Mother of mentally ill young man explores how controversial intervention program led to his addiction, death
July 2025
BY OLIVIA HINES
My childhood is a blurry place in my mind, its dreamlike quality alternately impenetrable and inescapable, a lot like my existence often seems to be.
So wrote Aaron Fette, on one of his many travels during his short, troubled life. At 15, this Texas native became a runaway and ended up homeless on the streets, hopping trains from city to city across the United States and Canada in an attempt to flee his paranoid delusions.
Family members tried in vain to help him, to bring him home—to no avail. All the while, he managed to write about his experiences, his travels, his dreams, and the damaging intervention program that propelled him into a life on the run.
Aaron started coping with his psychosis by abusing drugs and alcohol, until he eventually overdosed on opioids and died at the age of 39.
After his death, Aaron’s mother, Claudette Fette, began poring through Aaron’s creative writings—much of which were scrawled on random pieces of paper from wherever Aaron happened to be when the mood to write hit him.
“He left me with three boxes of scraps of paper,” Claudette, an occupational therapist and mental health professor, explains.
And as she read, she began to realize just how much she and her oldest child had in common.
“We are intertwined in ways that even I didn’t recognize until I began composing our story,” Claudette writes in her new book, No Saints Here: A Cautionary Tale of Mental Illness, Health, and the Cost of Ignorance in the Lone Star State.
Claudette has woven her son’s struggles with her own past, endeavoring to tell the truth about their lives as she remembers it, and as her son documented it in his poems and essays. Claudette chronicles her son’s mental health troubles from birth to death in the book.
Aaron Fette’s third birthday in 1980.
Aaron at age 5 in 1982, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Aaron and his mother Claudette at her wedding to her husband Dan in 1985.
As he grew up in the 1980s, when support and resources were limited for people struggling with severe mental illness, Claudette says Aaron became a victim of abuse in a program designed to “scare him straight.”
She says the program offered a low-cost intervention alternative to expensive, residential treatment centers.
The program aimed to reduce anti-social behaviors by using fear, intimidation, and hostility tactics on participating youth.
Claudette says the facility’s staff were untrained, unqualified graduates of the program who perpetuated abuse on participants.
No Saints Here also examines the failings of public education and the judicial system, as Claudette searched for effective mental health resources to help Aaron. The book presents Aaron’s and Claudette’s experiences as a cautionary tale, while offering families struggling with mental illness better alternatives based on Claudette’s experiences and expertise.
Claudette hopes her and Aaron’s hard lessons will encourage the development of a smarter, healthier culture around mental illness and its treatment for future generations.
The Reporters Inc. is honored to present the following exclusive excerpts from No Saints Here, and this Q&A with Claudette (edited for length and clarity):
Why did you want to turn Aaron’s stories into a book?
I was reluctant because I didn’t want him to be a poster child but it’s about our story as a family. Aaron had serious mental health needs since his early childhood. He maxed out his mental health insurance at 12. We entered a “Scared Straight” program which was extremely abusive, but we didn’t know that. He stayed there a year and ended up on the streets. We wanted to stop families from making the same mistakes.
Aaron’s motivation was to get more out there about the “Straight” program and the “Troubled Teen Industry.” Aaron started writing his part of the book 10 years before he died. He had written in various stages—edits and rewrites on the same page or different pages attached to the original.
We wanted to deflate the stigma about mental health and this book was meant to be a really good look at Aaron’s and my experience.
Aaron’s sixth grade school photo in 1988.
Aaron at age 15 with his two younger brother in Deep Ellum, Texas in 1992.
What exactly is the “Troubled Teen Industry”?
TTI is a label given to a specific style of adolescent alcohol and drug facilities like the “Straight” program.
Common traits include the use of large encounter-style, confrontive groups where the youth are expected to confess their deepest shame and confront one another. Compliance is enforced through violence and deprivation perpetuated by other participants. Youth go through phases as they comply and become oppressors for the youth who come after them.
Kids like Aaron used to call it “Nazi AA.”
Parents are also confronted and enculturated in tough love-style discipline. TTI has its own language use, culture and norms that youth and families learn and adopt—we believed our kids would die if we let them down.
Aaron didn’t graduate from his program. He was called a “misbehaver,” which is what they called people who fought all the time. The staff had no understanding of mental illness. He was tortured. They made his life hell. He had a hernia from restraints and a broken arm from being in there.
