Content Warning: This article contains references to mental illness, sexual assault, self harm, and suicide. All last names of patients have been withheld.
In October of 2020, Sabrina, a fifteen-year-old suffering from severe depression and anxiety, had just begun her stay at Newport Academy, an inpatient mental health facility for teenagers in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Having been hospitalized twice already, Sabrina was hopeful that Newport would give her the support that she needed.
On her way to the facility, Sabrina gazed at the New England countryside from behind the glass of her parents’ car window. As she neared Newport, trees replaced houses, and highways turned into winding roads.
After hours of driving, Sabrina and her parents finally arrived. Fallen leaves blanketed the stone pathway to the facility’s entrance, providing pops of color against the gray pavement. Although she was used to autumn in Pennsylvania, the season felt different here—crisp, fresh. Sabrina stepped inside, ready to begin her journey of healing.
Three months later, she would wish that she had never stepped foot on Newport’s grounds.
Newport Academy is one of many companies operating within the troubled teen industry (TTI), a network of private, residential treatment programs designed for minors. These programs, which range from therapeutic boarding schools to wilderness boot camps, promise to rehabilitate adolescents struggling with mental illness or substance use. Practices rely on several controversial treatment methods, such as confrontational therapy, isolation, and compliance-based reward systems.
TTI companies often convince parents to commit their children based on brief, online questionnaires. According to the National Youth Rights Association, these questionnaires, which contain general questions about anxiety and depression, are “almost guaranteed to yield some kind of disorder” given their nonspecific nature. Other TTI programs do not require a diagnosis at all and instead promise to “fix” teenagers’ attitude problems, poor study habits, or other “unsatisfactory” behavior. As minors, the teenagers themselves have no legal say in whether they will attend these treatment programs. At the instruction of the minors’ parents, TTI programs detain anywhere from 120,000 to 200,000 teenagers at any given time.
Founded in 2008, Newport Academy is one of the largest TTI companies, with sixteen gender-specific residential facilities around the country. According to its website, the company serves as an alternative to traditional rehabs, focusing on patients’ academic progress while treating their mental health conditions. Newport staff—including doctors, nurses, tutors, teachers, counselors, and specialized therapists—perform a “comprehensive academic assessment” on patients admitted to the program and “create a flexible plan that meets the needs of the student, family, and school.”
In 2013, Newport pledged to create new facilities in areas of the United States without adequate access to mental healthcare, starting by constructing a new residential facility in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Since then, Newport has expanded significantly, currently boasting eight female residential facilities, eight male residential facilities, and twelve outpatient programs around the United States.
During a typical stay at Newport residential programs, which typically lasts 45-60 days, patients can expect to undergo cognitive behavioral therapy, family therapy, group therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, exercise therapy, outdoor therapy, music therapy, and equine therapy, and more. Newport promises that residential patients will receive at least thirty hours of treatment each week, a combination of clinical and experiential therapy techniques. Outside of therapy, patients at residential Newport locations spend their time in academic programming, one-on-one tutoring, and supervised free time in living rooms, outdoors, common areas, or the computer room. For outpatient clients, Newport therapists design individualized programs with varying intensities to meet each patient’s needs. Some of the outpatient programs listed on their website include partial hospitalization, which provides all-day programming for patients five days a week, intensive outpatient programming, and standard outpatient programming.
According to Newport’s 2022 outcomes report, patients who completed Newport programs experienced significant decreases in depression and anxiety, as measured by responses on patient surveys. Additionally, Newport reports that more than half of their patients who were originally experiencing suicidal ideation no longer reported those thoughts by week five of treatment, and the number of patients actively planning suicide attempts had dropped by 75% in the same time period. These results have drawn patients like Sabrina to enroll at Newport facilities.
But as Newport continues to expand, former patients and staff members have spoken out about their negative experiences at Newport.
Although Sabrina was originally excited to begin her stay at Newport, she looks back on her experience as one of the worst times in her life. Sabrina’s life is different now. Her hair is darker, she’s started college, and she spends more time visiting her favorite place: Disney World. Still, as she recounts her experiences, Sabrina speaks about Newport as if she just left. She remembers small details about her stay, the anxiety she felt when entering the facility, or her surprise when she couldn’t use her phone in the treatment center. She recalls one traumatizing incident in which she was sent to the hospital after passing out from dehydration. She had left her bracelet, a special gift from a friend and constant source of comfort during her stay, on her bedside table. She returned to find it missing. When she asked the staff if they had seen the bracelet, they allegedly said that they had taken it and would only give it back to Sabrina once she stopped complaining about Newport on monitored phone calls to her parents.
“I have still not recovered from what Newport has done to me and my family,” Sabrina says.
Another patient, El, describes her experience at the Bethlehem location as “a living hell.” El, who was sent to Newport at age seventeen for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and PTSD, remembers feeling desperate and trapped at Newport during her two-month stay at the facility. Although El acknowledges that “there were some good staff members who got [her] through pretty tough moments,” she felt neglected by most of Newport’s care team. According to El, Newport staff refused to let her leave the facility’s common areas while she actively had panic attacks, forcing her to suffer in front of other patients.
Breaking Code Silence, a nonprofit that supports victims of the TTI, released a 2021 report detailing allegations against Newport Academy. The report contains over twenty-five testimonies from survivors, parents, and ex-staff members—three speaking directly about the Bethlehem, CT facility.
Stacy, who sent her child, AJ, to the Bethlehem facility, claims that Newport “falsified information” by housing her child with patients recovering from addiction after Newport promised to house him in a separate treatment pod. After just a week, Stacy pulled her son from the program. “[Newport] left my son even more traumatized with increased OCD, which I am dealing with at the moment,” she said.
