What right to choose? What right does a kid have when he/she is taken out of his bed at night and "transported" to some place in Utah. There is no due process. There is often no diagnosis. Take a look at Brendan's story if you need proof of that. What Che, like many others here, wants to stop, is the violation of people's rights. There is no "right" to take away the rights of others and removing that "right" is simply justice.
As far as I know most of these kids are under age and don’t control their own future. How could they possibly be given the power to make all these decisions? If a child has diabetes and doesn’t want to take their medicine do we just say okay we need to respect your rights? Once a child turns 18 they can decide what is best for them. This is not a parent decision or a program decision.
There are 12 -16 year old kids who are taken from school by their teachers to have sex. The teachers make the same argument you do that it isn’t rape because the child should have the right to choose. I disagree with this thinking.
The stories you post are unfortunate the same as the stories in the public school teachers raping the children in their care. I can see why people would want to shut down the public school system, but we need to look at resolving the issue, not shutting down the industry or school systems.
And even if this was not a rights based issue, A person cannot be forced to accept they have a problem. Common sense would indicate that trying to do so could cause a person to develop a self fulfilling prophecy... acceptance of an identity as "addict" or "alcoholic" or just plain "broken" when that very well might not be the case. The fact there are many cases like Brendan's out there would seem to indicate, if you follow, that many programs can create problems where there were none before, stripping away a person's confidence, sense of self, psychological defenses, and replacing them with a group dictated identity. Whether that is by design on the part of the program to create nice "they saved my life" marketing, imitation of other programs, a true misguided believe in the infallibility of that line of dogma, or some combination of the above is besides the point. The treatment in these programs, however gentle, if it is applied without consent, can cause harm. You might not believe that. If you do you might care, but it does happen and I don't believe the few successes out there justify even one causality. The ends do not justify the means.
I wouldn’t expect kids to automatically accept that they have a problem. You seem to focus on the few kids who don’t do well and try to use this to justify how you feel and it does work, I have seen it here. I know that it bothers many here to hear that programs save lives because if you believe that then how could you hold onto the feeling that these places should be shut down? You couldn’t, so you conveniently tag it as a marketing ploy which allows you to go back to the safety of your thinking that all programs hurt kids.
I agree that the industry is far from perfect and there is a lot of work to be done. It is too bad that the ones who do well don’t have a site like fornits. That way you would see that shutting the industry down would do a tremendous amount of harm.
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