Author Topic: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run  (Read 140885 times)

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Offline Inculcated

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Meanwhile...
« Reply #345 on: December 02, 2009, 04:28:30 PM »
“I can’t feel you feeling it” inside out…still can’t find the words for it, which is weird because so many come to mind. It’s hard to make sense of what I might be trying to say when all of the words I have to communicate collide. Anyway, If we were to imagine some conceptual hell of non-linear time we could look back and see that the extended group never ended, part of me is still sitting there, and there I am in the next room on a different day on chair, while elsewhere trapped there unblinkingly clock watching the interminable nightmare of the never ending sessions, and just a blink away we’re transitioning to our “circle of trust” from what others call “dissipations” and we’ve all been in this ring of the circus before and everyone knows how it goes and the show must go on so you know here we go and we all watch the shadow on the wall made by H. screaming at any empty chair and we hear that boy from the day room wind up again (it’s all the same place when these places get under your skin) and we look at the scars on his hands and try to draw upon  the compassion drained of us in the fighting ring encounters and to draw a breath, and over there we’re in the round and …oh, the Robin sings like a canary and she screams and I can’t help but think that if this group were gathered in the other ring I’d be picking little yellow feathers of hers from my teeth, but for right now (the eternal now, as someone once put it) I want her to shut up so I don’t have to feel her feeling and I want the drone of her tearful moans to go on and drown out the sounds of my hurting for her and of my own fears, so I’m not called upon to have them affronted here in the eyes and hearts of … Feedback emanates from me in my stead, and I play the that was a brave share song for her, an empty offering falling from my tied tongue. In a game theory way we are bound in this common ground, not to each other but by one another in the rules of the roles we're made to play.By turns the shadows on the wall shift in our dimly lighted room where our circle is interned. In turn the shapes change their span and shade.  The shadows cast themselves from where they stand over us and over again their punch drunk screaming incantations are eliciting cultivated keening. All the while others are dispelling themselves with disappearing magic into the patterned fabric… And I can’t speak a word of this though my lips move making sounds without meaning drowned out of something else meant for keeping and lost in the midst. Now close your eyes & make a wish, when opened again, my pupils constrict.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
“A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free”  Nikos Kazantzakis

Offline SEKTO

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Gasping for breath
« Reply #346 on: December 05, 2009, 07:35:17 PM »
Tonight, friends, I am so depressed that I just do not know what to do.  I've been on a studying jag all day long (since about 9:30 this morning) and have stopped only to make tea, eat a sandwich, and go to the bathroom.  The weather outside is cold, the rain is pouring down, and it's really windy too.  Foggy.  Because of the shitty weather, I cannot leave my apartment to go out and try and have some fun, and none of my friends are available to speak in the phone right now.  So it's just me and the TV and the four walls and my computer.  I do not feel like reading a book, and am exhausted from studying all day.  My anxieties are getting the better of me and I just wish that I could cry it all out, but the tears will not come.  Can't sleep either.  Actually, I feel like I am suffocating.  I just need some support right now, as I am in a very bad frame of mind.  Please help; I do not know what to do.
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Offline Inculcated

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #347 on: December 05, 2009, 09:19:19 PM »
your phone is ringing.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
“A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free”  Nikos Kazantzakis

Offline Ursus

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #348 on: December 05, 2009, 10:44:16 PM »
Quote from: "SEKTO"
Tonight, friends, I am so depressed that I just do not know what to do. I've been on a studying jag all day long (since about 9:30 this morning) and have stopped only to make tea, eat a sandwich, and go to the bathroom. The weather outside is cold, the rain is pouring down, and it's really windy too. Foggy. Because of the shitty weather, I cannot leave my apartment to go out and try and have some fun, and none of my friends are available to speak in the phone right now. So it's just me and the TV and the four walls and my computer. I do not feel like reading a book, and am exhausted from studying all day. My anxieties are getting the better of me and I just wish that I could cry it all out, but the tears will not come. Can't sleep either. Actually, I feel like I am suffocating. I just need some support right now, as I am in a very bad frame of mind. Please help; I do not know what to do.
You are burnt out from studying, your blood sugar is low, no surprise that a low might come at this time.

Keep in mind, this too ... shall pass.  :D
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
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Offline SEKTO

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #349 on: December 06, 2009, 04:28:00 PM »
Quote
You are burnt out from studying, your blood sugar is low, no surprise that a low might come at this time.

