My ‘troubled teen’ school hell: Strip searches, ‘smooshing’ and humiliation

“Where are you taking me?”

It was the middle of the night, and two strangers dressed all in black were forcibly dragging Elizabeth Gilpin, then 15, out of her childhood bedroom. As they pulled her down the hall they passed her father, who looked on in grim silence. Leading up to this moment, Gilpin — a gifted student and star athlete living in South Carolina — had been secretly burning her skin with ice and salt to jolt herself out of depression. She had survived a harrowing car accident: Her friend crashed into a tree while trying to get away from an angry drug dealer, and Gilpin had nearly flown through the windshield. She regularly coaxed her strict, religious parents into screaming matches and got fall-down drunk at parties.