Elizabeth Gilpin: Surviving “Troubled Teen School” Captivity

Author and actress Elizabeth Gilpin joins Tim to talk about the story behind her bestselling book called Stolen: A Memoir. The story starts with how one night when she was 15 years old, she was pulled from her bedroom in the middle of the night and placed into what is best called the system for troubled teens. That was the beginning of the nightmarish life she would endure in a burgeoning and unregulated industry for troubled teens. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/shapingopinion/Stolen_auphonic.mp3 The story we’re going to tell today is not unusual, at least the start of that story. Who doesn’t know someone or a family where they had an out-of-control teenager who hasn’t responded to anything the parents tried to do to help them turn things around? Elizabeth Gilpin was one of those teens. She came from a good family. She had parents who cared about and loved her. But she suffered from depression and that manifested itself in troubled behaviors. Her parents felt they tried everything, but nothing was working. So, when Elizabeth was 15 years old, her mother and father turned to a relatively new type of treatment field called the “troubled teen industry” or TTI. And that’s where Elizabeth’s story goes from common to unusual. And perhaps from the unusual to the disturbing. Links Stolen: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Gilpin (Amazon) Stolen: Harrowing Memoir Exposes Abusive Boarding School Industry, USA Today Stolen, Grand Central Publishing Child Mind Institute About this Episode’s Guest Elizabeth Gilpin Elizabeth Gilpin is an actress, writer, and producer. She starred in and produced Life Boat, a short film directed by Lorraine Nicholson which premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Live Action Short Film at AFI Fest and won the Audience Award at the Napa Valley Film Festival.  Elizabeth also starred in Endings, Inc. and Guerra. Stolen is her first book. Elizabeth currently splits her time between Los Angeles and Nashville.