On 2004-02-14 08:19:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Only if you believe what you read here. Talk to kids that have been there and see if they've come home worse than they went in. It will also give you time to learn how to live a better life, as a parent and as a person. The allegations regarding the Director were found to be false, but apparently just the allegation was enough to keep you from getting help if you are in a serious situation with your child. "
Talk to kids who have been there, sure, but *not* the ones the program refers you to and *not* the ones who have been out less than five years.
Most of the programs isolate the children from the outside world. Most use restraints at least in *some* circumstances.
Isolation, physical control, credible threat of physical force or harm----those are the prerequisites for inducing Stockholm Syndrome, and it only takes two to three days to induce.
How you treat Stockholm Syndrome is you undo the things that cause it---particularly the isolation.
Unfortunately, the TBS's have these kids for months, they tell the parents to treat anything negative the kid says as manipulation, the kid gets used to this, and so even after the kid is *physically* free, he or she is still isolated for a long time behind a barrier of mutual mistrust. The parents don't trust that anything negative the kid says about the program is anything *but* manipulation. The kid doesn't trust that the parents will believe anything he or she says, and typically the kid's mistrust lasts *much* longer than the parents'.
Sometimes kids who are pulled out early will talk openly about the experience right away. Graduates seldom will. It takes about five to fifteen years before the graduates, or most kids that have just been there for awhile (graduated or not), will talk about the experience in depth and give detailed accounts of what a day was like in the program, what the experience was like in the different "levels," what it was like when someone was restrained, the frank details of the educational environment provided, detailed descriptions of the food, detailed descriptions of the therapy process, etc.
Fresh program graduates generally give accounts that are as bare of details as an oak branch in January is bare of leaves. If you talk to someone and they aren't prepared to talk in detail about all of those things, they just try to brush you off with buzzwords or generalizations (e.g.---the food's a bit bland), take it as a huge red flag.
