Greetings. I tried following your advice for about 20 years after Straight, Inc. Now, I'm damned near 40 and I've realized that was a mistake. Elan is not unique. It's based on the Synanon model and so was Straight.
Check out the forum on the Teen Help Industry right next door. The "treatment" model has spread accross the country. There are hundreds of them with thousands of parents and other recruiters working the street like the religious converts that they are.
They all follow the same MO of recruiting from the wealthier, more influential demographics. That means that they have dedicated converts in entertainment, education, law enforcement, the lgislature, the judiciary (especially juvenile), news media, banking and other areas of influence.
Maybe you're lucky to live in a community that resists change. But the first time they blocked off the beach in Ft. Lauderdale w/ hurricane fencing and stationed cops at intervals to stop and search every 3rd or 5th person seeking access to the
Fourth of July celebration, I knew something was up.
Where I come from, parents don't have a choice. We can't just know better than to put our own kids in a synanon based program. If they skip school, smoke pot, get into a fight, refuse medications required by the child study teams or commit any of a number of other agregious crimes, the school resource officer will take them downtown to the juvenile intervention facility (JIF) for evaluation. Once properly tagged and gataloged like that, it doesn't take much before the wealthy ones get shipped off to avoid county facilities while the less wealthy get treated to a watered down version of the Program compliments of the tax payors.
There's a reality based fiction called Coldwater in the works. See
http://ColdWaterTheMovie.com/ There's also a documentary on Straight/Kids that should be coming out soon. I hope the Elan documentary will happen.
While we slept, they walked. Now it's time to put a stop to that agenda. People need to know what really goes on behind euphemisms like "Help for troubled teens" and "Emotional growth schools".
Were the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an article of food. Government is just as infallible,[sic] too, when it fixes systems in physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere.... It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
http://laissezfairebooks.com/product.cfm?op=view&pid=FF7485&aid=10247' target='_new'>Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia
