Off the Rails: One Family's Journey Through Teen Addiction

With two healthy children and rewarding careers, educator and communications expert Burrowes and husband Paul were shocked when, within only a few months, their lives were thrown into upheaval as daughter Hannah's ordinary teen moodiness shifted into vicious anger. "If she's willing to hit me, what else is she capable of," asks Burrowes at the start of this often disturbing, raw, and uncut account written from both the author's and Hannah's perspectives. Readers follow Hannah as she's admitted to a psychiatric hospital then completes progressive treatments at the Second Nature Wilderness Family Therapy program and comes to understand Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl's idea that "caring is the last human freedom." After Hannah completes a strict regimen at the wilderness program, she is treated at a residential center. Burrowes reflects on the experience: "when you have a child in treatment, everything you see, hear, and do is filtered through a lens of frustration, failure, and shame." Readers will appreciate Hannah's final move toward redemption when she returns home and healing begins.