http://radio.ksl.com/index.php?sid=120423&nid=19It appears that the public awareness of and backlash against the Colorado City FLDS is growing.
This is good for teens because Utah is a major playor in Programs with particularly bad reputations. The more the citizens of Utah are shaken out of their complacency that lets them be easy prey for any con man who pays lip service to being Mormon, the more likely it is that the laws will be tightened down and enforced, and places like Provo Canyon forced to comply with national standards of humane treatment of children and/or prisoners and/or mental patients---or be shut down.
Ginger's right that consumer education is reaping the most bang for the buck right now, but the history of mental health practice reform is that all the factors--consumer education, voter education, education of the next generation of mental health workers, and education of government officials and lawyers----all of that works together to push bad practices out.
The mental health profession used to chain patients to their beds and operate insane asylums like zoos---including walking bored people through to gawp at the patients for entertainment.
They used to dunk patients repeatedly in cold water, scrub them raw with harsh brushes, and apply all kinds of tortures in a supposed effort to "shock them back into reality."
It used to be common practice to sterilize or lobotomize mental patients at the drop of a hat, or to subject patients to thousands of electric shocks. It used to be common practice to chemically restrain patients with neuraleptics like thorazine and basically pass them out like candy and to hell with the permanent damage of tardive diskinesia.
It used to be common practice to lock people away in mental hospitals, out of sight out of mind, just for having a diagnosable mental illness and being a bit eccentric, regardless of whether the patient was doing themselves or anyone else any harm or not.
All of these abusive practices have gone from commonplace to shocking rarities because people like the activists on Fornits stood up and made noise and kept making noise telling the world, "Hey, everybody! This isn't right!"
I know at times the progress seems glacial, or two steps forward and one step back, but the Fornits activists are following in the footsteps of other activists who won their battles, and following the same playbook, in a long progression of trial and error, abuse and reform and better and better treatments, that has gone on pretty much from before the birth of psychology as a formal field of study.
Hang in there, everybody.
The FLDS controversy is only tangentially related to the teen residential care scandals, but the FLDS is doing child abuse too. If fixing that child abuse shakes Utah out of its complacency about other child abuse, then we may see some improvement in more ways than one.
We can hope, anyway.
While I'm on my soapbox, I'd like to thank all the survivors and activists on Fornits, even the fellow travellers with whom I sometimes disagree, for their work to protect children from abuse and neglect, and to ensure appropriate, quality care in the least restrictive environment to teens in troubled families.
As an adult living with mental illness, and a parent of a child living with mental illness, in an extended family with (unfortunately) a lot of the stuff, I don't have the words to express how much I appreciate the good work you're doing on behalf of humane, appropriate care.
Whether you're doing it because of difficult personal experiences, or the difficult experiences of family and friends, or just because you're good people, over the long term my extended family will benefit greatly from the improvements in care that will come out of your work.
For myself and all of my family, I thank you.
Julie Cochrane aka Timoclea
