Life and death at Montana Academy

LUCY TOMPKINS and CAMERON EVANS

MARION — In January 2017, Ben Jackson arrived in Marion, Montana, where he would spend the last six weeks of his life. The blond, freckled 16-year-old had traveled from his hometown in Colorado to attend Montana Academy, a residential treatment program for struggling teens.

Ben’s father, who wished to remain anonymous to protect his family’s privacy, said Ben was struggling with depression and anxiety, as well as his diagnosis when he was 12 of Type 1 diabetes. Ben’s parents had tried to find their son all the help they could in Colorado, but nothing seemed to be working.

“It’s really defeating when you do everything you can and it’s not good enough,” said his father. “When a kid gets to a place where you feel like you can’t keep him safe at home anymore, you have to do something.”

They enrolled him in a wilderness treatment program in Colorado, which appeared to help Ben significantly.

“He was like a different person when we went up to visit him. We thought, ‘This is great.’ He's sharing his feelings and emotions with us, and we were learning how to communicate. We were under the impression that that would continue at Montana Academy.”

The wilderness program staff recommended Ben attend a longer-term residential program to solidify his progress and suggested Montana Academy. That sequence through programs is common in the industry — nearly all students at Montana Academy outside Marion go through a wilderness program first, according to student interviews and an interview with co-director John McKinnon.

Top-notch program

Ben’s father said Montana Academy was supposed to be “the Harvard of these places, a real top-notch program.” It cost about $8,000 a month, plus fees, to send his son there, he said. (The Montana Academy website now lists monthly costs at $8,750, along with a $2,000 acceptance fee and monthly $150 charges for student allowances.) They visited the campus together, and met with the school director, who assured him the program could accommodate Ben’s health needs.

All of Montana Academy's  management is certified and licensed, according to its state licensing application. It was opened by two psychologists, a psychiatrist and a social worker who had grown disillusioned with treating youth in crisis in a hospital setting.

John Santa, a cognitive psychologist with a doctorate from Purdue University, opened the academy in 1997 with co-director McKinnon and their wives. McKinnon was the clinical director of Adolescent Psychiatry & Substance Abuse at the Charter Hospital of Fort Worth, Texas, before moving to Montana. He then became the medical director of Pathways Treatment Center in Kalispell.

The pair started the academy, McKinnon said, to escape the “constraints” of managed care: the growing influence of insurance companies on their work with patients.

“Our mission was to move psychiatric care out from under hospital overheads and to reduce the cost, and to do that for selected kids who were suitable for treatment on an open ranch,” he told the Missoulian.

In the first few years, they accepted teens with 50 different diagnoses of mental disorders, “everything from trauma to major depression, to suicidality, to anxiety syndromes, to various addictions and so on,” McKinnon said.

As children arrived at the ranch, McKinnon said he and his wife Rosemary began to notice a pattern in interviews with parents.

The way parents described their children fit into five categories, which are now written on the Montana Academy website: “selfish self-preoccupation and self-importance (narcissism); an obliviousness to others [sic] feelings (lack of empathy); a failure to connect present behavior to future outcomes (lack of goals, plans or reflexive anticipation of consequences); a ‘puppet’ quality in close relationships; and concrete, selfish ethical thinking (a lack of abstract or social moral ideals, such as ‘honor’ or ‘the good of the family’).”

When a parent arrived at the ranch, McKinnon and his wife listed what they called “1,2,3,4,5” to see if those attributes described the child.

“By the time I got to 5 they almost invariably said to me ‘Oh, my God, Dr. McKinnon, how did you describe my daughter so accurately? You’ve never even met her.’ And they would say that so often that Rosemary and I would look at each other and wink. It was literally funny. I could make them say that just by rehearsing 1,2,3,4,5.”

McKinnon said he realized that those five things were what parents wanted them to fix; that the heart of the problem wasn’t depression or anxiety or drug use, it was what McKinnon later dubbed “immaturity.” He compared the troubled teenager’s developmental stage to that of a 3-year-old.

“At the heart of it all, they were beginning to feel like their daughter was beginning to be a jerk and somebody who was failing and somebody who wasn’t going to get to college,” he said. “And if she wasn’t careful or he wasn’t careful, he’s going to end up in Sing Sing [prison] because he doesn’t seem to have a conscience or any restraint.”

Diagnosis: Immaturity

McKinnon said this immaturity theory became the basis for treating every one of the roughly 70 students Montana Academy housed, including students like Ben Jackson, whose father said he had severe depression.

Immaturity, McKinnon said, "turned out to be the common denominator among the students we were sent.''

To treat teens' problems and help them mature, McKinnon later theorized, requires two things: recognition of their trauma or history, and setting limits.

“You have to think about Montana Academy as a place where ‘no’ is built into the structure,” he said.