After “Straight” was closed down in the early 1990s, some parents, graduates and staff opened new iterations with new names, sometimes even in the same buildings, sometimes with new twists such as wilderness camps. They masquerade as [a] legitimate treatment to pull in desperate families.
They can be distinguished from legitimate programs by their lack of credentialed staff, their isolation of youth from families, and if you scratch the surface, their violence and use of abuse and restraint. TTI programs don’t use therapeutic relationships. They’re all about fear and control.
It’s important that we help families look at their options clear-eyed and recognize these places. They not only perpetuate trauma, they take time and resources that could be used for effective interventions.
From No Saints Here: Aaron’s description of the “Straight” program
Still, I sank deeper and deeper into the depths of my own murky reality, and insanity of textbook proportions began to take hold; I had lost all vision of the world behind me and was unaccepting of the one being forced upon my skull with such vehemence and fervor. My choices were limited to fight, flights, or submit and I hardened my resolve to give them nothing more than they already possessed. I was not alone—there were other children of refusal there and we made up the lowest rung in this shape shifting caste system. It works like this, there are five phases…
I suppose I should explain. There were five phases in this hell but eight castes as I saw it. On the bottom, below even the 1st phasers, we were called “misbehavers,” a belittling juvenile term as if speaking of a child to be put in the corner or spanked and sent to his or her room. We were probably the only honest people in the building. We were easily identified as we spoke or whispered or “clicked” at will, were covered in bruises, self-mutilations, floor burns and scrapes, and never sat up in group, often wouldn’t stand when told…this caste refused to be brainwashed, instead we followed ourselves.
The next caste up from the bruised, scraped, carved up, slouching nobility of dissent was the other first phasers. We giggled at and taunted them for their weakness along with the next four castes as the brainwashed or “full of shit” kids would get up in group with a “burning desire” to confess, weeping to the group for petty little things like “rocking out in their heads” to unapproved music or thoughts of “copping out” or thoughts of a sexual nature and so on.
The third caste was “T&R” or trust and responsibilities (beginning of second phase). These kids were still unable to go home but were allowed to visit their parents for 15 minutes under the watchful eye of an oldcomer on the Big Group night every weekend when families would come and confront each other in parent groups and their kids in the main hall. These visits were not for visiting, however. A child was to debase him or herself by sitting there and “making amends” for his or her wrongs, basically giving no opportunity to speak of the wrongs in Straight life or to “manipulate” them with tales of what went on with us in group and in fact discussing the negative goings on even vaguely with parents was considered “working against the program,” “sneakily talking behind backs,” and in most cases “manipulation” of parents in order to try and get “pulled.” This, just like “misusing one’s T&R parent talk,” was nearly always a trip back to first phase.
T&R was the induction to a system of peer brutality, a beginning point turning from weeks or months of getting torn apart in first phase. Jumped in a single day from being screamed at, man handled, sleep deprived, and forced to share every intimate thought or fear or trauma or pain leaving nothing that is your own but what you are told is your own, into warm liquid acceptance from the captors, into praise and smiles all around you and even though you are still led around with a hand on your shoulder or collar, you have your thumbs in two belt loops and a little power feels good after having less than none.
What was Aaron like growing up?
He was a remarkable soul, and he was not like other people. Aaron was a talker. He was kind of frenetic. He was a big kid. He wanted more than anything to have friends, but he sucked socially. He was not good at the back and forth aspect of friendship and would sometimes overpower, not physically but verbally, who he was talking to.
He was a bigger-than-life kind of kid and a bigger-than-life kind of person. He would believe or have some idea that he would argue intensely about, and you could see it wasn’t right, but his argument was persuasive enough that you would kind of be like, “Ok.”
He had precocious language development, but he also had severe learning disabilities.
At what age did you sense that Aaron was starting to have mental health issues?
Aaron heard voices from five-years-old. We didn’t know it at the time. Aaron didn’t share that at the time, but he later related how he would wake in the morning and see clowns playing at the end of his bed.
Stress also precipitates symptoms. In the third or fourth grade, his hallucinations became very dark and he started “rapid cycling,” which means he’d be fine at one part of the day and then he’d be having another delusion hours later.
