::puke::
It certainly does have the too-sweet taste of Koolade coursing through the "success stories":
"I'm grateful for this place," she says. "I'd be dead if it weren't for it..." The old "dead or in jail" shtick...
"I spent four and a half months there, but at the end, I didn't want to leave STU," Claire chimes in. This is a PV cliche - it's drilled into the "show pony" kids paraded out for parents. It normally goes like this: "They drag us in here kicking and screaming, but at the end we don't want to leave,"
Even PV's administrator Steve Petty spouts it:
"So many of them leave here, and you just can't believe it is the same kid who came in here kicking and screaming," Petty said. (
thedailytimes.com -
"Peninsula Village marks 20th anniversary" This is very telling, my wife and I have seen this still going on:
One observation is, however, easy to make. Amy, Claire, Emily, Jennifer, and the unnamed boy were all serious substance abusers with problems that, though severe, were not uncommon to similarly situated young people. They, and probably their families, obviously believe they have benefited from the rigorous discipline and the 12-step philosophy at the Village.PV's real "success" stories are created through addiction therapy, the AA ritual of breaking them down. Staff really push the "we're saving your life" angle. A well-known adolescent Psychiatrist told me that full-scale addiction in teens is rare, traits are surfacing but addiction takes a long time to fully manifest itself. A program like PV can still scare the shit out of a non-addict, though, and have a "success". Is it really a success to scare a kid into AA-12 Step dependency for life?
Where does PV fail? Anything other than addiction therapy.
Elizabeth was not a user of alcohol or illegal drugs. Her problems stemmed from a medical condition over which she had little control, and it broke her when her medication was reduced at the same time she was placed in a tough new environment and separated from her mother.My step daughter's antidepressant dosage was ramped-up to a scary level. She sneaked a mention of the change in dosage into a letter to her mom. Mom called to ask what was going on, and the next letter said "Surprise! You call and my dosage gets sharply cut,"
SettleForNothingLess had no substance abuse problem at all, which irritates Bob Pegler, the addiction guru. Settle refused to admit to any bogus addictions and fought tooth and nail against PV, which means she got a lot of Thorazine. In his impotent rage at not finding an addiction in Settle, he accused her of being addicted to the tranquilizers they shot her up with. The same thing happened with my step daughter - no addiction, no treatment, all they could do was keep her in isolation, deny her contact with any family member than her father - who was paying the bill. He was paying for a "service" to be rendered. In family therapy sessions, the PV therapist gives the kid a "focus" - an objective for the session with the parent. One "focus" my step daughter was given before a session with her father was especially repugnant to her. It was simply "Go in there and be his little girl again".
THAT'S the service dad was paying for.
PV's clinicians don't have the skills to treat depression, anorexia, etc., which require serious one-on-one therapy. Why anyone would put a child suffering from depression into a "sadistic" environment like STU defies logic. Do they really need to be "broken down"?
Anyway, we've got Vance Sherwood to look into now, the self-proclaimed "designer" of PV's methodology. Oddly, it appears he didn't get his Ph.D until 1994. The only mentions of a degree held by him before that date is D. Div. - Doctor of Divinity, which opens up a whole new mess. Not sure it's the same guy yet. Sherwood wrote a book called
Getting Past Resistance in Psychotherapy with the Out of Control Adolescent, which I'll bet details his "design" at PV.
Sherwood left very shortly after this Metro Pulse piece came out, at the same time a long-term addiction specialist filed bankruptcy and doesn't appear on cached PV clinical staff pages. It's possible the girl Elizabeth filed a lawsuit against PV, which resulted in the ouster of some key figures. Betty Bean, the author of the story, is still around Knoxville, I'm going to see if I can contact her.