Liahona Treatment Center

"My son recently graduated from his 14 months at Liahona. I highly recommend this treatment center. This place is exactly what our son needed. The level of care is excellent. We thought for sure we had lost our son forever to the wrong group of friends and drugs. With the knowledge and help of all the staff our son turned his life around. He was able to get back on track in school and take ownership of his choices. He even openly admitted at graduation that he would miss so much of the school. The staff always goes above and beyond. We are so happy to have our son back, Liahona will always be apart of our story. The staff and directors will forever be our tribe. Nothing but LOVE. Thankful + grateful, Kate Geyer"

"I was a student at Liahona Academy from June 2022 to August 2023.i chose to seek help, and I am glad I did. I was at the lowest point in my life. This place changed my life, and now I am happy with who I am and what I am accomplishing. It is not an overnight process, nor is it all that easy all the time, but no one wants to change if they are comfortable with where they are and what they are doing. Diamonds are formed under pressure. It pushes you to grow and become you're best self. I felt like I had a place where I was welcomed and belonged for the first time in years. I now work there, and I love my job, I care about the kids and hope they can change like I did. The program Is dependant on how much you want to change and how you behave. You create your own experience there."

"12 years later I’m writing this review. I attended Liahona in 2012 and graduated. Was the best decision my parents could have made after exhausting all other options. I would have been dead or on the side of the road had I not been sent to Liahona. Since graduating I’ve got two Bachelor degrees and have been a nurse for 7 years. My relationship with my parents,friends, and significant others have all been positively impacted by Liahona. I just went back and visited and Clay and Parker are still the same guys they were today. They know what helps kids change their ways for good. You just have to trust them. The motto in Liahona is you do good you get good and that is the truth. Your kids will see why you did this post graduation and will be better family because of this place."

"The hardest decision I have had to make was to send my son to a treatment center. I wrestled with this idea for about 2 years. Finally we got to a point where I knew my son was going to seriously hurt himself or someone else and I felt that we had to give it a shot. The first two months at Liahona were the hardest for us. We were warned that our son would be rebellious and threaten to kill himself, run away, waste our money, etc, and so we were sort of prepared but it was still very hard. Our son just sat on his chair on the sidelines in what they call “commons watch” and didn’t participate in anything. He was basically ignored because he needed to choose to do the program. At home we tried to force him to go to therapy and it didn’t work at all of course. At Liahona, they are forced to be in the facility, but no one will force them to do the work. It’s up to them to decide and until they decide, they will be extremely bored. Luckily the kids can still hear the group sessions and even though they are not really participating, they can learn a bit from osmosis. After about 6 weeks of our son sitting on commons watch something clicked and he realized that he had a lot of life to live still and he could sit and do nothing for the next year until he turned 18, or he could live life to its potential. He decided to change. That was the biggest turning point in his life. He wrote us a 46 page disclosure letter confessing the wrongs he had done while living with us. That was the biggest eye opener for us. I now finally felt like I had made the right decision. Had I know these things a couple years ago, I would have sent him to a treatment center much earlier. I don’t know what surprised me more, the fact that he was confessing all these things, or the actual confessions themselves, or the fact that it went on for 46 pages. This is the first thing I will say that I really liked about Liahona. They didn’t force our son to do anything. They allowed him to make that decision on his own. It would not have been real had they forced it or even bribed him or encouraged him directly. No they just allowed him to sit and do nothing until he wanted to change. After that disclosure letter, everything was fairly downhill. We got weekly letters from him and started working with him in weekly family sessions. It was so good to see how quickly he began to change. Yes there were a few setbacks in his learning curve at Liahona, but to wrap up the story our son graduated about 10 months after he started going to work. It’s now been 5 months since he graduated and the real proof of his progress is shown in the fact that he hasn’t relapsed at all. Before Liahona, he was involved in a lot of drugs, illegal activity, etc. Now our son hasn’t gone back to his old friends, and he continues to be honest with us and very open. He is taking his GED now and working 2 jobs, plus starting his own business. He’s ran a marathon and he willingly participates in family meals, games, and household chores. He’s 18 now and could have left home but he’s still here, and he’s a joy to have around. While acknowledging that not all boys have life-changing experiences at Liahona, we credit the staff for our son's success. Mike was our son's direct therapist. He initially posed challenges as we were trying to get used to the system, but ultimately he played a crucial role and we love him now. Taylor and Angel also contributed significantly, with Angel being tough and playing favorites a bit, but he was still influential. The program's unusual rules and disciplinary style, including peculiar eating instructions, initially baffled us, but in the end, they contributed to our son's positive transformation. Recognizing the difficulty of managing rebellious kids, I refrain from passing judgment and can only attest to the program's success for our son. While Liahona may not work for every child, if there's a chance it can help your son, I recommend giving it a try."

"We were having trouble with our son for 3 years. Finally his senior year of high school we decided we needed to do something before he tuned 18 years old. We live in PA so we never heard of Liahona Academy. We first send our son to Teen Challenge in AK but he only lasted there 3 days. Teen challenge send our son to Juvenile. We had no idea what we were going to do! A lady reached out to us trying to help us find a place for our son. She recommended Liahona. We had no idea what this academy was about! The school said they would take our son and they would work with him. It was very scary sending our son to a place where we knew nothing about. WOW all we can say is thank you Jesus! We were so happy how Liahona did not give up on our son! They worked with him, tested him and showed him what it takes to grow up and be a man! At first we did not know if we were dealing with mental illness or just a boy be defiant. They are very thorough with their research. The Academy does exercises with the brain to help strengthen it again. They help them work through their problems & have them see its their responsibility to take charge of their actions. They work closely with staff and help them to get back on a healthy life schedule. Our son is back home & finished high school at the academy and now is looking for colleges. We don't think our son would even be this far if he did not go to Liahona. We are so thankful for their structure and their routine and strict exercises they do with the boys. We are THIRLLED to have our son back and SO thankful for Liahona and the staff helping to get our son back on track!"