Teen Help's style is not for the faint-hearted. It helps some parents arrange the seizure of disruptive teens, even from their homes in the middle of the night.

Teen Help then ships them to far-off compounds where the message is simple: cooperate or you won't see Mom, Dad and the outside world for a long time.

Once inside the compounds, teens at first encounter a total lack of privacy. Some report being watched 24 hours a day at close range by "buddies." They can't do anything -- including talking or using the bathroom -- without permission.

The aggressive methods have spawned allegations of child abuse, prompting authorities to raid or investigate facilities in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Utah and South Carolina. Facilities in the first three locations closed.

Six former Teen Help students have sued the organization in the last eight months, claiming they were systematically abused inside the compounds.

Other criticism of the organization came earlier this year from a company executive shortly after he temporarily left its staff.

"These people are basically a bunch of untrained people who work for this organization," Ken Kay told the Denver Rocky Mountain News in an interview before he rejoined Teen Help as a vice president. "So they don't have credentials of any kind. ...

"We could be leading these kids to long-term problems that we don't have a clue about because we're not going about it in the proper way. ...

"How in the hell can you call yourself a behavior modification program -- and that's one of the ways it's marketed -- when nobody has the expertise to determine: Is this good, is this bad?"

Several psychologists and psychiatrists interviewed by the News expressed skepticism and alarm about Teen Help's methods.

"There's something very creepy about this," Seattle psychiatrist August Piper said. "It's kind of frightening. It sort of smacks of brainwashing, doesn't it?"

Rutgers University psychologist Robert Karlin acknowledged that Teen Help and similar programs can change behavior in a tightly controlled environment. But he warned that some teens could be traumatized psychologically.

"It would take one hell of a lot to think that the only way to bring my kid out of his problems is to take him in for brainwashing," Karlin said.

For many adolescents, the introduction to Teen Help comes in the middle of the night, when they are forcibly removed from their homes. At their parents' invitation, beefy employees of an "escort company" grab the youths and drive them to temporary processing facilities, including one near company headquarters in La Verkin, Utah.

From there, the 12- to 17-year-olds are transported to rustic compounds with idyllic names such as Paradise Cove, Tranquility Bay and Spring Creek Lodge.

But these teens enjoy no vacation. Minutes after they arrive, they begin the Teen Help behavior modification program.

They are cut off for months from speaking with their parents or anyone else in the outside world. Phone calls and visits generally are allowed only after the first two to four months.

New arrivals begin at "Level 1," the lowest of six on the Teen Help ladder. Level 1 teens get little privacy. "Buddies" -- upper-level youths -- often watch their every move, day or night, asleep or awake.

Buddies also administer "consequences" to teens who don't follow the rules. These penalties range from in-your-face dressing-downs to hours in solitary confinement and, some teens allege, to being hogtied. The company says it uses restraints only as a last resort.

Stanley Goold, a California teen-ager who lived at Paradise Cove in Western Samoa last year, charges in a lawsuit that he was subjected to "punching, being kicked, thrown and choked, hogtied and put in an isolation box."

A suit by another California teen and one from Nevada described Paradise Cove as "one of many closed and secret cult centers operated by the defendants where adolescents are impounded, tortured, berated, brainwashed and otherwise abused. ... Each plaintiff was subjected to cruel, unusual and abominable sexual abuse by his 'overseers,' the untrained Samoan staff at Paradise Cove." Teen Help has denied the allegations in the suits, which are pending. The organization said the suits are frivolous and the product of unethical lawyers or disputes between divorced parents.

Government regulation of these programs is spotty. Social service agencies in Louisiana, South Carolina, Utah, Ohio and California have investigated various aspects of the teen behavior modification industry, including the forcible removals of teens from their homes. Some jurisdictions have pressured facilities to obtain state licenses and submit to periodic inspections.

But some programs, including one of Teen Help's, have resisted complying. The former director of Teen Help's South Carolina program, for example, said his facility was a boarding school not subject to state licensing. Church-sponsored programs have cited the constitutional separation of church and state as grounds to avoid licensing.

The private teen behavior modification industry "is just completely unregulated," said Sue Burrell, an attorney with the Youth Law Center, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group specializing in teen custody issues.

But Kay, who ran Brightway and is now president of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a Teen Help umbrella organization, earlier this year acknowledged the controversy about the qualifications of Teen Help's staff.

"They are not clinicians," he said. "So their job is very important to them because the option a lot of times is a minimum-wage job someplace. And so it's very hard to get them to talk or to talk bad about the program or tell the truth about the program, actually."

Kay said there isn't enough clinical staff to ensure that the program is "headed in the right direction."

Teen Help in recent years has enjoyed impressive growth. With approximately 1,000 teens in its programs, at a cost of $26,000 to $54,000 each to their parents, Teen Help's revenues are estimated at more than $30 million a year.

Technically, the facilities are owned by a number of individuals and corporations. But all receive clients from Teen Help and connected enterprises. All billing is handled through an affiliate headquartered in St. George, Utah.

Lichfield controls the flow of money to the various compounds, according to Kay.

In some respects, Teen Help's behavior modification program has roots dating back a half-century.

Rutgers University psychologist Karlin said that Teen Help seminars share some techniques of the thought-reform program that Chairman Mao Tse-tung and his communist theorists pioneered in China in the 1940s. Teens are isolated from their normal environment, made to feel uncomfortable and induced to confess numerous shortcomings -- what Karlin described as the core of Mao's system of thought reform.

Psychologist Margaret Singer, professor emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley and one of the nation's pre-eminent experts on mind control, said Teen Help and similar programs attack the psyche in ways similar to Mao's methods.

It was 1949 when Mao introduced a new kind of thought reform for the newly conquered peoples of Communist China. Unlike the brutal torture techniques that Stalin had developed in the Soviet Union, Chinese methods were more subtle and in many ways more effective.

Western scientists became alarmed when these mind control tools were used on American prisoners in the Korean War of 1950-53. How could the Chinese so easily manipulate captured GIs into criticizing the United States and expressing admiration for the North Korean cause? The techniques, dramatized in The Manchurian Candidate, a Richard Condon novel and subsequent movie, quickly got a pop-psych nickname -- brainwashing.

In the 1960s, the methods began to be used in America. But instead of Communists with a collectivist political bent, the new practitioners were American entrepreneurs who charged thousands of dollars per client.

No follow-up studies have been done to gauge the long-term effects of Teen Help's intervention. Rutgers' Karlin said he anticipates that Teen Help's techniques will produce post-traumatic stress casualties in "hearts, spades and diamonds."

Tulsa, Okla., psychologist Eric Nelson said re-entering American society after a year or more in a Teen Help camp "would have to be a very unusual situation psychologically."

Nelson treated a Tulsa teen who had spent a few months at Paradise Cove in Samoa.

"One of the points of these programs that remove kids completely from their environments is to provide an environment where there can be almost total control of their behavior," he said. "Some of the kids manage to internalize those values and take the external control and make it internal control.

"My suspicion is that's probably the exception rather than the rule and that when most of these kids get back where there is not that degree of control, they will deteriorate even further."