On 2004-01-10 15:12:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Sounds good, but really, do you honestly expect the private for-profit teen help industry to go belly up in the next 5 or even 10 years? Not very realistic thinking in my mind knowing that the real problem is grounded in social policy and a pervasive zero-tolerance approach to child rearing. Second, the decline in community based social and mental health services in America has played a measurable role in fueling the growth of the privatized behavioral healthcare and specialty schools industry. There has to be sweeping changes across the board before these programs are no longer viewed as part of the solution, but rather part of the problem. However I do believe the publicity surrounding a large direct/class action lawsuit would work to broaden the awareness of the public, perhaps setting the stage for an end to the exploitation of families and youth by a largely self-regulated (and inefficiently monitored) industry.
Just my thoughts, any feedback?"
I think it could happen in ten years, and will definitely happen within twenty, that there will be an end to this industry as it is now.
In the history of the mental health profession, there have been many wrong turns like this one. Eventually, they are sunk by their own excesses.
There are far too many adults already who are survivors of the abuses of these places, and more are added every year. The brainwashing wears off, these people put their lives back together, and sooner or later one of them will come along who will be charismatic enough and an effective enough spokesman to galvanize public opinion, and there will be a ready population of other survivors to confirm the truth of what that charismatic spokesman says.
It's too good a story for the press to leave alone. Investigative reporters will come back to it over, and over, and over, and over.
This kind of thing---an exessive nightmare situation in the mental health field---has happened before, and it will happen again. It's *always* eventually taken down by the same kinds of forces, and this particular mental health fad is already showing the stress fractures that have always heralded the end of such fads.
I believe ten years is more likely than twenty, and five is not out of the realm of possibility.
If you've never studied the history of mental illness and societal responses to it, this could look new and unprecedented to you, I guess.
And people always tend to overestimate the tendency of things to go on in the same direction they are now ("the trend is your friend") and underestimate the certainty of change.
But if you know the history, it's pretty damned obvious what comes next.
What comes next is a huge outrageous national news story that outrages and inflames the whole country, and then the mesmerized horror as the authorities and media start digging, and digging, and digging at everything they uncover, then the lawsuits and the political speeches and the new legislation and the DA's an police chiefs and federal and state agencies all wanting to show they're "doing something."
If it isn't Ryan F. and Coldwater, which it may well not be, it will be another. Eventually these places will pick the wrong victim(s) and do the wrong thing(s) to him/her/them, and it will all blow up in their faces, and the whole scandal will burst wide open. It'll happen suddenly, and when it happens, it'll happen fast, like a dam bursting.
I mean, you don't have to be Jean Dixon or Psychic Friends or something to see it coming---all you have to do is know the history and know what's happened when this kind of thing has happened in mental health before.
Or in pain-in-the-butt teen management, for that matter---the dam bursting effect is exactly what caused the formation of the juvenile justice system as we know it (mistakes and all--the solutions are never perfect, just better than what they replace). The police arrested some kid on a BS juvenile charge and didn't tell his parents---laws at that time, they didn't have to---shipped him off to juvie with basically no due process at all. Poor kid's parents thought he was dead or kidnapped. And it was all legal. And it caused that dam bursting thing that changed the laws all over the country--that one kid that captured popular imagination and outraged voters over one really egregious incident.
See, the problem with people who do something bad and get away with it, is that they think they can do it again and get away with it. And when they do, eventually they grow to think they can do it over and over forever and always get away with it.
And on that last point, they're ALWAYS wrong.
You might get away with something once, twice, a dozen, a hundred times. But if you do it as a habitual practice, you always eventually make a crucial mistake and get caught.
The "Teen Help Industry" is in denial. They're like Ted Bundy---they think they're smarter than everybody who's looking to stop them or catch them, they think they can go on doing it forever.
The truth is that some school somewhere may have already made the mistake that will bring the whole industry crashing down. It's a matter of time, but it's a statistical certainty that it *will* happen---and from the cracks in the edifice, I'd guess sooner rather than later.
