In the years after filmmaker Katherine Kubler left the Academy at Ivy Ridge, she struggled to grapple with the trauma she endured there. Long accustomed to documenting her life on camera, she decided to make a film that would reify her experience. What she discovered was much bigger than the abuse enacted at Ivy Ridge. The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping is Kubler’s new docuseries that explores the unsettling and ever-evolving troubled teen industry, which continues to endanger children while promising parents that the so-called wayward youth of America can be “fixed.” The series is directed and narrated by Kubler, who, as a former student of The Academy at Ivy Ridge, also tells the story of her time at the school.

“For a long time, I wasn’t going to include my story because I just wanted to be a filmmaker and make it about this issue, not me,...