David Bowie and Iman’s daughter Lexi recalls being abducted from home and sent to abusive teen camp and not being allowed to be present with David Bowie in his final days

From Daily Mail article:

*When her father was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2014, Lexi said she hit 'breaking point' and turned to drink and drugs to cope. The music legend died in January 2016 aged 69, just two days after he released his final album Blackstar.*

She continued: 'Something hit me pretty young before I was around ten. I started seeing a therapist because my teachers noticed something was off, and so did my parents. That was around the time I had my first anxiety attack.

*'I started to feel depressed. I was failing school. I had learning disabilities, that made everything feel harder, and I hated the way I looked. I developed bulimia when I was 12. I started self-harming when I was eleven.*

'I felt stupid, incompetent, unworthy, useless, unloveable, and having successful parents only made it worse. It felt like I would never live up to them. I couldn't understand how I came from people that were thriving in every single direction while I was failing at everything.'

Following her father's diagnosis and turning to drink and drugs to cope, she said:  'Everyone around me was experimenting. But for me, it wasn't about fun. I wasn't experimenting, I was escaping.

'When the party ended for everybody else, I kept going, and I drank and got high alone. I became someone who lashed out. I was cruel to people who didn't treat me the way I wanted to be treated. I was begging to be respected by becoming something people feared, or at least noticed.'

Eventually, she said, an intervention occurred that was both unexpected and deeply traumatising. 

*I felt stripped of any right to stay in my own life. They got me back into a black SUV and shoved me inside. By the time the door shut, my parents were already gone. I was alone. I was in a car with two strange men that wouldn't tell me where we were going and I just sat there completely horrified and silent.'*

*Lexi said she spent 91 days at a 'wilderness therapy' programme living outdoors in winter conditions with no privacy, showering once a week, and being forced to count out loud every time she used a makeshift bathroom so staff could monitor her.*

Wilderness therapy, also known as outdoor behavioural healthcare, is a highly controversial style of mental health treatment developed in the US for adolescents and young adults. 

It combines intensive outdoor activities with counselling to purportedly address behavioural, emotional, and substance abuse issues.

Lexi said of her arrival at the centre: 'They strip-searched me, they made sure I wasn't hiding anything in or on my body. They did kindly hold a sheet up in front of me while I was undressing so I wouldn't be exposed all the way.

And they handed me clothes, which was a blue fleece, crew neck, snow pants, a kind of greenish jacket and hiking boots, and a giant a** backpack that was bigger than me at the time. I had never heard of anything like this before. I didn't know wilderness therapy existed. I was a city girl.'

She added of their way of living: 'We dug holes in the ground to be used as bathrooms far away from the site. And every time we used the bathroom, you had to count out loud so that staff would keep track of us.

'We made fires by stripping birch bark and striking flint and steel. We cooked our meals over those fires and learned how to tie knots to set up tarps and we would sleep under those tarps on a yoga mat and a sleeping bag.'

When new arrivals reached the programme, she said they were 'not allowed to talk to anybody in the group', adding: 'You're considered a potential safety risk until they can evaluate your behaviour and decide if you're fit to be incorporated in the group.'

*After three months in wilderness therapy, Lexi was sent directly to a residential treatment centre in Utah for 13 months. 'I was strip-searched again,' she said. 'I had to be watched while I slept. I had to count every time I used the bathroom.'*

*It was there that she learned her father had died: 'I had the luxury of speaking to him two days before, on his birthday.*

*'I told him I loved him, and he said it back, and we both knew. Then I saw the post, the one that said something like, David Bowie passed away, surrounded by his whole family.*

*'It made me physically ill because, yeah, the whole family was there. Except for me.'*

She continued: 'I've accepted it. I've tried not to internalise it or feel guilty but sometimes I still have those moments where I wish things were to be different.

'Processing his death became a whole new layer of the programme. They created a special phase for me called The Grief and Loss Phase. They structured my grief. They categorised it and assigned milestones and expectations.

'At the time, I thought that was normal. I had never lost anyone that close to me and I didn't know how to grieve. And that was my only frame of reference.'

After finally returning home from Utah shortly before turning 16, Lexi said she 'slipped back into old patterns' and was eventually sent away to another programme.