Residential facilities are terrifying. I've been hospitalized and threatened with them so many times. Literally have had to weasel my way out of going, and when you're a minor, they jump to send you quick regardless of why you're behaving the way you are, if you dont show "significant improvement" CPS hurt me more than helped me every single time. Kids I was in the hospital with literally got worse in there. Some of them were sent back to the inpatient I was in from residential. One kid hated it so much that he punched a ceiling light out and cut himself open with it, just to get out of there. Even some psychiatric hospitals do more harm than good. I finally had a good experience being hospitalized when I was about 15, and I only went back to that hospital once and the last time I went to date. It's been years and I still cant get out of my head what some kids told me about what they experienced in residential. Physical and sexual abuse from staff, being starved, abuse from their peers that was ignored. I was terrified. Some kids need a residential setting. But it's so unregulated and the kids are so isolated that they hardly get the help they need. They read your letters most of the time too, so there's no way you could tell anyone what's going on. And even if you could, most of these kids already dont have anyone who would believe them or care. It fucks me up to think of myself as "lucky" that I was hospital jumping, all throughout the juvenile court system and I still had the better hand. If I knew a residential facility would be good and regulated I think it may have actually helped me a lot. But from the culture surrounding it and what everyone that I'd known be in there experienced? It's basically juvie. Not a treatment center. And it drives the few good souls that work there crazy too, I'm sure.