Selling Sanity

Exposing the Troubled-Teen Industry: One Survivor's Story of Abuse, Coercion, and the Fight for Accountability

The messaging promised help and healing.

The staff promised structure and support.

What Corey Jentry got was something else entirely.

Growing up in a run-down trailer park in a small southern town, life always felt too much-too loud, too sharp, too unforgiving. His mother was strung out on cocktails of painkillers. His father was checked out, emotionally shut down and permanently disappointed. Then came the bullies, the beatings, the sense that no one gave a damn. Corey was one of those kids the world seems to throw away early.

And then-one sticky August evening-things went from bad to worse.

Corey was love-bombed, manipulated, and pulled into a system built on control and emotional abuse. What was sold as treatment and help ended up breaking him in ways he's still reckoning with.

In this raw and unflinching memoir, Corey shares his experience inside a coercive treatment program-part of the troubled-teen industry. Behind the slick websites and urgent promises to help families in crisis lies a sprawling, largely unregulated network of wilderness programs, residential centers, and behavior-modification schools. These programs sell hope but often deliver trauma.

Corey's story is one of many. Together, they reveal an industry with almost no oversight, one that profits from the pain of young people and the desperation of their families. An industry that too often sacrifices healing for harm.

This is a must-read for parents, educators, mental health professionals, advocates-or anyone who cares about the safety and dignity of kids.