Newport Academy High Cost, Low Return: They promise to save your teen, but they harmed mine Orange California

When our daughter starting having trouble we tried a number of ways to get her help and eventually a residential program was suggested. We live in Southern California and wanted somewhere close enough to visit so we could stay involved with her care. We looked online and Newport Academy came up everywhere, so I visited the website which looks great, and finally called. What grabbed our interest was that that they offered a girls only options. Since she had been bullied by a group of boys at school, we thought this would be the best option for her, and so Newport Academy said they would provide my child with the care needed to help her depression.

We knew our daughter did have a history of drinking and other drugs, but her real issue was the unhappiness and sadness, the depression. The way Newport addressed our daughter's issues was to focus on the drinking and marijuana. Everytime we talked to them they focused on that. We kept asking about the depression and how individual counseling was going, but we didn't get answers. They also focused on her eating, they seemed fixated on it.

Our child had been diagnosed with depression, not an eating disorder, and yet the depression was not discussed, only drugs and eating. Her mental health was never addressed head on, unless we brought it up. I should have seen this at the time she was at their center, but I didn't. Our daughter told us tshe had to sit at the table for extended periods of times after meals, but we didn't grasp the extent of it. She had talked about 12 step, but we didn't understand that it was the bulk of her experience there. Just like being bullied at school, she didn't tell us much of what she was actually experiencing while at Newport.

She did connect to a couple of girls there, but was teased for being the kid she is, for being a tomboy, called names, and other things that she later told us went unaddressed. We learned the hard way that the teasing in an all-girl environment can be just at bad, if not more damaging, than that inflicted by schoolyard boys. Newport wanted us to have her attend their outpatient program, which we declined since we didn't see much improvement from her residential stay. We did find a different residential program, that really helped her, where we spoke regularly with her therapist and had family sessions. I really wish this program had been our first try.