YouTube's 'The Real Story of Paris Hilton' reveals her rich girl persona masks genuine trauma

However her new YouTube documentary suggests that her scintillating brand of superficiality and poor little rich girl rebellion masks genuine trauma.Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Hilton spent some of her youth inside the “troubled teen industry” — a collection of tough love boot camps, wilderness programs and “emotional growth boarding schools” — that sells itself to parents, at least in large part, as therapy. Hilton’s mother, for instance, believed her daughter was exaggerating on the few occasions she spoke about her experience before making the film.In 2007 and 2008 — following the release of my book, “Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids” — Congress held hearings on the issue, including testimony by Government Accountability Office investigators who’d looked into the programs and validated the testimony of survivors like Hilton.Their stories — and those of parents whose children didn’t survive — include accounts of beatings, starvation, sexual abuse, months of solitary confinement, severe medical neglect, use of stress positions and emotional abuse aimed at complete humiliation. We have proven treatments for teen mental illness and drug problems — none of which involve midnight kidnappings and most of which involve family therapy, at home.It might be hard to have much sympathy for Paris Hilton, but her experiences show that these kinds of programs hurt everyone, even heiresses.