He had a number of diagnoses. The most accurate was Schizoaffective Disorder. The day he was first hospitalized he was my bright, brilliant kid when I dropped him off at school in the morning. By the time I picked him up for lunch, he was in another reality and I couldn’t reach him. He wanted to kill himself because in his mind that was better than having “them”—whatever was in the delusion—kill him.
We were told he needed long-term care. We could send him to expensive residential treatment or relinquish him to the state. I called a psychiatrist and he suggested the “Straight” program.
We probably should’ve looked at it closer, but it was before the internet. I don’t know how we would have found out. I regret that. It’s the largest regret of my life. It was better to have done nothing and deal. When he left “Straight” at age 13, he had no connection to other kids, because they didn’t have his experience.
It was also then hard for him to trust us because we were the ones who put him in there and that’s one of the reasons he wouldn’t move back home after he ran away after the program.
How did Aaron cope with his own mental health?
Initially when psychosis starts you don’t know it’s psychosis because it feels like reality.
After Aaron ran away after “Straight,” we developed strategies. I got him an 800 number. He could call me up to six times a day to reality check.
He’d call and say, “Mom, I think this person is following me.” I would say, “OK, turn left, turn left again…” You couldn’t say it was going to be OK because you didn’t know. The environments he was in were very dangerous.
There are certain norms homeless people follow and if you violate those, there are consequences. The homeless population is a pretty rough place. Aaron suffered a lot of abuse.
How did Aaron’s drug addiction and alcoholism progress?
He was drunk at least once prior to the “Straight” program and that came to my attention because the police found him passed out on a railroad track in the middle of the night.
I don’t think he was really an alcoholic or an addict prior to “Straight.” He experimented with drugs after “Straight” and we tried to exert more control, which really never worked.
His drug and alcohol abuse were his way of coping with the trauma he had experienced, and his use escalated on the streets.
Can you tell us more about Aaron’s ordeal with homelessness?
Aaron was on the streets by the time he was 15. He learned how to hop trains, and he would take off when he got paranoid. He would hop on the nearest train and take it to whatever city it stopped in. Then he would settle down there for a bit before he became paranoid again.
Initially I was trying to get him home. He stayed in contact, but there was a five-month period in the beginning where I heard nothing and that was terrifying. Then I saw him and it was during that time that I decided to let go of the idea he’d have a life like everyone else; that he would go to school and learn how to drive a car. It was more important that we had a relationship.
One time he called me and he was sitting next to a kid, one of his friends, who said, “I want to use the phone,” and Aaron said, “You can call my mom because that’s the only number this phone goes to.” Sometimes they called to talk to me because they needed a mom. Other times they were hurt or in trouble and needed help.
Eventually he developed a tight circle of friends, who were also travelers. Some of them were “Straight” survivors, but not all. They would travel together or sometimes see each other in different cities. He first married in Montreal in 1997, divorcing just a year later. He wed a second time in 2001, a union that lasted maybe two years.
Aaron, age 17, in New Orleans in 1994. By this time he was heavy into tattoos. According to his mother Claudette, “He started with a row of tattooed dots across his cheekbones. The tattoos are part of the culture of his group of traveling youth.”
Aaron lived in Alaska for a while. He got into a shootout with a friend, and he was the better shot. Fortunately, no one died. He went to prison. He had an eight-year sentence but they would release him to halfway houses in horrible neighborhoods with lots of drug abuse, and he was expected to work but there were no jobs and he would end up in prison again.
He married again, a year or so before he died, and lived in Spokane with his wife and kinda settled there. But that didn’t last. A lot of his coping was about leaving and getting away.
Claudette and Aaron at his first wedding in Montreal, 1997. He was 20-years-old.
Claudette Fette today.
From No Saints Here: Claudette’s description of Aaron “riding the rails
I remember clearly the first time I saw him again after that long stretch of months with no word. He had come to Arlington and called to tell me where I could come meet him. I promised to come alone and met him in a vacant parking lot on a hot, humid, Texas summer night. He was so tall and thin, and he smelled of layers of stale sweat that had dried and been renewed…It is a specific musty smell common to homelessness and an odor I would come to know well. I cried and clung to him, relieved that he was alive, and held his sweet, thin face and kissed it.
