Geeking-Out March 24, 2024

The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping

Curated by Meg Birmingham

What happens when parents who feel they are losing connection with their teenagers are targeted by an organization that promised a series of steps that combined academic education and therapeutic interventions? That’s when their teen is essentially kidnapped and enrolled in the Troubled Teen Industry, a traumatizing program with the express purpose of making money, not helping young people.

Katherine Kubler and a handful of other Ivy Ridge alumni act as amateur investigators, set out to expose the truth of the suffering they endured. Each of the series hour-long episodes examines a different aspect of the program’s horrifying history of abuse — the first two episodes follow the group as they work to compile information to prove that Ivy Ridge was a for-profit facility that was set on brainwashing and humiliating its “students” and the concerned parents who enrolled them.

Read more here.