Catalyst RTC - Brigham City, Utah

Evan E.

Graduated February 2022. No need to beat a dead horse, this place is twisted and leaves no room for suggestion. The therapists are insanely set in their ways and believe that they are infallible, but they are far from it. Turning kids against each other to “teach them a lesson” ruins relationships, and the attempts to make students care about such trivial wrongdoings (in the eyes of the therapists and “mentors”, of course) distorted many of my worldviews and made me lose my sense of self for a long time post graduation. If there were any positives, it would be all of the time spent exercising and the time to myself, but nobody needs 9-18 months of that. Don’t send your child to treatment. Be understanding, be patient, be loving, and be an actual parent. I relapsed after leaving and natural consequences were the reason that I got sober. Treatment centers in Utah are a sick attempt at creating uniform morality, and the people that run them are smart enough to know that they likely won’t succeed. They just want your money. Again, just be a parent.

Skyler S.

Worked here from 2015-2020. I would not recommend working here. We were not sufficiently trained for the job that they expected us to do. Owners do not care about direct care staff and we were just a number to them.They denied my time off request for my wedding, and the birth of my first child; both requests were submitted months in advance. Staff turnover rate is extremely high, in my 5 years I worked under 5 different program directors.

John

If you are looking at an RTC for you already messed up. The review is for the parents who have neglected and abused your child in one way or another (why else would they be acting the way they are, come on now). This school was a good experience on a physical level. You go outside lots and stay active. There are fun trips and your son will make friends here. Some of those friends will not survive long after the program. It will be a hard, isolating experience for your child some days, and they will have to confront parts about their upbringing that may have caused them significant trauma without a respite. You as a parent on the other hand will be at home continuing on and largely not focus on therapy. For your child it will be their life for the next year. If you send your child here please ask yourself if they need a program or a healthy parent first. And if you arent feeling competent as a parent please look into therapy for yourself, while taking it seriously. The therapists cant say it because you'll be paying them, but if this place is on your radar you failed at creating a safe environment in one way or another for your child.

And to the owners and therapists. So many of the boys here were abused at home. But none of the parents face consequences. You protect abusers as long as that abuser hands you money. You have failed at your purpose. You enable the abuse and mistreatment of these children. And worse, you convince them they deserve it through hours of therapy. If they don't follow the program, you shame them and tell them they are less than.

Tldr: biking was fun, great memories with friends, but it's essentially designed to make the parents feel better about being bad (often abusive) parents. At the cost of their child's sense of reality and self worth.

If you're kid goes here and finishes the program, the best thing you can do as their parent is stop adding input and let your child figure it out. They have done more introspection in one year than you likely have your entire life. You signed your rights as a parent away, literally, when you started this process. And chances are your kid will have been the only one in your family to change during this process. They are the one doing the work. Not you. No program in the world that's designed to improve your child's mental health will fix the environment that created those problems.

bruh S.

Don’t send your kid here. The program doesn’t focus on individuals needs, they are very focused on making kids turn against each other. They give false hope to parents about sobriety, which u haven’t seen any of the kids I knew succeed with after wards. The adults were hypocritical, manipulative, and simply cared about money. It’s not a hospital it’s a business and one that makes a lot of money. During my time, a therapist left because they believed it was unethical. The therapist lied to me about the number we could call at anytime to speak to someone that overseas places like this, I was not allowed to call the number and was even lied to about whether my therapist knew of the number or not. The staff allow their emotions to dictate your child’s life. If an adult makes a mistake and it falls on a kid, that’s kids next month could become much harder. The only thing that it truly helped me with was seeing the lies they feed you. Every bad review may be seen as an angry kid, but they’re angry for reasons, most of which are valid.

Jason S.

I went there over a decade ago. The relapse rate from my group was 100 percent and I have now lost atleast 20 percent of the friends I had made to overdoses. They bully you into changing through emotional pressure. The therapists and staff are Mormons who push their personal ideology onto the kids and shame them for any other behavior. This place is a sham and should be shut down.

Brandon C.

Edit: I’m no longer sure how I feel about catalyst. If you’re a parent considering sending your kid here, make sure you get TWO opinions. Do not blindly listen to whichever educational consultants you hired. My original comment is below:

I was a student at catalyst for 15 months, I graduated in January of 2020. This place changed my life in more ways than I can possibly describe. I went to catalyst because I had severe anxiety and depression. I also had a bit of substance abuse issues. Before catalyst I was extremely dependent on my parents, had no responsibility, and just didn’t care about anything but getting high.

Feedback I have for catalyst is this: put more time and effort into making sure appliances are always working, like getting plumbers sooner if a toilet breaks, or getting new doorknobs if they break, or anything like that. They replace broken items with cheap ones that break super fast. They also need to hear out students better when it comes to quality of life stuff like keeping the AC cooler at night (which is proven in clinical sleep studies to enhance sleep), because small stuff like this that can be easily changed needs to be heard by the owners and action needs to be taken by them.

Also get better teachers. You guys hire underqualified teachers. Mr. Ruland and Mr. Jake were both great but I had 5 teachers total at catalyst and only 2 of them were actually good at their job. Some of them didn't even graduate college with a degree in education. I want to emphasize this: use a real curriculum for math. I was extremely underprepared to return to school because of how terrible their math classes were. They use KHAN ACADEMY! At most, they should use khan academy as supplementary material to their own Math curriculum, and not use it as the source curriculum. That’s incredibly lazy and they can do so much better. They also need to use real math classes and not math 1 and math 2. It was super difficult to do high-school level math when I got home because the math curriculum in the state of Utah is so different.