Keep in mind, this too ... shall pass.  :D

Too much Ritalin and Adderall, too little food, the stress of finals.  At least I get plenty of sleep, though, and my grades are excellent, all A's and B's.  Add to all that some tension in my personal life and you've got the recipe for a real depressive episode.  I sure do hope that it will pass.  The semester is over in a couple of weeks, anyway.  Then a month off.  I'm going to relax and read a lot in that time, try and get out more, weather permiting.

Really, if there were some kind of autism pill or some such that I could take to make me NT overnight, then I'd take it.  I'd rather not be this way, I'd rather not have this PDD.  Actually, I hate being like this.  Imagine being a traumatized 22-year old who is trapped in the body of a 36-year old, but who also has the intellect of a 50 year old.  It's very uncomfortable, kind of what I imagine that literal blindness would be like, but it's a social blindness.  Imagine being really smart, yet really stupid at the same time.  People have always thought me eccentric and even weird, but I do not know how else to be.  I don't know how NOT to be like this.

That's what has me depressed.  I feel a great sense of loss and grief.  It'll never really go away, either.  All the therapy and medication in the world won't make me NT.  Coming to terms with all of this makes me very emotional.  My social, emotional, chronological, and intellectual ages will never match.  I am as insecure inside as a nerdy little kid with no friends; I am still in many respects that nerdy and bullied little kid with no friends that I was when I was 12.  It pains me very much, and I do not like it at all.  It's a very isolating feeling; it's as if I do not belong to this world, never have, and never will.

My emotions are very childlike, though I do not necessarily think of myself as childish.  My friends, those who really know me well, know this to be the case.  In a lot of ways, I'm still a kid.

Keep in mind as well, I was only assessed as being on the spectrum a little over a year ago, when I was 34.  Well, AS was not added to the DSM until 1994 (the year I left DAYTOP) anyway.  Before that, nobody outside of certain medical specialists knew about ASD.  Next year, I'll undergo the neuro-psychological testing necessary in order for an official diagnosis to be made.  

And DAYTOP surely did not help me one bit.  I only started to unpack the DAYTOP stuff a year or so ago, too.  All they did for me was compound my insecurities.  All that constant humiliation, the  degrading LEs and all the screaming, (not to mention the abuse and neglect that I lived with at home) led me to have a deeply internalized sense of shame and perpetual self-doubt.

And so my parents stick me in this fucked up cult in order to make me "better."  Years later over dinner, just last summer actually while I was at MH, my father (who had come to visit me there) told me that he never could see how all that stuff that DAYTOP did was really supposed to help anybody.  I told him that DAYTOP is a cult and that they screwed my mind up.  He told me that he always thought it to be a cult too, but that he didn't know of any better options as far as what to do with me.  I told him that DAYTOP did me great harm in the long run, but that I forgive him. He didn't know any better, and he thought that it was helping me.  For that matter, I thought so too.  

Those people did not know what the hell they were doing, and for some kid like me, it was the worst place I could have been. The only thing is, that it took me fifteen years to see that fact.  Well, the second-to-worst place; they would have killed me in residential. No wonder Mike Gomez split right before they would have sent him to Athens.  They would have eaten him alive there.

The other day I was telling this woman, after my Personality Theory class and over coffee in the library, about my experience in DAYTOP.  She told me about being manipulated and used by her therapist, while in Jungian therapy many years ago.  So I opened up told her about the chair, the encounter groups, Mike and the pacifier, and the time I was made to wear a sign that said, "Ask me to bark like a dog."  She looked at me incredulously, as if she thought that I was making it all up.  I assured her that I was not.  She told me those were some of the worst and most abusive "therapeutic" B-Mod practices that she'd ever heard.  I told her that that was only the beginning, the tip of the iceberg in terms of the abuses of the Troubled Teen Industry.  She told me that she'd never heard anything like that before, that she had no idea.  I just smiled.  What to say?
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Offline SEKTO

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Offline Inculcated

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #351 on: December 07, 2009, 10:50:20 PM »
SEKTO,
'New theme song? Seriously, I hope this ^ piece of music is not all you’re listening to. That’s probably not an ideal soundtrack for dealing with the dismal weather, exams to study for and being blue.
Cheer up.  :hug:
A song with some sunshine
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“A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free”  Nikos Kazantzakis

Offline SEKTO

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #352 on: December 08, 2009, 10:21:36 PM »
Feeling much better now, dear, thank you.
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Offline Ursus

