The Elissas Quotes

“The Maudsley Approach is an intensive, three-phase, outpatient program that encourages families to play an active role in the patient’s recovery, from taking over the eating schedule to accompanying them to therapy.3 As the Maudsley Approach is used more and more, other treatments have fallen out of favor. Enrolling teen girls in inpatient eating disorder programs has become a discredited practice, as has employing operant conditioning on patients. This approach has proven that it’s harmful to remove privileges from teen girls, only giving them back once they’ve gained weight. It’s also shown that there is little evidence that group therapy is beneficial for girls with anorexia—in fact, it can worsen their condition.4”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“The Troubled Teen Industry attracts many wealthy white kids from suburbs and socioeconomic classes like Alyssa’s. While working-class, bad-behaving teens often enter the school-to-prison pipeline, the criminal justice system weeds out the wealthy. Not because teens of different socioeconomic backgrounds commit different acts of rebellion. For all intents and purposes, the rich and the poor are just as likely to drink, do drugs, and have sex. But economic status dictates the punishments these teens receive for their misdeeds.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“given our society’s perpetuation of these models, the line between healthy and toxic love can be difficult to discern, sometimes even appearing aspirational instead of worrisome.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“There’s a fine line between quintessential teenage obsession—an all-consuming, drama-prone type of romance—and true emotional dependence.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“Feminist scholar Carol Gilligan argues that in adolescence, girls are encouraged to surrender their own perspectives. They’re supposed to make themselves small, focus on becoming conventionally attractive and traditionally “nice,” forgoing their confidence, spirit, and voice in favor of embodying these feminine mandates.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“no woman truly has high self-esteem. Insecurity is the inheritance of womanhood.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“Self-objectification is a rite of womanhood, but it’s an exhausting one. Suddenly you’re overcome by a quiet yet constant reevaluation of how your body looks at any given moment.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“White women have an experience of being a teenager that’s in total opposition to that of young girls of color, whom society views as adults from the onset.1 Robbing them of their innocence at the first chance. Instead, these poor little rich girls experience a youth so romanticized, its lure is undeniable.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“The rest of her life unspooled like a never-ending state of withdrawal, a constant aching for that first hit of first love.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“Every reflective surface becomes a tool for self-examination, an outlet to pick your body apart as you ready it to be perceived by boys, girls, adults, fellow teens. Girls aren't discriminatory when it comes to approval.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“Poor little rich girls don't just wake up one day fully formed, ready to denounce the patriarchal and privileged order that they were born into in the name of a good time. It starts as a ringing, nearly imperceptible at first, that grows louder and louder until it's impossible to ignore.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“When you're starving or wrapped up in a cycle of bingeing-and-purging, or sexually obsessed with a man, it is very hard to think about anything else, very hard to consider what else you might need or want or fear were you not so intently focuses on one crushing passion.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“The labels that had been placed on them and the judgement they'd incurred had isolated them, making them more susceptible to addiction or vice.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

“It's incomprehensible to me that there are so many who would inflict such torment on teenagers. That there are networks full of adults abusing kids in the name of tough love.”
― Samantha Leach, The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia