Collin Gosselin’s Memoir Puts Fairmount on the Record

Collin Gosselin’s memoir, out Oct. 13, says staff at Fairmount Behavioral Health System pinned him to the floor and sedated him after he asked when he could go home. The 22-year-old, one of the sextuplets from Jon & Kate Plus 8, writes that he spent 21 months in the Philadelphia hospital after his mother, Kate Gosselin, had him admitted in 2016.

Kate still calls that stay medically necessary. Fairmount will not discuss him. A year before he arrived, federal inspectors had already cited the same campus for restraining a child without telling a parent.

He Asked a Doctor When He Could Leave

Collin writes that after 18 months inside he had “had enough of the staff. Enough of the chaos. Enough of being drugged into numbness.” He says he pleaded with a clinician he names as Dr. Jack Brown about why he still could not go home after nearly two years. When he was told to return to his unit and kept asking, he writes, the doctor called for backup.

Two male staff members were beside me in what seemed like seconds. Hands pulled my arms behind my back, and I was pushed to the floor. My chest slammed into the tile so hard it knocked the air out of me. Knees dug into my back and legs. I couldn’t breathe. I’d seen this happen to others who challenged the staff members, but all I had done was ask a question. As I lay on the floor panting, I watched Dr. Brown’s shiny shoes come toward me, and the two staff members who were holding me down quickly flipped me over to face up. The doctor stepped over me, with his back facing my head, then sat down on me, on my chest.

Collin Gosselin, In the Shadow of Eight

He writes that staff then pulled him into his room, threw him on the bed, and shut the door. Through the door he says he saw a metal tray and knew he was about to get the intramuscular shot patients called “booty juice.”

“Within seconds, five or six staff members were on top of me,” he writes. Someone yanked his pants down. One staffer joked, “Ah, just another day at the office,” and a couple of the others laughed. Then the drug hit. “My mind slowed to a crawl. There was no fighting it. My mind went blank, my body still. I felt like a candle that had been blown out with the lightest sigh, and I was plunged into darkness.”

A Fairmount spokesperson, in a statement printed in the book, said the hospital does not comment on specific patients. The same statement said staff “strive to maintain a total therapeutic environment through individualized treatment,” with group therapy, family therapy, allied therapy, and educational services.

A 2015 File on Child Restraints

Fairmount sits on a 27-acre wooded campus at 561 Fairthorne Avenue in Philadelphia’s Roxborough section, beside Fairmount Park. Its own site lists 169 beds and an adolescent program for ages 12 to 17. Collin writes that most kids came and went in days or weeks while he stayed through his 13th and 14th birthdays.

In March 2015, the year before his admission, a federal survey of that campus found the hospital failed to protect patient rights on several counts. Inspectors wrote that it failed to notify a minor’s parent and obtain consent for a physical restraint. They also found it failed to finish a face-to-face evaluation within one hour of a physical hold, and that it failed to investigate and close grievances.

WHAT INSPECTORS FLAGGED IN 2015

• A child’s hold: A 10-year-old’s Jan. 6, 2015, physical hold had no documented notice to a legal representative, against the hospital’s own rule that parents be told when a patient is under 14.
• The one-hour check: Surveyors found no timely face-to-face evaluation after at least one physical hold, a step federal hospital rules require.
• Grievances: Four of four sampled complaints were not investigated or answered in writing through the ethics process the hospital had on paper.
• The setting: Inspectors also cited a failure to provide a safe and emotionally healthy environment.

That file is about other patients, not Collin. It does show that, before Kate signed him in, the campus already had a documented problem when staff put hands on a child. federal limits on restraint and seclusion treat those holds as emergency measures, not treatment, and they bar using them as punishment, to force compliance, or for staff convenience.

After the Runaway Came the Zip Ties

The path into Fairmount, as Collin tells it, started at home. By 11, he writes, he was spending 70 percent of his time locked in a basement bedroom. The publisher’s jacket copy calls it a basement cell where silence was his only companion. He writes that gifts laid out for the cameras on Christmas morning were taken back once the crew packed up.

“People from that time would probably say I was a ‘difficult kid,’ I won’t argue with them,” he writes. “I probably was.” He says the talking back and the meltdowns came out sideways because he did not know how to name what he felt. He has also said his mother dragged him by the ear often enough that a teacher saw the bruise and walked him to a counselor.

After a runaway try, he writes, Kate came at him with long black zip ties, bound his wrists, then his ankles, tight enough that he could not move. He writes that she later cut them off with kitchen shears in a calmer voice, “the version she used when there were witnesses,” and that EMS strapped him to a gurney. He says she told him, “This is for your own good.” He writes that he did not know he was being taken to Fairmount.

He told host Jay Shetty the week the book landed that Kate was “physically and verbally abusive.” He has said he has not spoken to her since the hospital stay.

Kate Still Calls the Stay Necessary

Kate has not issued a full statement on the book. On Oct. 14 she answered TikTok comments under a video about her dog. To a supporter who said haters would be haters, she wrote, “Thank you so much. I know rational logical ppl or anyone who has dealt with mental illness understands what’s going on here.” In the same thread she wrote, “Exactly! I had nothing to do with it, except for consent because it was medically necessary.”

That is the same line she has held for years, with the hospital as the actor and her role as the signature. In a 2023 statement reprinted in the memoir, she said Collin was admitted “for the safety of myself, his brothers and sisters and for his own well-being,” and that outpatient care “proved insufficient for his needs.”

All measures that were taken in our home were at the explicit recommendation of his pediatric psychiatrist and/or his team of specialists and were put into place to safeguard every member of our family, our friends as well as our family pets. Unfortunately, I believe Collin remains a very troubled young man who continues to need a lot of help. His brothers and sisters and I have not been directly involved in his life due to his history of unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies towards us.

Kate Gosselin, 2023 statement, as printed in In the Shadow of Eight

In 2024 her attorney, Richard Puleo, said he did not believe she had tried to “intentionally harm” her son and that “she did what she did to protect herself and her family” from “troubled behavior.” Collin has said he has been cleared in three psychological evaluations, and that her claims about his mental health do not change what he says she did. “Perhaps it’s time she look in the mirror,” he added.

THREE ACCOUNTS OF THE STAY

Viewers who sat through the original TLC seasons already watched Kate snap at Jon and the kids on camera. The book is the version that starts after the crew left. She still files the zip ties, the basement lock, and the injection under medical consent.

The Hearing Kate Did Not Attend

Jon Gosselin has said Kate would not even tell him where their son was being treated. Collin writes that he smuggled a letter out, and that his father then fought for custody. Jon has said he spent $1 million, everything he had, to get his son out.

Collin writes that Kate visited him once, when he was 12, for about 20 minutes. He says she described the other children’s birthday cakes and holiday plans, told him he was not going home, said, “You broke our family,” and left without goodbye.

HOW HE GOT OUT

1. 2016: Kate has Collin admitted to Fairmount Behavioral Health System.
2. After 18 months: He asks Dr. Jack Brown when he can leave; he describes the floor hold and the shot that followed.
3. Oct. 24, 2018: Jon files in Pennsylvania for sole legal and physical custody, arguing Collin should live with him when the program ends.
4. 2018: Collin leaves the hospital into his father’s care.
5. Dec. 4, 2018: A judge awards Jon sole custody after Kate’s request to delay is denied and she does not appear.

Hannah, one of the other sextuplets, was already living with Jon. Collin has said he remains in touch with his father and with Hannah and is estranged from most of his other siblings. Kate’s 2023 statement says she and those children have stayed out of his life because of what she calls violent tendencies toward them.

What the Memoir Puts on the Record

Grand Central’s 304-page memoir published Oct. 13 is titled In the Shadow of Eight: Surviving the Reality of My Childhood and lists at $30. It puts names and numbers to stories Collin had told in pieces since 2024: a basement room that locked from the outside, zip ties after a runaway try, more than 13 drugs, and a doctor he says sat on his chest.

He announced the book on June 17, 2026. “Growing up, millions of people watched my life on television,” he wrote. “People felt like they knew me. They knew my family. They watched me grow up. But there was so much they never saw.” He added that writing it forced him back through the hardest moments and gave him “my voice.”

View this post on Instagram

“This is not a story for entertainment,” he wrote later. “It is a story to instill responsibility in everyone to advocate and speak up against abuse, injustice and the exploitation of children.” Paris Hilton, in a jacket blurb, wrote that she knows “the lasting impact institutional trauma can have on a young person’s life.” Jay Shetty called the book a reminder that wounds can become a base for healing.

The jacket says Collin is sharing “the truth about being held down, the basement cell where he was hidden for years, and the cocktail of powerful antipsychotics forced on an eleven-year-old boy.” He writes that swallowing six pills at once was so hard that Kate would “sometimes pinch my nose and push down on my neck in a rubbing motion, the way I’ve seen people administer meds to dogs.” At Fairmount, he writes, he later learned he had been on over 13 medications, including antipsychotic, antidepressant, and anti-anxiety drugs, and that nurses called him “fat boy.”

Jon & Kate Plus 8 ran from 2007 to 2017, and after the 2009 divorce the series continued as Kate Plus 8. Collin was born in 2004. The cameras sold a full house. The book is the record of the child who, in his telling, got written out of it.

He Has Not Ruled Out a Police Report

Asked whether he would file a police report, Collin said, “I have the grounds to do so.” He has also talked about wanting a polygraph. On Fox’s Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test this week, he went back over his discharge from Marine training, which he has tied to the hospital stay Kate arranged.

On Oct. 15, Jon said he “couldn’t be more proud of my son’s heartbreaking memoir and his mission to help other victims of abuse.” He added, “If you continue to falsely label my son Collin as ‘mentally ill,’ you will be held accountable. As you know, Collin has been evaluated by multiple independent psychiatrists, and that narrative is proven categorically untrue.”

Kate’s TikTok line still treats the 21-month stay as a medical event she only consented to. Fairmount’s printed reply still will not name the patient. The book names the doctor, the tile, the tray, and the joke in the room, and it does so three days after it reached stores.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a published memoir and on public statements by the people named. It is informational only and is not a finding that abuse, neglect, or malpractice occurred. It does not constitute legal advice, medical advice, or a diagnosis, and it should not be used to make decisions about child custody, psychiatric care, or whether to file a complaint. Readers who need advice on those questions should consult a licensed attorney or a qualified mental health professional. Names, quotes, and figures reflect the memoir, hospital statements, inspection records, and comments as those sources stood on the dates given, and they may change if new statements or records appear.