With all due respect, Mandy, it was a lot different for those of us who were not staff's favorite. Not too many students hated me personally, but did go after me at staff's direct encouragement. I'm assuming that you somehow had a personality that was agreeable to the staff at 3, or were there voluntarily for most of your stay. I did not get anything out of Elan except maybe how to keep feelings inside more, which might be positive if I had a different ethnic background, but it wasn't. My family and I do not talk about things or express our feelings about anything, so even though I left in 1999, my family and I are still angry at each other about Elan. I do not want to tell about the circumstances in which I was sent there, but I will say that they were unforgivable, and I am not exaggerating. My parents are way more fucked up than I am, but unfortunately I was a legal minor, so I got sent away. I eventually got pulled out, but way too late for me to forgive them for putting me there. They really had no clue what that place was like, but they think that me and everyone on this and a few other sites are exaggerating and that the "successful" Elan students are all at Yale consequently too busy to go on these sites. Believe it or not, I do go to a good school, not Ivy League, but still good, so I'm not just some loser who could not make it in society and is trying to blame Elan. I have made it a personal point to graduate college (BA) just to prove Elan staff wrong.
