Dead, insane, or in Jail by Zack Bonnie

This is a story of someone on the powerless side of family conflict. Nothing particularly rare just another one of the common products of our social system, the “Troubled Youth”
They go with the “Concerned Parents”
This is Zack Bonnie’s memoir of his time in the family role of “Troubled Youth” even if he didn’t feel like he fit the role at the time and wondered why he was being sent to a horrible concentration camp out in the middle of nowhere.

Zack is a child of so-called “privilege”, There can be countless benefits to a youth from parents with money, but Zack is on the receiving end of the horror ignorant and distracted wealth can hire in an attempt to correct relationship and discipline problems in children. The acknowledged experts of a given era may not be as enlightened as they are perceived to be. These things seem to flow with the fashion of the times and 14 year old Zack finds himself in the late 1980s before light was shed on some of these businesses.

Zack gets shipped off to deep rural Idaho to a correctional boarding school experience. Much of the treatment there involves abusive language and group therapy or more like regurgitations of traumatic situations in the past that are said to have brought the child there. The methods are an evolution of the Synamon program and launched by one of Synanon’s graduates. 

Much of the early and middle part of the book involves scenes from these hardcore, kind of like, Basic Training, marathon group sessions. This makes for an unpleasant time for the reader with pages of bickering and abuse from leaders that is intended to break down the youth who will be rebuilt via hard work and proper thinking, or something like that. Be that as it was, it filled me with doubt that Zack Bonnie could actually deliver a readable story version of his life rather than a therapeutic purging.

Maybe the writer should be considered courageous for daring to present us with a reading experience that evokes the tedium, boredom, and the “get me out of here” claustrophobia of the remembrance. 

There are other books that continue the story. I think I have all I need for now since it is not a pleasant place to be and the resolution seems to be books ahead.. 

You can hear Zack Bonnie tell part of his story on the IndoctriNation podcast.