sorry Who- your failure to name facilities that follow the principles I set forth or explain why they don't follow them speaks volumes. Initially you said that a lot of facilities follow them. You have now retreated. How come?
Show me where I said that.
The facilities you support do not operate in a manner that is consistent with the principles on the list because if they did they would not exist.
Of course they don’t, they work to their own list.. why should they listen to you? When did you consult them and ask them to follow your list? The facilities would work fine abiding by your list.
It is also nonsense to say that anyone could make a list. Of course they could but the list I made would require the schools to operate transparently and follow legally required educational policies and the standard of care for the conditions they purport to treat.
Why don’t you back up what you say then.. for example where does it say the child should be able to make their initial phone call within a minimum of 2 weeks? Some schools may do 4 weeks… what do you base your 2 weeks on?
The list goes to the heart of the facilities marketing, the conning of parents and the abuse of kids. If you made a similarly specific list they would not abide by it either.
Exactly my point, you could ask 10 different people to make a list and you would get 10 different lists… which one would be right? Which one should the schools follow? If you were starting a TBS would you call some teenager who has no education in the field to make a list for them to follow? Of course not. If you didn’t follow everyone’s list would they have right to call you a con artist and say that you abuse kids?
I am not interested in discussions of who is offended or not by what I write. I am interested only in having you explain why the facilities you espouse don't publish meaningful statistics, do use psychiatric language but ignore standard practices, routinely have "therapy" provided by uncertified individuals, have lengthy black out periods without involving mental health professional in the black out decisions, routinely accept adolescents into treatment over the objection of non custodial parents. If you want to go through the items on the list one at a time I would be gald to explain why the facilities do not and will not abide by the standards i set forth but I think you already know that.
If the schools are not meeting standards set down by the laws in their state then they should be exposed in these areas and corrected. If you are going to state that kids should have initial contact within 2 weeks I need to understand where you get these requirements from? If they need to publish specific types of statistics then lets take a look at what is required. Some schools are more data driven than others and publish statistics. Some schools don’t publish statistics at all.
One more question. You keep talking about your concern for kids. What do you do to protect kids and their families from what you consider to be the bad facilities?
If a parent contacts me I try to lead them away from the more abusive facilities and/or have them read specific threads I have earmarked here on fornits for them.
You know which ones they are. Don't you think it would be a better use of your time to work at closing those facilities then trying so hard to influence the discussion here? And wouldn't convincing the facilities you respect, but that you refuse to identify, to adopt the ten reasonable principles be something important that you ought devote some time to. I guess not.
No, shutting facilities down does not work.. they will gather themselves up and open up shop someplace else. What we need to do is strengthen the ones that are good and the bad ones will go out of business. You need to beat them on a business level.
Your 10 principles you came up with are fine, MIS, and I agree with most of them… many schools run along the same lines that you propose but they all go by a different list…. Every school is different. If every school adopted your list it still wouldn’t solve all the issues that schools face today… the schools need to become more specialized in the types of kids they accept so that they can focus more closely on the individual childs needs. Accepting children who are violent and placing them in the same environment with kids who are working on issues which are the result of violence in their past is not a good idea, in my opinion, and schools have recognized this and are moving to become more selective in their acceptance criteria.
Another item which was not on your list is a minimum requirement for the educational levels for the staff that are interfacing with the children. I think this would be a needed addition to the list also.
These are the areas that we need to be working on. If some of the better schools keep raising the standards and increasing their success rates then the rest of the industry will need to keep up or they will go out of business. Government regulation isn’t going to do crap in protecting the kids, in my opinion.
...
