Troubled US teens left traumatised by tough love camps bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57442175

> *My parents got me kidnapped and dropped off in the middle of the mountains," 21-year-old Daniel says in a TikTok video watched more than a million times.

> Daniel suffered anxiety and depression. He was 15 and had recently come out as gay when he self-harmed so severely that he required hospital care. It was in hospital that he was shaken awake in the middle of the night by two men. They told him the process could be easy or hard - depending on how much he resisted. With little fight left in him, Daniel went with the pair.

> Daniel was sent to a wilderness programme in Georgia where he spent 77 days living outdoors, hiking miles a day on rations. He vividly remembers feeling cold, hungry and dirty for weeks on end and witnessing others attempt to run away and try to take their own lives. Like many others sent to wilderness programmes, he was then enrolled directly into a long-term facility - this time in Montana - where he would spend another 15 months.

> From boot camps to boarding schools, these facilities are marketed as treatment for a broad range of behavioural and mental health issues including eating disorders, drug use and defiance.

> Cynthia Clark Harvey was one of them. Her daughter Erica was just 15 when she died of heatstroke and dehydration on her first full day in a wilderness programme in Nevada in 2002.

> She learned Erica had been pushed to keep hiking as her condition worsened throughout the day. She later testified to Congress about how her daughter's distress had been mistaken for teenage belligerence by staff. Even after Erica fell off the trail into brush and rocks, she did not receive medical help for almost an hour.

Note: She was sent her due to suffering from medical depression, at the recommendation of her psychiatrist

@Wipqozn better title would have been "Parents pay to have their child tortured and potentially murdered because of bigotry"

@Nzall yes

> Some, including sex abuse victims, complained of invasive strip searches and examinations. One person, who was sent due to struggles with depression stemming from gender dysphoria, recounted undergoing a smear test as a virgin aged 14. Others described having their heads shaved and having blood and drugs testing despite having no history of substance abuse themselves.

New York Post tries to smear young political candidate with BDSM revenge porn, candidate essentially replies "so what?" twitter.com/AbeGoldfarb/status/1406371900704628744 (note: tweet contains somewhat explicit screengrab from the video. No visible genitalia, but could be seen as NSFW)

@Nzall How many US politicians are called Weiner?

And anyway this is a private thing, not a scandal.

@MadScientist yep, and he treated it as such

It was the NY Post tabloid who tried to turn it into a scandal, but he effectively sunk that line of thought

I'm a bit surprised a video exists at all, but maybe I'm just too paranoid

I mean, A LOT of young people have porn of themselves out there. Before they purged nonverified users, PornHub had over 15 million videos

often these videos are shared in private, but then made public

I don't trust any digital stuff to remain secret

Same here. I think we're nearing the timeframe that you can't kill a political career anymore through scandals based on claims of consensual sex between adults. The generation of politicians who would be harmed by that is dying out

@MadScientist Yes, just New York Post being it's usual garbage self. So long as it's consensual , we really have no business knowing what a person gets up to in the bedroom.