Dan [Claudette’s husband and Aaron’s stepfather] and I bought a house in a lovely neighborhood with two parks nearby and established trees in Denton, Texas. We continued to beg him to come home, but he resisted. Sometimes he insisted he was protecting us, that if he stayed home, someone would harm us. He said that the skinheads he had left would do a drive-by shooting, or someone else coming after him would catch us in the crossfire. I tried to reassure him that nothing like that would be tolerated in our carefully selected, very middle-class neighborhood. It just would not happen. I wonder now if he was perhaps afraid that he would hurt one of us? Or maybe the threat of trying to get through his life without the alcohol and drugs that had become a primary coping strategy was just too far beyond his otherwise boundless imagination?
We tried to entice him with typical rites of passage like learning to drive, paid remodeling or landscape work, and his very strong attachment to family. We were broken and finally learned to let go of our nagging and incessant demands. Now we just wanted whatever time we could get. We embraced him and the traveling friends he brought home and tried to push as much love as we could into the compact spaces that we had with him. But inevitably he always headed back out on the road.
In the age before mobile phones, I needed to figure out a way to stay connected. This was all in the dark ages before lightning-fast internet, when both access to information and easy, ubiquitous connections across the country were unheard of. Back then, long distance calls cost a fair amount of money for the caller, which meant Aaron couldn’t call home whenever he wanted.
I established an 800 number so he could call no matter where he was. He began to call regularly, sometimes several times a day if he was having a rough time with his own monsters born of trauma and manifested in delusion or hallucinations. He would talk through what he thought was happening around him and we would problem solve together to try to figure out what was reality and what was likely delusion. It was not what I wanted, which was to have him safe at home, but it was better than not knowing where he was or whether he was okay. It was infinitely better than the stalking monsters that whispered all sorts of tortured ends into my thoughts.
Aaron Fette around 1998, in his early 20s.His mother Claudette explains another reason for the tattoos: ‘First he picked at sores, which physiologically is a dissociative response to trauma–self harm produces an endorphin response. Then on the street, he continued the same, shifting from digging at his skin to tattoos.” Photo by Bruce MacNeil.
Aaron and Claudette in Spokane, Washington in August 2016, eight months before his death. By this time, Claudette says Aaron had covered many of his earlier tattoos “incorporating them into what became a gladiator mask
How did you learn of Aaron’s death?
Two policemen showed up at my door and told me he died. You kind of know when they arrive that it’s not to tell you he’s in jail.
He was not well even before that. He said he had cancer, and he had come home to die. He didn’t have cancer. The autopsy report showed that he died from a heroin overdose in a homeless encampment under a Fort Worth interstate in April 2017.
What advice would you give parents who are parenting children with severe mental illness?
The first thing would be to find a knowledgeable family organization with others who have been there.
Also look at school failure.
It’s not good for kids to go to school every day and get a beatdown because they couldn’t do something well.
You need to identify your child’s strengths, and build from those strengths. A mistake I made with Aaron when we were homeschooling, because I wanted him to catch up, was pushing the bar higher when he succeeded at something. He didn’t get to relish in that success, which is very damaging.
You mention the concept of “restorative justice” in the book, as a learning mechanism for children with mental illness. How does it work?
It began in the adult justice system as an attempt to move from a retributive system that also left victims with no say, to a system that sought to help offenders take responsibility and make things right in a negotiation with victims.
It seeks to identify needs and do something about them. Some schools are now using a version to help children learn and practice effective conflict resolution. When one child does wrong to another, they are expected to try to make it right. The process gives everyone a voice and creates space for everyone to listen and be heard.
Anything you’d like to add?
Each time period in No Saints pairs Aaron’s and my experiences with a chapter about more effective alternatives to our needs than what we knew at the time. I hope that families, helpers and policy makers will find information in those chapters that they can apply to better support youth.
They include suggestions involving early childhood education for young parents, multi-tiered systems of support that help students succeed in school, and programs conducted right in their communities as an alternative to sending youth to residential treatments like the “Straight” program where Aaron was abused.
I share foundational concepts like building from youth and family strengths, trauma, teaching self-regulation and conflict resolution, facilitating a growth mindset, recovery practices, restorative justice, and–for families–acceptance of ourselves as being the best we knew how to be until we knew better.
No Saints Here: A Cautionary Tale of Mental Illness, Health, and the Cost of Ignorance in the Lone Star State is available to purchase here on Amazon. Claudette Fette can be contacted at cfette@twu.edu.
Olivia Hines can be reached at oliviaannette2@gmail.com
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