Even before I became a therapist, I was drawn to working with teenagers. From schools to summer camps to case management, I’ve always had a heart for the misunderstood teen. This is partially because I’ve been there (most of us have), but as I grew older and more educated, I started to see the cracks in the psychology of parenting teenagers. I’d always told myself I had been dramatic or moody as a teen. But the things that were happening to me (and my friends) were real and powerful and deserved space. So much rhetoric, outdated psychology, motivational speakers, etc. have convinced parents otherwise, telling parents their child is inferior, nonsensical, “in a phase,” rebellious, wanting attention. This punitive line of thinking puts so many adolescents in dangerous situations.
That’s what makes Mae Martin’s Wayward an evocative, eerie reflection of the present. While it technically offers just a fictional story about misunderstood teenagers, the core of the story is clearly a product of this very real parenting culture. Behind their thrilling tale of a cult-led town are hundreds — if not thousands — of real accounts from troubled teen facility survivors. Wayward interestingly avoids assuming queerness or transness as the reasons why its characters are punished, instead allowing for a queernormative narrative. By doing so, Wayward creates catharsis for queer viewers who may have been controlled by their parents as a direct result of their queerness while still underlining just how dangerous punitive parenting can be. In a time when so many groups like Moms for Liberty seem to control kids under the guise of “parental rights,” its message feels extremely current, even as it’s set in 2003.
The category of “troubled teen” has historically encompassed youth who sit outside of norms, especially queer and trans folks, as evidenced by the many gay conversion camps and programs that remain open across the country. Films like But I’m A Cheerleader, Boy Erased, and The Miseducation of Cameron Post used wildly different genres and modes of storytelling to expose true stories of how the queer teen is labeled a “troubled teen.” This is somewhat alluded to in Wayward in that viewers are told from the get go that one of our protagonists is queer, but that this isn’t the reason she eventually gets put into a facility. Similarly, our leading transman Alex is called upon to be a crucial part of the Tall Pines community. This could’ve been another anti-queer, anti-trans abusive Christian school story but it wasn’t, instead the characters allowed their queerness while still manipulated for daring to exhibit agency. It’s current, it’s present, it’s real, now, in 2025.
Instead, Wayward paints a picture of all the different things that could get a teen labeled “troubled.” They’re kids who are unruly or misbehaved, are addicted to substances, have really any serious mental illness, or are generally “deviant” from the “norm.” While anti-queer camps were drawn up from decades of conservative religious beliefs, the concept of the “troubled teen” came more clearly into play during Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” which came with a push for legislation that would fund rehab camps for adolescents. This is where The Seed — the 70s youth branch of the infamous Santa Monica drug rehab facility-turned-cult — birthed an aggressive “therapy” model we now see in conversion therapies, boot camps, intensive nature retreats, teen rehab facilities, and unregulated behavioral inpatient centers.
The most glaring connection between Wayward’s Tall Pines and places like The Seed, The Academy at Ivy Ridge, Love In Action, or Bethel Boys Academy is this “therapeutic” structure of the facilities. The many group therapy scenes, referred to in the series as Hot Seat or, ambiguously by graduates, “the game we used to play at school” can be attributed to “the Synanon game.” Created by the Synanon, a rehab facility empire created in1958, the game instructed participants to “scream what they really thought of one another—and then hug it out afterwards.” We see this play out in best friends Abbie and Leila’s first Hot Seat on Wayward. The teens cruelly share their grievances and accept “feedback” from their peers, only to then witness the “Converge,” when the kids gather in this unsettlingly sensual hug.
This type of disturbing group activity seen on Wayward is rooted in real-life horrors. It’s considered “attack therapy,” which involves “verbal abuse, humiliation and shame, denouncing, and demoralizing techniques by the therapist toward the client or group members.” It relies on breaking someone so much they lose themselves, only to be built up through manipulation or even gaslighting. This is sometimes referred to as “the crush,” or one of the first levels in a multi-level hierarchical program where the intention is to break someone by “whatever means necessary.” Tall Pines’ version of this hierarchical program has steps labeled Burrow, Build, Break, Ascend, and Leap. The characters make it instantly clear you don’t want to find out what happens when you get to Leap.
Unsurprisingly, this type of “therapy,” an offshoot of behavioral modification, has been used countless times in troubled teen facilities, such as those mentioned in the documentaries Hellcamp: Teen Nightmare (2023), Teen Torture, Inc, (2024) and The Program (2024). Behavioral modification is a therapy “used to eliminate or reduce maladaptive behavior in children or adults” where the behavior is targeted rather than the thought or feeling that prompts the behavior. It’s in the same vein as the Pavlov dog food experiment you may have learned about in high school. That is to say, treat people like animals and the problem will be solved.
Despite the growing research proving behaviorism techniques aren’t effective, behavior modification is still widely used outside of the troubled teen industry. In a review by the National Institute of Justice, researchers found “recidivism rates for boot camp graduates mirror those of their peers in traditional juvenile justice settings, indicating that behavioral changes are not sustainable.” A change in behavior can be more “attributed to shock factor of the environment rather than substantive behavioral change.” Alternatively, survivors are left with symptoms of PTSD, “loss of self identity, strained family relationships, and an inability to reacclimate successfully.” In Wayward, Tall Pines’ leader Evelyn boasts of the school’s reacclimation program, but as we see in Alex’s wife Laura who went through the program herself, even a drug-induced change in personality still leaves behind dissociative trauma. The behavior was dealt with, but the person wasn’t ever healed.
