David Bowie’s daughter describes ‘dehumanizing’ teen treatment centers

David Bowie’s daughter said this week that when she was a teenager, she was forcibly taken from her home and placed in several “dehumanizing” treatment centers, all of which happened while her father was… Death by cancer.

“Therapy made me realize how much I had to move forward in my teenage years,” she said in a long video on Instagram on February 18.

Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, Bowie’s daughter Fashion model ImanShe said she started seeing a therapist before she was 10 years old after her parents and teacher noticed something was “off.”

“That was around the time I had my first anxiety attack,” she said.

David Bowie and his daughter split (Lexi Jones/Instagram; Larry Busacca/WireImage)

A few years after that, “things got heavier. I started doing it,” Jones explained He feels depressedIt was as if my mind had turned against me.”

The 25-year-old said that she was failing in school, suffered from learning difficulties, and hated her appearance, “and I… Advanced bulimia When I was 12.”

“I started harming myself when I was 11 years old,” she continued. “I don’t know why I felt the way I felt. I knew I was miserable. I felt stupid, incompetent, unworthy, useless, and unlovable. And having successful parents made it worse.”

She eventually turned to drugs and alcohol after her father was diagnosed with cancer, which she said was her “breaking point.” She added: “I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do and more because I was angry, I was scared, I was numb, but I was free, until I wasn’t.”

As her mental health deteriorated, she said she lashed out at people and was “cruel” because she was looking for respect by becoming someone “people feared”.

Paris Hilton details trauma, abuse at facility for ‘troubled teens’, children died ‘in the name of treatment’

One weekday morning, after she got ready to go to school, she said her mother called her into the living room and her mother, father and godmother were standing there.

“I did everything I wasn’t supposed to and more because I was angry, I was afraid, I was numb, but I was free, until I wasn’t.”

– Lexi Jones

She said her father read her a letter that ended with, “I’m sorry we have to do this.”

She continued, “Then two men came through the door, and they were over six feet tall. They told me I could do it the easy way or the hard way. I chose the hard way. I fought back. I screamed. I grabbed onto the leg of the table. They grabbed me, put their hands on me. They dragged me away from everything I knew, and I was screaming bloody murder for someone to help her.”

App users click here to post

But Jones said her parents just watched. “They were crying, but they let it happen.”

She explained that the men wrapped a rope around her. “I felt like cattle. I felt stripped of any right to my own life.”

She was forced into a black SUV.

She said: “I was alone, I was in a car with two strange men, and they did not tell me where we were going, and I sat there terrified and completely silent.”

Once she arrived at the wilderness center, she said she was subjected to a strip search and was issued clothing that included snow pants and hiking boots.

The experience she said as a “city girl” was completely unfamiliar to her.

“This wasn’t camping. It felt like a weird cousin to boot camp,” she said. “It was disguised as something therapeutic.”

David Bowie’s hairstylist, ‘Madam Tour’ singer recalls warning he was hanging out with a 16-year-old fan

She said that during the three months she spent in the wild camp, she was only allowed to communicate with people outside the camp once a week through letters, and even then, “only approved people were allowed to write to us or listen to us.”

During their time there, they prepared meals over fires, built themselves and installed the tarps they slept under on their yoga mat and sleeping bag.

Lexi with her father David Bowie when she was young. (Lexi Jones/Instagram)

“We dug holes in the ground to use them as bathrooms away from the site,” she said. “And every time we used the bathroom, we had to count out loud so the staff could keep track of us.”

When she first arrived, she said she wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone else in her group because the new people at the camp were considered “a potential safety risk so they can evaluate your behavior and determine if you are suitable for integration into the group.”

“So, until then, you’re invisible in a way that’s hard to describe,” she added.

Some of the treatment helped, she said, but some looked like they had been “cracked and left exposed.”

Despite this, the girls in her group were a huge support to her, and she said they made each other feel human, “even in a place that stripped us of that.”

“But the whole experience was still inhumane,” she said, “as if the primary goal was to deprive them of all comforts and basic human needs” until they behaved “properly” to reclaim small privileges.

She said they were only allowed to shower once a week, had no mirrors and were not allowed to know the time.

David Bowie was a ‘joyful soul’, says photographer, ‘he came to play’

While she said she may have gained some things while she was there, “I didn’t choose to be there, and if you don’t choose to change, it’s hard to know what change means.”

Although different, she said the girls all had the same thing in common: “We were treated like we were bad when we were just afraid.”

She said she knew how lucky she was that she was not physically abused there, “because that’s not the case for a lot of kids.”

“But still the mental and emotional manipulation I went through is something I will never forget.”

After wilderness camp, she said she was sent to a residential treatment center in Utah for more than a year where she felt like everything she had worked for at the wilderness center “disappeared” because she said she had gained respect and privileges there, but the moment she arrived in Utah it was “like starting over.”

Do you like what you are reading? Click here for more entertainment news

Once again, she was strip-searched, had to count while using the bathroom and was monitored while she slept.

Lexi with her mother when she was a little girl. (Lexi Jones/Instagram)

She said she did well there, but made mistakes sometimes because she was 15, including when she kissed a girl once.

As punishment, she had to go back to full-time surveillance and was not allowed to speak to anyone for several weeks.

“I felt like I was in solitary confinement, I felt like a prisoner,” she revealed.

Click here to subscribe to the entertainment newsletter

However, she met one of her best friends there and had a great teacher who ignited her love of art.

“All of this happened while my father was getting sicker at home,” she said, adding that she wanted to be there with him for the first time in a long time.

Bowie died while she was still on the show.

“I wasn’t there,” she said. “I had the luxury of talking to him two days ago on his birthday. I told him I loved him, and he said so and we both knew.”

Then, she said, a social media post that said he died surrounded by his entire family made her physically ill.

“I had the luxury of talking to him two days ago on his birthday. I told him I loved him, and he said so and we both knew.”

– Lexi Jones

“I accepted it,” she said. “I’ve tried not to internalize it or feel guilty, but sometimes I still have those moments where I wish things were different.”

On the show, she said the program structured her grieving process according to how she dealt with it. At the time, she thought this was normal.

David Bowie with his wife Iman in 2011. (Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for DKMS)

Once she returned home before she turned 16, she said it was “sensory overload” with too much freedom, so she fell back into old patterns and was soon sent away to another treatment centre.

The repetitive cycle of being transmitted from one place to another made her feel like a “problem passed over.”

Every place seemed to mold her into something different that she hadn’t asked for, she said, and she soon stopped wondering where she was going.

She concluded that the goal of her post was to show what those places do to a person and “the parts of yourself that you lose in the process of repair.”

“As much as I have gone through things that no child should have to go through, I have also become someone I am proud of,” she added.

Having to learn “healing before I knew algebra” wasn’t fair, she said, “but it’s part of who I am now, so, no, this isn’t just a story about trauma, it’s a story about how I was shaped not just by what hurt me but by what I built in response to it.”

Click here to download the FOX NEWS app

While she wishes it had happened under better circumstances, “I can’t pretend it didn’t make me someone who sees people deeply, feels things deeply, and creates from that place.”

She said she still scans rooms for rules she doesn’t know about and feels guilty about the freedom, but she’s also proud of herself “because I finally get to define healing for myself.”

Fox News Digital has reached out to Iman’s representative for comment.

Related article