Catalyst changed my life, but there are no good RTCs, and many people don’t have a good experience when they’re forced into treatment. I know kids who probably would've succeeded better if Catalyst did some things better, and I know I would've graduated and progressed faster if Catalyst did some things better. However, Catalyst has taught me how to control my anxiety which prevents me from getting depressed, and I have been extremely successful since I got out. I am a psychology student now with a 3.9 GPA, getting ready for grad school. I have made the deans list every semester so far, and I am in the international honors society of psychology. I have had large success but not everyone does after graduation. One of my friends who graduated has died from an overdose and some of them have relapsed into their old behaviors. I just want to emphasize that because I am not guaranteeing any sort of miracle cure or lifelong sobriety for your kid. I can’t really speak for others because everyone has a different experience, and some therapists are better at their jobs than others. I had Melissa as my therapist, and the therapy work I did with her is what helped me get to where I am today. I can’t speak on how the other therapists were, but whichever therapist a student gets can have an impact on their whole experience and perception of catalyst. The owners really need to get an on call handyman that they can just call whenever there’s a broken appliance. They wait until right before “family days” to get the house fixed, because they know that as long as the parents don’t see how bad stuff gets broken they won’t care. I’d like to assume that the other owners will listen to my feedback, but who knows.

Anyways, it changed my life and I am thankful every day for the knowledge I have learned at catalyst. The knowledge of how to cope with the every day stresses of life which used to be unbearable to me, and the knowledge of how to live a successful and happy life, which used to seem impossible to me.

Charlie F.

If you are a parent, looking at my review, thinking to yourself: “What’s this place like?”, I would simply just encourage you to love your child instead of shipping them off for 20 months bc they’re struggling. I was a former student, from June 2019-April 2020. I am forever grateful for the students and lifelong friends I made there, in fact some of them have even also left reviews. Aside from that, this place (and the whole “adolescent treatment industry”) is a total and complete scam. 95% of the students I went to “school” with there are right back to the same stuff they were doing before. This is not just a Catalyst problem, this is an industry problem. I have now met a whole network of kids who went to varying wilderness+RTCs/TBSs and every single one of them is just as worse off as before. I will however also say specifically at catalyst, about 40% of the employees are good, honest people who want the best for their students. The remaining 60%, in which I would include all 3 owners, are money hungry people who exploit desperate parents at the end of their rope. There was also a good amount of staff members who would continually push the ideals and morals of the Mormon Church. To me that was a disgrace, and I am a christian. We were there to get better, not learn about the LDS church. I felt as though I was consistently treated unfairly and was constantly watched. Think about what that does to a 16-17 year old. Traumatizing as all hell. I know it’s been a while since I left, but for some reason I felt compelled to share my honest version of the truth today.

c G. S.

I was a student/patient at Catalyst RTC for nine months. I enjoyed my experience overall and view it as a mostly positive experience. I truthfully think though that if I was unable to have the therapist that I did, and the consistency which my therapist brought to work everyday my experience would be very different. I learned so much about myself through therapy and learned how to manage myself in healthy ways which (so far) has benefitted me in everyday life to explore myself and actually think about my decisions. That being said, that commitment and consistency lacks in some areas throughout Catalyst. I observed that sometimes the other therapists one in particular would not meet with a student/patient for a couple of weeks. Me knowing how much peoples parents are paying for this treatment, and the inconsistency in that regard is frustrating to me.

The connections I made with students and mentors during my stay helped me a lot as well. Throughout my stay I made consistent relationships with students and mentors, many of those relationships I still value and keep in touch with. There is a very discernable relationship with some of the mentors though. Many of them are empathetic, reasonable and caring, but some of them are robots and look to punish and dominate a bunch of kids, subtle power trips in treatment are fun and interesting for me to watch as I am not a very rebellious person. Those who are rebellious in nature however, this creates tension and anger which is most of the time suppressed by the rule of no "program bashing". I viewed that this robotic and sometimes unreasonable punishment affects people negatively and not in the constructive way it is intended too.

After I left Catalyst I realized a vital piece of what this place is. It is in nature a business, one that is designed to allure parents and provide them security for their child and lots of help along the way. Catalyst like any business will sell their services and like most residential treatment centers it costs a pretty penny, but the influence of educational consultants really is a business model for parents whose children are struggling, to find a place and give them their money. Many phrases of manipulation and using that to take advantage of the fragile and vulnerable area of a struggling child. Also at Catalyst, I was a appalled by how long they kept some of the kids who were violent and struggling beyond their help and services. Some of kids I saw who were not progressing and were there for 11+ months were in my opinion milked for their money and I found that pretty disturbing.

From what I have observed recently with talking to past students is that sobriety and quality of life is poor. Most are actively doing drugs and the exact same thing which got them sent to treatment if not worse than before. There is an exception probably 7 or 8 (including me) out of 40-50 are doing well, and thriving in life with occasional struggles. This is expected but if you send your child here DO NOT, expect them to be an upstanding member of society.

This is my honest evaluation of this treatment, as I have said my experience was overall good and real. I think if I had other circumstances in the program such as a different therapist or some of the mentors I loved did not work there my experience would be much different and more difficult than it needed to be. I am happy with myself for my work and what I did here, but in my opinion there is a problem at Catalyst in occasions ethically and in the industry as a whole

CS