Roberta, another parent who testified in the report, expressed disappointment with her experience. “My child’s experience there truly set them back,” she wrote. “Quite a few other attendees left early. From what I could see, very few students actually finish the program. We very much regret sending our child there and are working to rebuild their trust after such a negative experience.”
Statistics back up Roberta’s observations. In 2022, Newport Academy admitted 2,404 adolescents to their inpatient treatment facilities and 610 adolescents to outpatient programs. However, only 1,660 of those original 2,404 patients remained in the program after three weeks, and only 1,240 remained after five weeks. Newport does not report these numbers explicitly but rather reports them through what percentage of patients filled out surveys about their conditions. Newport has not responded to questions about these statistics or allegations of abuse.
For a program designed to rehabilitate teenagers’ existing disorders, some residents found themselves worse off after their time at Newport. Although Sabrina was not suffering from an eating disorder when admitted to Newport Academy, her room was in the eating disorder pod. By the time she left Newport, she claims that she had developed a binge-eating disorder, bulimia, and atypical anorexia. “Many of the clients taught me how to partake in ED habits, and the staff did nothing to prevent this,” she recalls.
Although Sabrina and El did not take legal action against Newport, at least one family has sued the company for wrongdoing. In February 2021, Brandon Fortier, a former staff member at the Bethlehem facility, was arraigned on charges of second-degree sexual assault, risk of injury to a minor, and providing alcohol to minors. The victim, who was being treated at Newport for substance abuse at the time of the allegations, confided in a family friend about his experiences with Fortier. According to the police warrant, Fortier “groomed” the patient by providing him with alcohol and nicotine in exchange for oral sex.
After an investigation, the police also found that thirty-five-year-old Fortier had engaged in similar practices with other male patients, including adding alcohol shooters to the coffee he bought them and providing them with personal gifts. Fortier initially denied the allegations, but in September 2023, he pled guilty to illegal delivery of alcohol to a minor, reckless endangerment, and illegal delivery of electronic nicotine devices to those under the age of 21. As part of his plea deal, the sexual assault charge was dropped.
Although Kristen Hayes, Associate Vice President of Public Relations and Communications at Newport Academy, called Fortier’s crimes “a reprehensible aberration of mental health treatment and professional conduct,” other former staff members were not surprised by Newport’s failure to identify and put a stop to Fortier’s actions.
Troy Stewart, former Newport Care Coordinator at the Bethlehem facility, attended Fortier’s hearing and told Waterbury, CT’s Republican American that the quality of care at Newport had declined after the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s understaffed and there is a collective indifference,” Stewart said. “[Newport hires] professional babysitters while they charge 2,500 dollars per day for clients.”
Sabrina recalls how some staff members marked patients asleep on paper without physically checking on them overnight. Without supervision, some patients, Sabrina claims, engaged in unsafe practices like drinking perfume, self-harm, and attempting suicide. Having to witness other patients endanger themselves without the staff intervening, Sabrina often felt responsible for the safety of her fellow patients. “The majority of the time, [patients] had to check in on other patients or stay up all night to make sure the other[s] were safe,” she claims. “No 13- to 22-year-old should ever have to have that responsibility, especially not one who is already struggling to simply survive.”
Dangerous situations like the ones that Sabrina describes are not uncommon within the TTI. According to The Regulatory Review, “No national accreditation or licensing law exists that governs for-profit [residential treatment facilities.]” Given this lack of oversight, many TTI programs receive funding from private equity investors who encourage the facilities to maximize the number of patients enrolled in their programs while minimizing the number of staff members.
Although lawmakers have proposed greater regulation of the industry, no significant legislation has been passed. Instead, pushback against TTI facilities most commonly occurs on a case-by-case basis. For example, Newport’s plans for its latest facility, which will be located in Seymore, Connecticut, have received resistance from locals. In a series of Zoning Commission meetings, Seymore residents expressed concern about the facility’s proximity to Route 34—a dangerous road that runs along a river only 150 feet away from the proposed facility site. “I think that the gentlemen that run this meeting have opened Pandora’s box and they’re going to live and die by their choices,” local resident Joan Firmender told the Valley Independent. “When people start dying on Route 34 and people start drowning in the river, it’s going to be on them.” Despite these concerns, Seymour Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously approved Newport’s plans for the facility during its meeting on October 12, 2023.
In the absence of legal intervention, most of the advocacy against the troubled teen industry is carried out by survivors. Because the “troubled teen” is stereotyped as needing tough love and strict discipline, many abusive TTI programs do not get media attention or garner public outrage. Though society deems troubled teens “irresponsible” and “unambitious,” the victims of the TTI are the ones who bear the burden of reforming a multibillion-dollar industry.
Sabrina is all too familiar with this predicament. Although speaking out against Newport forces Sabrina to relive her time in the facility, she is committed to spreading awareness and preventing further harm done at the hands of Newport. “I don’t want someone else to walk into it expecting an amazing experience when, in reality, their life will be flipped upside down,” she says.
In a post-COVID world, this advocacy is more important than ever. According to a report published by the National Library of Medicine, rates of adolescent anxiety and depression have skyrocketed since 2020, resulting in increased rates of hospitalization. While only 32% of children and adolescents who underwent emergency psychiatric evaluations were admitted to an inpatient psychiatric facility during the pre pandemic period, over half of similarly presenting patients were hospitalized during the pandemic and post-pandemic period. With this greater demand for youth residential facilities, legislation and oversight of the troubled teen industry are imperative. While survivors like Sabrina can help draw attention to the problems occurring within the industry, awareness is not a substitute for legal intervention—especially for the thousands of patients still in Newport facilities.