dealt with these challenges and choices.  Neither turned to a Christian program.  Instead, both turned to the Insight program in Atlanta (now also in Greensboro) for help.

It sounds radical and it is.  You send your child away to another city to live with a host family.  Your child lives with this other family ... well, they sleep at their house and eat meals with them.  However, your child basically spends the majority of their time hanging out with other kids going through the program.  The rules are ... well, there are no rules ... ok, there are three rules, in the words of the founder of the program : "no fighting, no fixing, and no f___ing".  They attend group outpatient sessions M-F (half-day sessions).  The parents meet in their own support group (once every other week, I believe) while their kids are in the program.

Other than the group sessions, the program looks like "controlled chaos."  Kids hanging out till whenever.  No curfews.  Few boundaries.  No drug testing.  An honor system.  The belief is that your peers will keep you accountable for staying clean.  The philosophy is called enthusiastic sobriety.  The program boasts of a high recovery rate in the first year.

The cost?  Seven grand.  The duration?  Indeterminate.  The outpatient sessions run six to eight weeks – but it seems to be entirely subjective.  What happens next is part of the controversy.  You would like to think that the child returns home and restarts life – equipped with new tools for coping with the temptation to use drugs.  That rarely seems to be the case.

Here is what happened in the two families we know about.  In one family, their son stayed in the after-care program for two years.  He eventually returned home, relapsed into drugs, and went right back to Atlanta to be with his friends from the program.  He originally left home at fifteen.

In the other family, the son went through the program and then decided to become a counselor in the program.  He stayed in the program (as a counselor) and to our knowledge, has never left.  It has been five years.  He originally left home at sixteen.

Some families are told that their child needs additional counseling.  In one case, a mother was told that her daughter needed additional counseling.  She reluctantly agreed and sent her daughter off for 45 days of inpatient counseling.  The cost?  Fourteen grand.  The result?  The mother eventually pulled her daughter out of the program and felt the $20,000 investment ultimately did  nothing to help her daughter with addictions.  Other parents, however, seem to think that the program is the answer to their prayers.

Is this program a scam?  A cult?  Or life saving therapy?

I did some digging.  There is remarkably little on the internet.  What I did find was disturbing.  I'll share that in the next post.