On Feb. 12, 2017, about six weeks after Ben Jackson's father dropped him off in Montana, the youth killed himself.

“My feeling is that they look at the money and they don’t necessarily look at the kid,” Ben's father said. “It turns my stomach, quite frankly. I'd really research every aspect of these programs before you send your kid to one. We thought we did. You send your kid to a place where you think they’re the experts and they may or may not be. Who knows?”

Ben’s father is still trying to understand what happened to his son in those six weeks. He wonders if Ben might have said something about his worsening mental health had he been able to talk to his parents without supervision.

“All the calls are monitored and all the communication is monitored going in and out, so I’m not sure how you can really judge where somebody is when they could get in trouble for something they say,” he said.

Students don’t get unsupervised calls with parents until they reach the third level in the program, which can take months, and at that point calls are limited to 15 minutes, once a week, according to the program’s policies and procedures, obtained by the Missoulian through a records request.

After Ben’s death, John McKinnon wrote to parents in a March 31, 2017, newsletter about the youth’s suicide: “We would be kidding ourselves if we thought we could make an open ranch completely safe for a suicidal teenager. Moreover, if we ever did succeed, it would only be at the cost of removing all door-knobs and shoe-laces, mounting cameras in every toilet and shower. In so doing, we would give up the dream that animated the creation of Montana Academy: a civilized, nearly-normal adolescent high school culture situated on a ranch that, quite on purpose, was not a psychiatric ward, where carefully-selected immature teenagers could be helped to finish growing up without having to be locked up.”

Students' views

The Missoulian spoke with eight students who attended Montana Academy between the years 2001-2016. None is from Montana, and some spent up to two years living there. Several said they attended the program because they were depressed, not because of behavioral problems.

Sean Colin was sent to Montana Academy in 2015 when he was 17. He said was kicked out of prep school after using drugs recreationally and getting caught selling them to his classmates. His 20 months at Montana Academy helped him and he misses it sometimes, but he said it wouldn’t be helpful for everybody.

“If you’ve got these issues that are so severe it’s altering the course of your life, you should seek more specialized treatment than MA,” he said.

Rebecca Payne, who attended Montana Academy from 2009 through 2011, was dealing with trauma from sexual abuse and had an eating disorder when she arrived from out of state. She was 14 when her mom decided to send her to a wilderness program, and then to Montana Academy. She was once put on “Solo Reflection Time” — isolation — for a week for passing notes between two of her classmates, she said.

She ate meals separately from everyone else, and if anyone interacted with her, they would be put on social isolation as well, she said.

“It drove me crazy very quickly, because in that place you don’t have anything but the people around you. That’s all you have. And when you’re denied that in this horrible place, it took a toll. The days go by so slow. That’s about when I started adhering to the program because I didn’t want that to happen again, I didn’t want to risk being by myself again.”

Tamara Cherwin said she attended Montana Academy for 22 months in 2010-2011, after therapy and medication failed to help her serious depression, and professionals recommended Montana Academy. She said she went there willingly because she wanted to get better. Her mom, Cindy Cherwin, said she talked to other parents whose kids were in the program, who said all positive things about it. She visited the campus, and spoke with the directors, who explained the program’s theory for treating teens with behavioral and mental health issues.

“The word they used most was ‘immaturity’ — the idea that there was an immaturity happening,” Cindy Cherwin said.

The directors explained that it would be a therapeutic program, but within the framework of a structured environment, Cindy Cherwin said.

But Tamara Cherwin said that Montana Academy “treated my anxiety and depression as if it was a behavioral problem. ‘You are the reason you're depressed, you're the reason you're anxious.’ It was all about taking accountability and not being entitled. One of the first things they established with me is if I tell my parents negative things about what’s happening, that's called manipulation.”

Cherwin took these things to heart, trusting the program and believing her depression and anxiety were symptoms of her flawed character.

Her peers also told her she had to change herself. “In these group therapy sessions, people would be encouraged to say what they thought about a single individual,” she said. “So there was encouragement from team leaders for people to vent and question people’s character.”

To advance and earn greater privileges, she said, "you had to characterize other people on your team and read aloud what you thought about them. These were all supported and encouraged. I don’t remember being able to say, ‘This hurts me.’ They would seize on that and say ‘Tamara, you care too much what other people think.' But at the same time, these girls could character-attack me.”

Colin said it felt as if there was a “pursuit of conflict” in these sessions, an approach called "confrontational therapy'' for which experts say there is no scientific evidence of success.

“You speak a lot about group dynamics and you discuss people's flaws, and we did it three times a week,” Colin said.

Students were also expected to tell on one another for breaking rules, according to the eight students who spoke to the Missoulian. If someone knew a rule had been broken and didn’t turn their peer in, they too would be punished.