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #353 on: December 09, 2009, 12:47:08 PM »
Quote from: "SEKTO"
The other day I was telling this woman, after my Personality Theory class and over coffee in the library, about my experience in DAYTOP. She told me about being manipulated and used by her therapist, while in Jungian therapy many years ago. So I opened up told her about the chair, the encounter groups, Mike and the pacifier, and the time I was made to wear a sign that said, "Ask me to bark like a dog." She looked at me incredulously, as if she thought that I was making it all up. I assured her that I was not. She told me those were some of the worst and most abusive "therapeutic" B-Mod practices that she'd ever heard. I told her that that was only the beginning, the tip of the iceberg in terms of the abuses of the Troubled Teen Industry. She told me that she'd never heard anything like that before, that she had no idea. I just smiled. What to say?
Classic. This should be a scene in a Jacques Tati movie. 'Tis a pity that he only made 5 or so...
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Offline SEKTO

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #354 on: December 09, 2009, 03:35:27 PM »
Too obscure of a reference for me, man.  That went over my head.  What do you mean?
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Offline SEKTO

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #355 on: March 04, 2010, 09:16:34 PM »
Recently, for diagnostic purposes, I have undergone a full battery of neuro-psychological testing.  This being done, I now know conclusively that I am a person on the autistic spectrum.  The one test that was, to me, the most memorable was called ADOS.  

http://portal.wpspublish.com/portal/pag ... ema=PORTAL

The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) is the "gold standard" for assessing and diagnosing autism and pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) across ages, developmental levels, and language skills.

I was also given the WAIS, the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R), the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ), the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a battery of purely neurological testing, (the names of which I cannot recall), and as well went through a semi-structured interview with a neuropsychiatrist.

After all this stuff was evaluated, it was determined (long story short) that I meet criteria set by the designers of the ADOS and the other tests that would place my brain somewhere on the the jumble of developmental syndromes known collectively as "autism spectrum disorders."  I have now been conclusively diagnosed.

Just today, as a matter of fact, I was given an fMRI scan, which entailed my being placed in the chamber and given a series of "moral reasoning tasks," as well as certain protocols measuring my capacity for self-referential thought; also I performed episodic and semantic memory-related tasks.  I was in that damn chamber for over an hour and a half.

On a screen were described to me different scenarios, and then I was asked questions pertaining to the ethics of the situation being described.  This, while scientists were looking at different areas of my brain and how they "lit up" according to the responses I gave.   "Is Bobby forbidden to give Suzy the ham sandwich, or is he allowed to?"  It was that kind of thing, up to progressively more and more ethically ambiguous situations.

My point is, this: if I had been diagnosed twenty years ago, and placed in the care of competent therapists, then the whole trajectory of the rest of my life would probably have been much, much different (in a good way).  No, instead I was placed in DAYTOP and they did little other than try and do their damndest to try and get me to "act normal."  "We do not like the way you are behaving, so stop it or else."  No referalls, no evaluations, no nothing,  just lots of encounter groups and humiliation.  I came out of DAYTOP  with and deeply instilled and constantly reinforced sense that there was something very wrong with me.  The DAYTOP "counselors" used to laugh and call me a "space cadet" who fried his brain with too much acid.  That was their explanation for why I was so different from the rest of the kids, too much acid.  It outrages me that none of the DAYTOP "counseling" personnel back in my time there were in any way, shape, or form trained or degreed counselors. If I had been in residential or else some other and even more confrontational program, then who knows, I might not have made in this far in life.  It grieves me deeply to think of "what might have been."  Every day I gain more insight into just how much damage was done to me in DAYTOP.  It was like badly botched surgery.  DAYTOP was a toxic environment for somebody like me to have been in, toxic for anybody, but for me the exposure to that milieu was the equivalent of being given psychological Thalidomide.  The experience was downright psychologically disfiguring, and the scars will never go away; I will heal, and am healing, but the scars will remain.  For somebody like me, with a profound PDD, it was devastating.  But the hell of it is, for the longest time, I was grateful to them.  And to top it all off, I did not ever begin to recognize what had happened in there until over fifteen years after the fact.  This revelation came to me after a few months at MH.  There, while doing reading on identity formation and boundaries, and thinking about my early life, I had that AHA! moment, and finally saw DAYTOP for what it is: essentially a sobriety cult which employs thought-reform techniques in order to manipulate children.  

DAYTOP did me (us) great harm in the long run.  And it makes me very sad inside.
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Offline Anonymous

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #356 on: March 05, 2010, 01:02:02 AM »
Quote from: "SEKTO"
Recently, for diagnostic purposes, I have undergone a full battery of neuro-psychological testing.  This being done, I now know conclusively that I am a person on the autistic spectrum.  The one test that was, to me, the most memorable was called ADOS.  

http://portal.wpspublish.com/portal/pag ... ema=PORTAL

The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) is the "gold standard" for assessing and diagnosing autism and pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) across ages, developmental levels, and language skills.

