I spent 3 accumulative years in residential treatment centers for adolescents with behavioural and mental health issues. I was sent there for treatment with Major Depressive Disorder, mild marijuana use, and family conflict issues. I would describe my high school experience as atypical at best, and arguably rife with tragedy. After all, these were places that hosted a highly concentrated student body of kids who were hideously abused, drug-addicted, suffered from severe mental health issues, and often times foster kids who had been abandoned by their own systems. We were all orphaned, in a way, which makes the greatest tragedy at one of them all the more anguished.

I am not sure what the bounds of confidentiality laws are, so I apologize if I need to keep this vague.

My second residential treatment center was a peer-based program. We lived in dorms and did everything with our dorm mates, usually groups of 7-10 students. When I say everything, I mean everything, including trips to the bathroom during school. You moved and breathed and ate and slept as a unit. You did not have personal time. This was your new family. They knew everything about you. You made decisions for one another. Home visits, discharge dates, discussion of your problems, these were all decided by your group. There were staff, too, but they were facilitators and observers. They would sign off on the groups decisions, and could override them, but essentially, your group was your mentor, therapist, judge, and jury. It was vital to learn to care for one another, but naturally, there was conflict in this system, too.

I loved my group. I hated my group. The system was interesting, and definitely had its flaws, but one of its greatest strength was its ability to foster deep and meaningful relationships with your group members. You were a cohesive organism, all responsible for one another. When a group member was violent, you would take the hit. And you would watch as they were restrained by staff in a 5-point, face against the gravel, bleeding from the teeth. You would feel for them, and you would forgive them, even as you yourself stood bleeding from the injury you sustained. We were prisoners there. But we tried to love one another as best we could.

There was one dorm, a boys group, who always seemed to be distant. They were late to meals a lot. They often forgot to do their program wide chore, like kitchen duty, or supply ordering. They were quiet. When we had socials (a meeting between groups to play a game or something) they were shifty, on edge. Their members did not interact with other groups on a regular basis. When members were released for home visits, they would often never return. Due to the relative isolation from other groups, it was impossible to ascertain what was going on in their dorm. We all just assumed they had a peer who was struggling too much and preventing the group from thriving, as often is the case when a group would fail to complete their duties.

Then the tattoos started showing up. Their dorm number, on their hands. In dots, in roman numerals, on the face of an object that commonly bore that number. And we sort of scoffed, like, "What are they, in a gang?" And we wanted to think it was silly, it was fronting, because this was a boys dorm that for some reason had all of the tallest, strongest, meanest looking boys. It was an artifact from back when the dorms were separated by problem type, as it had been the previous "gang affiliation" dorm. I think we wanted to see it as a vestigial behaviour, that they were "acting hard" in the absence of their "real hardship" on the outs.

Then the hospital trips began. They started as a trickle. A broken arms. Months later, a black eye at the dining hall. I sometimes watched them from across the dining hall, stooped over their plates, eyes glazed over, thousand yard stares. One boy now walks a little slower, a limp? Did he always walk that way? "Must be a gangster thing," one of my peers joked nervously. And we didn't talk about it much, because we didn't know any of them. We were having socials with other groups, we knew their members, we wrote each other caffy mail (peer reviewed letters in between one kid and another from different groups), but no one ever wrote to the boys in the one dorm. They weren't active. They had groups (meetings to discuss behavioural issues) all the time, it seemed, and maybe half hearted basketball games on the outdoor court if time allowed.

"They're struggling", we'd say, which basically just meant, "Someone's having a serious issue, and the group needs to focus on solving it before they can focus on things outside of their group."

And time slumped on, for all of us. Seasons bleeding into seasons, days ticking like hashmarks off the calendars we were all issued to check the meal menu, circling our favourite meals and looking forward to them all week. Counting days by edible food. Counting days by formals, by discharge dates, by phone calls, by socials, by letters, by school, by the monthly trip to Walmart, by dentist appointments, by glances across the cafeteria. By all of these things, we counted days, and as they fell, so did the boys dorm that nobody talked about.