Conservatively like 50% of the teenage girls who end up in treatment have a version of BPD and are just too young to get formally diagnosed, which is why most treatment programs are heavily DBT focused. The average treatment program is between 6 months and a year, more if you add on things like 2-3 months of wilderness therapy or 6 months of a stepdown school. You could not design an environment more conducive to lifelong psychological issues around attention.
Rose's "30 hours of therapy a week for 2 years" probably looked something like 2-3 hours of group therapy a day, plus a couple individual therapy sessions and family therapy to boot. 30 hours is a bit of an extreme estimate, but that shouldn't surprise anyone lol. I'd be very interested in the programs Rose went to, because there's a big difference between partial hospitalization/day school and full on residential plus wilderness plus hospital. Either way, not great, but the latter is what I'm talking about here. All of this more or less applies to ED treatment too.
Treatment is nonstop attention on the basis of having something wrong with you, and it is very competitive. Everyone is constantly informing on each other, often in group settings with an adult facilitator. Everyone knows the gory details of each other's trauma, or suicide attempts, or eating disorder, and the more you talk about your issues, the more you're rewarded for it. Constant focus is on getting better, but because this is a house/school full of BPD teen girls, everyone is really more interested in being the worst. After all, if you get all the way better, you leave. You become a social non-entity and are no longer the fixation of anyone there (in fact, your name will literally no longer be spoken, you'll be referred to by initials for HIPAA reasons). For a year, your life is a mental hospital themed cult, and then it suddenly ends, leaving people lacking purpose. It's a little like the failed gymnast pipeline- call it the failed fuckup pipeline.
Turning from mental health issues to physical ones is also a great way to make the attention you get not your fault. Threaten to kill yourself, get "gooned" and taken to treatment, get out, get sick, relive the structure and atmosphere of treatment only this time, nobody is making you recount your rape in front of male college students making minimum wage supervising you. If I had the time I'd take a long hard look at the teenage social medias of these girls, because if there's a year long gap, the odds are strong that they were in Utah feeding off a collective well of BPD and learning how to lie. For the record, I've never seen someone flex being in treatment on social media while there, only later once whatever program they were in inevitably shuts down.
The main form of entertainment in these places is also, generally, other people's insanity. (That and Mormon boomer approved movies, aka Disney.) It's a lol-calving ground. Kids run away, they shove stuff up their asses, they serially shit in the showers, they have sex with each other and adult staff, et cetera. It creates in a person a real appetite for other people's drama.
I'm not unsympathetic to the munchie reaction. Real munchausen's experts tend to talk about how recreating past medical trauma plays a role in munching, and the TTI itself is pretty consistently abusive. If such a thing as CPTSD exists, treatment is how you acquire it- look at any of the recent lawsuits and closures for an example of this. (Elan, Trails Carolina, Provo Canyon, Vista, Agape, etc). The TTI could use its own thread on here.
I've been aware of Allyson for years and my theory has always been that since getting out of an environment where she was constantly getting attention for her mental issues, she lacked an alternate source of attention and has been gradually reclaiming what she used to have.
The powerlevel here is probably obvious already but, PL, I know a version of most of these girls. They get out of treatment and flop back in, or don't and end up half heartedly in and out of mental hospitals until they realize that treatment itself is considered traumatic enough to justify a CPTSD label, at which point they settle down. Many are semi-munchies and a couple are full on, although not particularly interesting, nor public with it. As an aside, the rise of discourse around the TTI has led to the emergence of a few people faking having gone to treatment, or pretending to have gone to residential when they didn't, since an "RTC" is where the clout is these days.