I was also given the WAIS, the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R), the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ), the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a battery of purely neurological testing, (the names of which I cannot recall), and as well went through a semi-structured interview with a neuropsychiatrist.

After all this stuff was evaluated, it was determined (long story short) that I meet criteria set by the designers of the ADOS and the other tests that would place my brain somewhere on the the jumble of developmental syndromes known collectively as "autism spectrum disorders."  I have now been conclusively diagnosed.

Just today, as a matter of fact, I was given an fMRI scan, which entailed my being placed in the chamber and given a series of "moral reasoning tasks," as well as certain protocols measuring my capacity for self-referential thought; also I performed episodic and semantic memory-related tasks.  I was in that damn chamber for over an hour and a half.

On a screen were described to me different scenarios, and then I was asked questions pertaining to the ethics of the situation being described.  This, while scientists were looking at different areas of my brain and how they "lit up" according to the responses I gave.   "Is Bobby forbidden to give Suzy the ham sandwich, or is he allowed to?"  It was that kind of thing, up to progressively more and more ethically ambiguous situations.

My point is, this: if I had been diagnosed twenty years ago, and placed in the care of competent therapists, then the whole trajectory of the rest of my life would probably have been much, much different (in a good way).  No, instead I was placed in DAYTOP and they did little other than try and do their damndest to try and get me to "act normal."  "We do not like the way you are behaving, so stop it or else."  No referalls, no evaluations, no nothing,  just lots of encounter groups and humiliation.  I came out of DAYTOP  with and deeply instilled and constantly reinforced sense that there was something very wrong with me.  The DAYTOP "counselors" used to laugh and call me a "space cadet" who fried his brain with too much acid.  That was their explanation for why I was so different from the rest of the kids, too much acid.  It outrages me that none of the DAYTOP "counseling" personnel back in my time there were in any way, shape, or form trained or degreed counselors. If I had been in residential or else some other and even more confrontational program, then who knows, I might not have made in this far in life.  It grieves me deeply to think of "what might have been."  Every day I gain more insight into just how much damage was done to me in DAYTOP.  It was like badly botched surgery.  DAYTOP was a toxic environment for somebody like me to have been in, toxic for anybody, but for me the exposure to that milieu was the equivalent of being given psychological Thalidomide.  The experience was downright psychologically disfiguring, and the scars will never go away; I will heal, and am healing, but the scars will remain.  For somebody like me, with a profound PDD, it was devastating.  But the hell of it is, for the longest time, I was grateful to them.  And to top it all off, I did not ever begin to recognize what had happened in there until over fifteen years after the fact.  This revelation came to me after a few months at MH.  There, while doing reading on identity formation and boundaries, and thinking about my early life, I had that AHA! moment, and finally saw DAYTOP for what it is: essentially a sobriety cult which employs thought-reform techniques in order to manipulate children.  

DAYTOP did me (us) great harm in the long run.  And it makes me very sad inside.

The MRI was not around twenty years ago, sure wish it was there for ya buddy. At least you have been diagnosed and maybe some good can come from this for you.
 :shamrock:
Danny........
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Offline Inculcated

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #357 on: March 05, 2010, 05:22:48 PM »
You’re off on your time lines again Danny Bennison. Not that it would’ve helped much for a non neurotypical kid being immersed in Daytop’s program fifteen years ago.

Understandably your knowledge of Daytop’s intake and treatment practices is also limited.

The larger point that you’ve missed here is that at Daytop no considerations toward developing an individual treatment plan for SEKTO were made. Daytop’s program by its very nature caused lasting harm to SEKTO in particular, because no considerations were made for his being non neurotypical. They targeted any differences in him as being character flaws and reduced them to damaging labels, while imposing on him a demand to accept these labels and conform.
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Offline Inculcated

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #358 on: March 05, 2010, 05:23:24 PM »
SEKTO: I’m very glad you’re feeling empowered by the acknowledgement and support you’re getting along with your developing understanding.
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Offline Ursus

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Re: DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
« Reply #359 on: March 05, 2010, 06:19:05 PM »
Quote from: "Inculcated"
You're off on your time lines again Danny Bennison.
Sorry, I believe you are in error to imply that the Materials Research Institute at Penn State (first link) was in any way involved with the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which is what Sekto was referring to...

Your second link was more spot-on. Nevertheless, from the time-line given, it is difficult to appreciate when MRIs were, for all practical purposes, already in routine use on humans, e.g., in a hospital setting. To that end, I will add that I personally toured an MRI facility that was operating as part of a hospital setting back in 1985 or 86. So it was certainly before then.
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