Sunday, October 18, 2015

Carrie Williams at Island View RTC

This testimony was found as a comment to an article. All rights goes to the original author.

Someone above said you have to trust the marketing material. I have one thing to say to that – don’t. As far as Island View is concerned, I was there the day half the pictures on their site were taken. My team mates and I watched, confined in our group rooms, as they paraded models on to campus to take those.

Much like the poster directly above me, I was placed at IV at the age of 15 and am also now 24 (can’t help but wonder if we knew each other). To this day, I have recurrent nightmares about the place and large blocks of my time there have been edited out by my own mind. I have since been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the 18 months I spent there. I was accused of lying over and over again when telling the truth. I was held back in my treatment by manipulative, vindictive girls that were supposed to be my team mates.

At one point while on “Individual Focus”, a so-called therapeutic treatment that consists of sitting in your chair, staring at the wall and not being allowed to speak, even to staff, I was routinely denied access to the bathroom. I was also denied the medication I had been prescribed by one of IV’s doctors, which lead to severe withdrawal symptoms that I was then accused of faking. At one point, I was put on a heavy anti-psychotic without myself or my parents being fully informed of it’s side effects. Come to find out, one of them is eye sight deterioration. I have had reading glasses since I was 17 because of that and my eyes continue to go downhill.

The boarding schools I have heard great things about. As far as lock downs like Island View? I wish I could say the same. Even though I was in a “therapeutic environment”, I was denied treatment for my addiction, staff claiming it could negatively impact other girls. I was denied the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, a condition that made my early years on my own a nightmare. I was also denied the diagnosis of hypoglycemia and tourettes while there. As far as my most major disorder at the time, trichotillomania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichotillomania), I was denied treatment for it over and over again and was instead made to feel ashamed of it as I already had for years and was accused of self harming and doing it for attention.

All I have to say to parents thinking of sending their child to Island View, or someplace like it, is don’t. Fully research anywhere before you condemn your child to a lifetime of nightmares like mine did to me.

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