A mother about Redcliff Ascent

This testimony was found on a message board. All rights goes to the original author.

I'm sure ABC family is going to portray the staff at Redcliff Ascent as good and caring and the kids as manipulative brats, hence the name Brat Camp.

I've read the message board for brat camp and some people are shocked that RCA would sell out this way. I am not at all surprised. Our daughter attended RCA in 2001. The therapist at RCA led us and our insurance co. to believe she was making progress all along when in fact she made no progress. They kept her there for 5 months leading us to believe she was getting better.

Our daughter was 13 and suffering from severe depression. She took an overdose one night, was taken to the hospital, had her stomach pumped and transferred to another hospital that night. A psychologist from Ohio State University came and evaluated her and said RCA was exactly what she needed. We were pressured and rushed to make a decision about issues we had never dealt with before.

Having your child so distraught she tried to kill herself and being told by all these so called professionals was so overwhelming.

We live in Ohio and left early one morning from the hospital and drove our only daughter nearly 2000 miles away and left her with complete strangers because it's what the doctors said was best for her.

I had weekly phone sessions with her therapist who assured me she was making slow but steady progress. i kept notes of each phone session throughout her stay. We were not allowed to talk to our daughter, we could only write letters. The therapist told me she had lost some weight but said that it was common with the kids due to all the hiking.

About three weeks before we went to pick her up, RCA sent some pictures of our daughter to our e-mail. The first two were disturbing but she looked ok. In the third picture she looked bad. Emaciated, scraped up and unhealthy. We left the next morning to pick her up.

Nothing could have prepared us for how she looked when we arrived in the wilderness of Utah. We couldn't wait to get her out of there.
Our daughter had gained weight due to her depression and weighed in at 178 when we left her at RCA. When we picked her up 5 months later she weighed 106. Her face reminded me of the pictures you see of children who had been in concentration camps. She had lived on lentils, rice and rolled oats for the past 5 months. They got peanut-butter or cheese once a week. At times they had to drink water from troughs for cattle in the fields or from ponds.

Since she had no salt in her diet, she retained huge amounts of water after she began eating regular food again. She threw up all the way home. She was starving but her system couldn't handle food. We took her to the doctor when we returned to Ohio. She was anemic, malnourished, iron deficient, albumen levels were low, blood sugar levels were high, liver enzymes elevated. Her hair was falling out due to malnutrition. She said the staff at RCA had started calling her baldy.

Our insurance co. did an investigation of RCA after hearing of our daughter’s condition. We were not informed of the outcome.

Children’s services in our home town gathered information for their own. That was sent to Columbus, our capital. Columbus sent all the information to Provo, Utah who sent it to the local sheriff’s office in Beryl, Utah who, as far as we know, had done nothing.
That was 4 years ago and this place is still operating at an average cost of 10,000 dollars a month.

If we had gotten our daughter in this physical condition while in our care, she would have been taken away from us. Many kids have been seriously injured or have died in these wilderness programs and not only are they still in business, now they are also entertainment.

One concerned and upset mom in Ohio.

Source:
NOT SUPRISED!!!!!! (Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora)