A prescription painkiller overdose had nearly killed Victoria Gonzalez Vega, but the 61-year-old American was hopeful she’d get a second chance at life—at Retorno, an inpatient addiction programnear Beit Shemesh, a desert town near Jerusalem.

The rehab’s brochures and website painted Retorno as “a paradise,” with horseback riding and mountain hikes.

They said nothing of the full days spent peeling potatoes or shoveling horse manure. They didn’t mention the use of humiliation as a punishment, or the strange “therapy” where addicts were screamed at and insulted by their peers until they broke down. And though Gonzalez had signed up for the English program, very few of the other women or counselors ever spoke it.

But it was the silence that still haunts her.

“I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone. No one was allowed to speak to me,” Gonzalez said, describing one of the treatments she received at Retorno. “There was a lot of grunting to ask for things I needed, like a glass of water or something.”

For Gonzalez, who had been sexually abused as a child by her father, that silence and the guttural sounds were triggering. During group therapy, she began screaming, then howling. Soon some of the other women in her group started to scream, too.

The next day, Gonzalez says one “sadistic” counselor told her, “We liked what happened to you yesterday. We’re doing it to you again today.”

Speaking from a New York coffee shop—five months after she finished the program and left Israel—Gonzalez says such treatment is commonplace at Retorno. She says it’s a place where participants work long hours, learn what the rules are by breaking them, and are handed down peculiar punishments including timeouts, isolation, and being forced to dress like a baby for “immature” behavior.

And now, the therapeutic community, which practices a self-described “tough love” philosophy—one that American mental-health experts label ineffective and possibly detrimental—is making a concerted push to recruit more American addicts for its programs.

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At 62 years old, Gonzalez—a lawyer by training and an artist by nature—was 40 years older than her nearest peer at Retorno. Before she entered the facility in 2015, she was living with her then-boyfriend in Tel Aviv; when the relationship went sour, Gonzalez became depressed, living most days locked in her bedroom, high on Klonopin, Valium, and alcohol. One day her boyfriend’s son came to get her for dinner and found her unconscious in a pool of her own vomit.

When she woke from her coma months later, her boyfriend told her he didn’t want her to come home. He suggested a place for disturbed artists, then, she says, he found out about Retorno, for people with addiction problems.

“And I certainly have an addiction problem,” Gonzalez says.

Though she wasn’t technically committed, Gonzalez had run out of options and was taken to Retorno “not entirely voluntarily,” according to the rehab’s director. Still, hearing that she had been accepted to Retorno, Gonzalez wrote to her boyfriend, “I feel hope—something always beyond my reach since I was 18. Before that, survival itself was all I could hope for, dream of. Now it may be possible to exorcise the demons.”

But Gonzalez says she never got the treatment she needed.