Troubled
Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control—suffering from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage—are carted off against their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across the country. Desperate parents of these “troubled teens” fear it’s their only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever.
Acclaimed journalist Kenneth R. Rosen knows firsthand the brutal emotional, physical, and sexual abuse carried out at these programs. He lived it. In Troubled, Rosen shares more than his experience of lockdown and its aftermath as he unspools the journeys of four graduates on their own scarred, faulted journey through the programs into adulthood. ➔
“A Searing Exposé”
— The New York Times
BIO
Kenneth R. Rosen travels the world to write in-depth stories about the impact of major geopolitical issues and conflict on individual lives. He is writing a book about the Arctic for Simon & Schuster for publication in 2026.
This year he is a MacDowell fellow, a finalist for a Scripps Howard Award in opinion writing, and a de Groot Foundation Writer of Note grant recipient. He works at The New York Times.
Rosen received the 2022 Kurt Schork Freelance Award for his reporting from Ukraine, Syria, and Malta, which the judges called “courageous multifaceted investigative work.”
He is a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award in international reporting and, among other honors, he received the 2018 Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for War Correspondents for his reporting from Iraq and was a finalist in 2019 for his reporting from within Syria.
He is the author of Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs (Little A, 2021), which The New York Times Book Review called “a searing exposé” and a “public service.” Troubled was a Times Editor’s Choice, one of Newsweek’s most highly anticipated titles of 2021, and was optioned separately as a feature film and a docuseries. ➔