Wayward explores the emotionally traumatic tactics of the camp, but it’s unique in that it closely examines a wider array of physical abuse as well. Some of the major troubled teen documentaries released over the past decade have illuminated these horrors: sexual abuse, medical neglect, isolation, physical restraint, kidnapping, and many others. Wayward gives us a full picture of the physical abuse taking place at these facilities, especially in the sixth episode when the teens are dropped off in a remote location with little survival supplies and told that whoever makes it to the top first gets to leave the program. This appears to be a direct reference to a series of camps referenced in Netflix’s Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare, where teens end up starved, beaten up, in need of severe medical attention, and even dead.
Hell Camp follows The Challenger Foundation, a wilderness survival camp where “out of control” teens are forced to hike 500 miles in the Utah desert using scare tactics to “fix” their behavior. Eliminating all privacy and access to basic needs, teens were disciplined — or tortured — nearly to death to break them down. The Tall Pines hike to the top of the mountain offers us glimpses into these stories: Alexandra threatens Rory and Abbie to give her their survival supplies, and later, falls and breaks her ankle; Rory nearly dies from not having his inhaler; and Stacy straight up kills Daniel. In both the real world of The Challenge Foundation and in the fictional realm of Tall Pines, adults used scarcity mindset tactics to scare teens into facing “the real world.” When Wayward’s Marty wins the challenge and opts not to leave Tall Pines, he believes he can’t survive alone in the wilderness nor, therefore, the real world.
The Challenger Foundation schools weren’t the only of their kind. HBO’s Teen Torture, Inc. features testimonies from facility survivors across the country, including infamous places like The Seed, Bethel Boys Academy, a Missisippi religious camp run with the physical intensity of a military base for adults, and Turn-About Ranch, another Utah-based forced labor program Dr. Phil carelessly referred teens to (and profited from), including rapper Danielle Bregoli.
As we discover the world of Tall Pines (the town and facility), it becomes clear how Martin’s story is chillingly realistic. At first, it feels surreal that a town like Tall Pines could even exist: a place where every citizen and authority personnel either went to the teen camp or have been deeply influenced by unspoken rules created by the troubled teen culture. After runaway Riley escapes from Tall Pines, we see him slap one of the policemen and run away. Later, he points to Alex’s wife, Laura, mumbling “she’s one of them,” sending viewers the message that the people of this town might be untrustworthy, brainwashed, or even dangerous. Teen Torture, Inc. follows an almost identical story, where a boy attending Bethel Boys Academy called the police hoping for rescue after being brutally abused, only to find the police were in cahoots with the owner of the facility, who also happened to be the lead pastor and politican in their small town. He continues to share how no one could escape, finding that the ones who did were simply returned to the facility from locals in the community. Locals who, similar to the townspeople of Tall Pines, all believed in the promise (and profit) of the academy.
The parallel tales don’t end there. Within the first episode of Wayward, we see Abbie kidnapped from her own home to Tall Pines, a representation of hundreds of troubled teen facilities that actually do this, namely The Academy at Ivy Ridge, Turn About Ranch, Teen Challenge facilities, and Bethel Boys Academy. Abbie’s traumatic experience mirror’s Paris Hilton’s Provo Canyon School experience, where she remembers “men from one program dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night in handcuffs. “ Throughout the show, we see the teens at Tall Pines endure all of the torture methods Paris shared at the 2022 legislative summit, where she reported she was “not allowed outside for 11 months, was forced to take drugs that made her numb and tired, and was locked alone in a bare room with no toilet for days. Her contact with family was restricted.” Supervised letters or phone calls are common among all facilities, where teens are punished if they say anything to relatives that might reflect poorly on the facility. In Wayward, we see Rabbit and the other staff inject tranquilizers to knock teens out, and further, we see Evelyn use a substance even more sinister to change their self-concept. It isn’t made clear how long Leila and others might’ve been in Wayward’s nightmarish Mirror Room, but it certainly contains traces of the solitary confinement Paris Hilton attests to.
It’s astonishing that even with so much public awareness, legislative initiative, and psychological research, these facilities still exist. I could write 10,000 more words on why this is the case, but in sum, it’s about following the money. Similar to our prison system, the more people we keep in the system for longer, the richer some right-wing billionaires become. The city of Tall Pines is a microcosm of this, where Evelyn and the police department benefit from keeping teens at the facility. As the producer of Teen Torture Inc aptly stated, it’s not the teens who are troubled, it’s the industry. Gay conversion camps are only a small fraction of the big picture. It’s not just about religion vs. queerness; it’s about those who stand to profit under the guise of “adolescent wellness.” Politicians and profitmongers discovered an opportunity to market to terrified parents, creating a culture of fear around adolescents. Wayward takes that culture and runs with it, to the point of suggesting parental attachment itself as the issue. It makes us question the line between discipline and abuse, parental control and autonomy. As Wayward declares, trying to control teens with violence and subjugation only harms and could never yield true healing.
