Becoming Unsilenced

Surviving and Fighting the Troubled Teen Industry

As a 15-year-old, struggling with severe bullying, ADHD, adoption trauma, and undiagnosed autism, Meg became one of the unfortunate 120,000–200,000 youths who are funneled into the lucrative Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) every year. Over the next 3.5 years Meg was abused in two separate facilities that masqueraded as “treatment”.

Over two decades later, Meg Appelgate has evolved into an advocate, activist and passionate spokesperson for survivors across the United States. In Becoming UNSILENCED, she details the institutional abuse she and her peers suffered and what led her to where she is today.

Deeply rooted in lived experience, Becoming UNSILENCED exposes the lack of institutional accountability and safeguards within the Troubled Teen Industry. It also confronts the tendency to pathologize typical adolescent behaviors, questions the effectiveness of "tough love" approaches, addresses deeply ingrained social issues, challenges faulty belief systems, and explores more healthy alternatives for desperate families.

Becoming UNSILENCED is a highly personal and invaluable first-hand account written for survivors and their parents, as well as for decision-makers and health professionals suggesting life-altering interventions for troubled teens.

©2024 Meg Appelgate (P)2024 Meg Appelgate

the truth in the story

I absolutely loves this, not only did she tell us her story, but she told us to perspectives of the parents, and the educations staff and their misinformation that they were given as well.

Thank you, so much

I feel like a soothing balm has been applied to the raw exposed nerves that have been my life since 1993. When at only 13yrs old I was admitted into Charter Cypress Behavioral health center after taking a bubble fill scan-tron assessment that was administered by a woman in her 30s that only 2 weeks before was the person who answered incoming calls to the GMC car dealership and connected the potential customer with a sales person. And now here she was after answering an ad in the local quick quarter classified paper, deciding my entire future. It was an easy decision my parents were upper middle class and my good friend had just killed herself. The question they asked me were things like, have you thought of suicide, have you talked about suicide, do you find yourself thinking about suicide often, well yes all of those but not about my own suicide, but my friend was dead I was a freshman in high school I had no idea how to handle this I've never known anyone to die before. I wouldn't say that we were total rubes but I have been raised to know that you were honest with doctors, police, teachers, generally anyone in any form of authority. You are not lie to these people because they have your best interest at heart they are who you go to if somebody tries to get you into a windowless van. These were the good guys. So I answered honestly yes of course I thought about these things. But there was no qualifiers there was no comment under the question where you could explain your answer. And my answers were all they needed to tell my parents your daughter is going to die if you don't admit her into this hospital tonight. The propaganda and the absolute gaslighting is disgusting when I look back on it I don't know how they got away with it for as long as they did. They told my mom not to talk to me for several days after I've been admitted because my test showed that I'm a manipulator with the tendency to lie in order to get my way. This wasn't the child my mother knew but these were the doctors and they knew best. She left to go back home and get me some clothing and toiletries. I was still at a room by myself filling out yet more test. I had no idea what was going on or that I wasn't going to go home that night.
This set into motion the next four years where I would be in and out of state institutions as long as they were getting a bed filled with someone who wouldn't complain wouldn't draw attention and whose parents were mailable and easily influenced by a fancy title or a little persuasive threat such as, you'll go to jail if she actually did do anything illegal or dangerous because she's a minor in your care and we assure you she is a ticking time bomb. If you have to put her into a private hospital again you'll have to leverage your house for the copayments.
They misdiagnosed me 7 times. I had a total of 19 different prescription medication's to treat these various ailments ranging from borderline personality disorder, bipolar, antisocial, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, manic depressive, generalized anxiety, PTSD, and the funny part of all of it is that I was just ADHD and a teenage girl in the 1990s. But they didn't have a classification for us back then. So they played a game of wait and see while prescribing me hard-core drug during the formal years of my mental development.
Until I read this book I had all that convinced myself that I was being a conspiracy theorist and that I had convinced myself that these things that happened to me not that they actually happened as some form of a defense mechanism in my mind so that I wouldn't have to deal with the trauma of Tammy's death . I told myself all kind of pretty stories, except for the truth, that people with the bottom line of getting paid more for me to be mentally unstable and or sedated, prayed on me and my family and stole my childhood for me. Setting me up for a lifetime of addiction and subjecting myself to abuse because it's all I knew and being convinced that I was bat shit crazy and I didn't know how all of it happened how did I go from being a straight a student who never been in trouble in her life to a social pariah that no one will come near.
I'll tell you how, because charter saw me as a dollar amount and not as a child who is going through something hard and needed her parents to talk to her openly about something as serious as suicide and take five minutes out of their day to just talk to me about real feelings.
This book paralleled almost every one of my experiences Word for Word. There were times that I paused it because I couldn't keep listening it was so visceral and so by the letter exactly what I went through. I cried. I laughed out loud a few times. But most of all I got angry. Because they took this from us. The safety and security and normalcy of childhood they stole that from us. And to be honest with you I'm pretty pissed off. This book helped me to look at things with a fresh new light and focusing on who is really to blame. Thank you for sharing the resources to be able to take action on my own, because I very much intend to. Thank you.

Best book I have listened to this year!

Incredible work, I absolutely loved this. Thank you Meg for all you do for the community.

So Validating

What a great book! I thankfully did not experience any of TTI. though I have friends who are survivors and feel like I got a real insight into their life through this book