Cracked's "6 Shocking Realities of the Secret Troubled Teen Industry."

[Demo_Chris]

22. You don't understand, I will BRIEFLY try to explain...

I spent a year and a half in that place.

For nine MONTHS out of that year and a half I never once saw looked outside, not even through a window as there were none. I saw sunlight indirectly once a week or so, through the ceiling skylights in the gym. I lived in a large room with the lights always on, stuffed with bunks and boys, staff always watching.

People tried to fight and resist. I did. They physically and mentally torture you, and I mean that literally rather than figuratively, and if that all failed they had drugs. Have you ever seen someone that you knew turned into a zombie? One day they are fine, laughing and cracking jokes, as much of a friend as you can have in a place like that, and the next their mind is fucking melted, where they just stand wherever they are placed, drooling and pissing themselves? I have. I can't describe how that feels, knowing that there's no defense, no one to tell, and tomorrow it could be YOU. That's horror, real no-shit horror. And it's arbitrary, it's just random evil for the purpose of evil. Gratuitous violence.

And they TRAIN you. It's easy to say "I would have done this or that," and I don't doubt for a second that you mean it, but that's not how it works. You say those words in a world with rules and boundaries, a world in which it is understood that things will go this far and no further, a world in which there are things like rights, and ethics, and reality means things that we can all agree on, a world that actually exists. But now imagine discovering that all of that is gone, there are no rules, no limits, no world. Just walls and weird religious rules and endless hours and FEAR.

I could type for days about how they break you, how they turn you into a cultist who hates himself and his cult, but you wouldn't understand and you wouldn't believe me anyway. You probably don't even believe what I have already written. I understand that and it's okay.