_ Zen Agent:_________
Thanks for posting, it's interesting to hear from a PV counselor who went through the Covenant transition. The program is off the rails these days. If you don't mind me asking, were you there when Dr. Vance Sherwood was clinical director, and do you know if Bob Pegler has a degree in Psychology? I appreciate any input you might have from your time there.
Reply from expvstaff
Honestly, I'm a bit unsure about posting here. It is very upsetting to me to read from folks (you included) about what the Village is seen as now or how it was experienced. This guy Turtle was there when I was there, and I surely worked with him. I felt like most of what I did (what PV did too) was helpful and therapeutic and probably unique. I worked with an Administrator who often agreed to keep a kid for an extra 2 or 3 months after the expiration of insurance benefits because that's what they needed. We did discharge kids who ran out of benefits sometimes but I really felt like we had a good relationship with many families and many insurance companies.
It's hard to reconcile that spirit of goodwill and energy with what is being related here. Not saying we saved everyone or turned every kid around, but I was proud of what we did and knew that I was making a difference. That was very important to me, because I knew that we were tough and demanding.
Covenant opened up the floodgates of state-custody kids (foregoing the majority private insurance kids) and that brought in huge numbers of very challenging patients who were facility-hardened and not interested in therapy. They were much angrier on the whole, and staff assaults (and consequently, PCI's) went up.
I worked with Dr. Sherwood and found him to be a pretty brilliant guy, actually. His ideas on group dynamics (treat the individual by creating a group dynamic that rewarded the group for an individual's efforts) were a key to what we did. He felt that since peer pressure is one of the biggest influences on adolescents, then that should be used to help in positive ways. Working with Dr. Sherwood was one of the better things about working there for me. He struggled with the Covenant transition and left by the 1997 or so.
Bob Pegler, as I said, doesn't resemble to me the person described in some of the posts. Bob's "gift", to me, was a natural ability to get to the heart of the matter with kids who desperately needed to be understood. He was a no b.s. kind of guy but I never
Zen Agent
29 November 2007, 11:52
Thanks for the insight into the old PV. I think they suffer from program drift and the corporate bottom line mentality. DCS quit referring kids to PV after some unknown disaster, so PV may be suffering from a drought of patients.
expvstaff
1 December 2007, 11:50
I absolutely think that bringing in more kids in state custody compromised the program in many ways. You ended up getting more patients who spent longer times in STU or whose goals for treatment were modified to no longer include a stay in the cabin program. We saw kids come in and we knew that we'd only have them for 3 or 4 months; once they were "stabilized" in STU, they were discharged to group homes, foster care, home, or other facilities. Naturally, they often had little motivation to progress as they knew they were short-timers. The use of group dynamics and treating the individual by treating the group seemed, in my opinion, less effective. Some of the state patients had no interest in progressing. When you've been in 15 different placements in 3 years and you're hopeless as a result, it is really difficult to believe that anything that you do is actually going to make a difference or that somehow you can break the cycle.
Beyond that, some of the newer patients were nuts. Just totally screwed up and at times psychotic. Pardon my frankness, but they weren't budging from their orientation to the world, and it didn't matter to some of them if they destroyed the group dynamics. They were scared, scarred, and damaged and they weren't giving in, no way, no how.
An unused cabin on both the boys and girls campuses were then utilized as "STU cabins", with round-the-clock awake staffing (as opposed to regular cabin staffing in which the counselors slept at night). Some cabin staff and some STU staff transferred to those programs; others were hired directly and trained specifically for these hybrids.
I believe that a security alarm system was rigged up for the STU cabins, in the event of a restraint or something. I know that lighting was an issue, and so a system with car batteries and lanterns was used so the overnight staff could record patient notes and more easily monitor the patients.
These "developments" further moved PV away from its origins as a unique environment designed to treat the treatment-resistent adolescent and into a place that seemed poised to mine whatever they could from whatever was out there.
Dr. Sherwood eventually grew disillusioned with the changes and left as well, I think by 1997.
Message from expvstaff
1 December 2007, 14:36
after reading here (and on Fornits) about that counselor, I searched a bit and found the links and your email exchanges with her. It looks like her MySpace pages are gone, by the way.
One of the great fears about bringing in new staff is that, especially after Covenant came in, salary and standards were lowered (high school diploma okay instead of BS degree preferably in psych) and you got people with all manner of experience and inexperience. I know that there were a few people hired who had worked up at Mountain View in Dandridge, which was pretty different from PV at the time. PV ended up taking people who were less qualified and were willing to work for less money. A bad combination, as it turned out. We could no longer be as exclusive and picky when it came to hiring, as other places paid more.
I'm trying to remember some specifics about family therapy. FT was required but it usually wouldn't start face-to-face until after the kid had been in STU for about a month or had reached the 2nd level. That was one of the "carrots" that was held out to newbies. "See your family when you get to level 2."
I worked with some awesome family therapists who pushed and prodded, supported and examined, and worked those family dynamics. That went really well when there was an actual family involved. As I mentioned before, that happened a lot less with patients in state custody. Therapists began to come and go a bit more around 1993 or '94 and also as before, when that happened you lost that history, that sense of purpose that PV had early on. The newer FT's were professional but, if my memory is correct, were often pretty new and inexperienced. FT was a key component of what we were doing since the family was the preferred placement upon discharge. Patients were given TA's (therapeutic assignments) home for the weekend to "try out" coping strategies with the family in the months prior to discharge. Again, that was something that happened with kids who were at the Bear level (level 2 of 4) in the cabins.
I don't recall many instances of parents who were actively questioning what we were doing in the early 90's. Certainly we weren't given carte blanche and did whatever we wanted; I think it was more of a comprehensive approach to treatment that kept them involved and informed.
We had kids who got pulled out early (according to our treatment plan) by parents who had issues or grew impatient o
Zen Agent to expvstaff
1 December 2007, 16:41
Your last message got cut-off at the end - is there a word limit? The staff's blog disappeared after I emailed a link to PV's administrator and CC'd it to HIPAA/OHRS.
We were not allowed to question the program, anywhere. All we were told was "If you're against the program you're against your child". We were given a guideline that made the rounds of the mental health professionals we know, including some from CAFETY- to a person, all were shocked.
The program lost its direction, that's obvious. Every PV clinician we encountered seemed de-sensitized and intolerant of parental concerns, openly laughing at some questions and occasionally losing their tempers when questions came up they did not want to think about. One psychologist flipped when questioned about PV's success statistics - my wife knew they were based on a questionnaire sent to 121 people, I believe. Anyway, only 33% returned them, and that was PV's database. The psychologist got angry when this was brought up and growled "Why are you ASKING these questions?'
expvstaff
1 December 2007, 16:57
oh shoot...hate to see that it got cut off. It was a good one
I guess my main point is that parents were involved in therapy from the beginning, even if their kids were in STU and unable to attend FT meetings due to their level. Parents still came in for sessions. Dr. Sherwood believed that kids needed to take responsibility for what they were doing now as a result of things that had happened to them earlier in their lives...that they couldn't go back in time to figure out what had happened to them but would benefit instead from trying to understand how things in the past (and at home) were affecting them currently. FT was a big part of that, so I don't think that it is necessarily correct that he (or PV at the time) didn't promote FT or attempt to treat the family as a unit.
