The girl 💅 that NO ONE wants to talk about
💚 Our perception of Paris Hilton as two former troubled teen treatment survivors 💚
I’ll never forget the morning of our product launch for my first company Chill Pill - an online peer support mental health platform for Gen Z women - when I woke up to a notification on my phone that Paris Hilton had commented on one of my viral TikToks and started following me.
Only a year before that, in May 2021, I had set up a few meetings with venture capital investors and convinced some of them to invest over $1,000,000 in my idea for a company. At the time, I had no product, team, or co-founder. I had a Discord server with about forty young women on it who were talking to each other about their mental health and daily struggles during Covid in a way I had never seen them do anywhere else online. I leaned heavily on my story of being sent to wilderness and therapeutic boarding school for my fundraising pitch.
Only six months before that, deep into Covid, Paris Hilton had released her documentary “This is Paris” on YouTube. At the time, I didn’t have any opinion on Paris other than loving her show The Simple Life and remembering she had a sex tape leaked of her when I was too young to understand what that meant.
I found out about the documentary from my students in the emerging tech/entrepreneurship program I was running at the time. Earlier in the school year, I had shared my experience going from troubled teen sent to treatment programs to graduating from Columbia with a master’s degree in chemical engineering and working as a data scientist by the age of twenty-five. One day, a few of them messaged me asking if the places I was sent to as a teen were like those Paris Hilton had been to.
I had no clue what they were talking about, so I searched it on Youtube and watched it myself.
When the director got Paris to open up about her nightmares of being taken from her home in the middle of the night, I was completely shocked. I had no idea she had been through something so similar to me.
Did I find the animations a little campy and dramatic? Sure. The emotion behind her voiceover detailing what had happened the night her parents had two people take her from her bedroom and fly her out to a wilderness program struck a chord with me like no other documentary had before. It was both emotional and inspirational. Two words I never thought I would associate with Paris Hilton.
Up until that point, the only people I spoke to about my experience in wilderness and treatment were the other young women with whom I attended those programs. I shared some of it with the high school students I worked with at the time, but my story was always something that I thought would hold me back professionally.
Hearing from Paris about how she used that experience, for better or for worse, to fuel her drive to build an empire and create a life where she didn’t have to rely on anyone else, specifically her family, for money or security resonated deeply with me. When I left treatment, I resolved never to let that experience hold me back from building a life where I was financially independent and building a career based on my passions.
It wasn’t until I fundraised that I realized I could directly use my treatment experience to propel myself forward. I was inspired to use my story to build a business helping young women improve their mental health before they got to the point where they needed treatment. This ultimately led me to what Colin and I are doing with Not Therapy.
So thank you, Paris Hilton, for sharing your story and for inspiring a young woman who has struggled with mental health most of her life to use her experience to help other young people who’ve been in our shoes.
This ^ is the exact opposite view that many people in the residential and wilderness treatment industry have of Paris Hilton.
Colin and I get why many people who run residential treatment programs, specifically for teens, are defensive when they talk about the Paris Hilton of it all. They view her work as a direct attack on their programs. And while I can see how that viewpoint is justified, it’s ultimately unhelpful for these programs and the teens they treat.
The advocacy movement that Paris became the face of has led to bills being passed that protect children and, from my non-legal viewpoint, are regulations that make complete sense if you want to improve residential treatment programs.
For instance, the bill passed in Utah a few years ago calls for programs to report any time they use physical restraints or seclusion to the state’s licensing authority. They prohibit programs from using mechanical restraints and sedation without prior authorization, and they require the Utah Office of Licensing to conduct four inspections every year of each program. The records of these inspections and any violations are now in a public database.
I looked back through many of Paris’s #tti TikToks and her testimonies before state legislatures and Congress, and I couldn’t find a single time that advocates for “all programs to be shut down” - a common talking point we hear people in the industry repeat. Instead, she advocates for a federal “bill of rights” for children in residential treatment facilities.
She advocates for data collection and transparency within residential treatment centers - an initiative I know many programs themselves are pushing for to track and improve outcomes.
She talks about going to programs to help children who have been abused, such as what happened at Atlantis Leadership Academy. Everyone reading this would absolutely agree that the program needed to be shut down, and the legislation she’s supporting is intended to prevent abusive programs from hiding under the radar.
The industry’s reaction to Paris is just like when people in the industry were looking through my old TikToks and claiming that I’m also calling for programs to be shut down, which I’ve never once said in any video or podcast interview even before starting Not Therapy. We’ve seen programs and people working in the industry get so defensive - an understandable initial reaction - around what Paris Hilton has been doing that they fail to see how they can partner with alumni that identify as survivors.
As the senator championing residential treatment reform in Oregon and on the federal level puts it, “The survivors have been telling us what’s wrong this whole time. As legislators, we just hold up the megaphone.”
This is called survivor-led legislation reform. This is becoming the standard in many states for legislation around domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking, just to name a few. I’ll go more into that another week because that approach to not just legislation reform, but program improvement and reform, merits an entire newsletter.
The other gripe we hear from people working in the industry is that Paris Hilton’s advocacy - and the online discourse that stems from people who were also in these programs - makes parents too scared to send their children to these programs based on what the industry claims is “false information.”
We’ve heard many people claim that she has completely lied about her experience at Provo Canyon. We’ve also heard that there was a lot of malpractice when Paris Hilton was in treatment, and that it doesn’t exist anymore.
Okay, that’s great, but it’s clearly been a waste of energy trying to prove that Paris Hilton is lying or not.
A better use of energy is working with these organizations and alumni who are speaking out, rather than discounting everything we’re saying. Sure, do some people exaggerate? Of course. But behind the exaggerations are real experiences that were painful for us.
Imagine if there were more people who went through this experience who had the power of Paris Hilton and unlimited resources to spend on PR. She’s not the only person that is going to become rich and powerful after going to treatment.
So shouldn’t the industry focus on helping people heal the trauma they went through by being sent to programs? The reality is, even if you have a transformative experience in treatment, trauma is inherently woven into it. Everyone we know who’s been to treatment feels, to a certain extent, abandoned by their families or betrayed by their parents. We all struggle to trust and open up to mental health professionals afterwards.
Imagine if programs worked with alumni who had the resources and leaned on their experience to improve how programs are positioning themselves to parents, families, and teens in an authentic way? I know at least two people personally who went to treatment and who have since built careers in brand positioning and PR. Just saying.
This is a call to people working in the industry to reevaluate their views on what Paris Hilton and other survivors are talking about for the past four years. Most of us, Paris Hilton included, don’t want to “shut down the industry.” We’re the experts on how programs affect their alumni long-term, and we have thoughts on how programs can support us better during and after our time spent in treatment.
Colin and I believe these programs can be life-changing for the right people if they have the support they need afterwards. That’s why we built Not Therapy. Instead of calling for the programs to shut down, we came up with a peer mentorship-led way to support young people going through any tough transition in life, including those who are coming out of residential treatment centers and wilderness.
As always, this is just our opinion, and it’s based on our personal experience. We would love to hear from anyone else who has thoughts on this, whether you agree with our opinions or not! In fact, we especially love to hear from people who have a different point of view, whether you’re a program alumni, a parent, or someone who works at a program.
And now……our vibes this week🔮
📚 What we’re reading
Change your thoughts, change your life, Dr. Wayne Dyer
More teen girls smoke marijuana than boys now, qz
This new drink testing kit could save your life, Nylon
🎶 What we’re listening to
Ourselves, Not Therapy
💡 One last thought
THANKS FOR READING!
If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎
We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:
If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!
If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.