That was me that wrote about the billboard signs. I agree that they would just make rules about looking out the windows. In the years since Straight I often think "what if" things, like "what if I had known more about brainwashing?" Then maybe they could not have gotten to me?
Just a few years after Straight, I was sitting in a waiting room (completely voluntarily) at a community mental health facility. On the wall was a big poster listing all of your rights as a client of ANY mental health facility (at least in that state). Well whattayaknow, my rights had been violated in Straight! What if Straight had had those RIGHTS posted on the wall? (Still not enough, but something.)
In rereading my first post, perhaps I overstated my point regarding years of anxiety and depression. From the outside, things might have seemed normal. After all, I went back to school, graduated on the honor roll, went to AA and NA meetings...
But then I could never figure out what to do. I had been so brainfried at Straight that nothing really mattered to me anymore. Again, hard to see from the outside, except that I went from place to place, school to school, job to job. Very normal, upstanding citizen. Mildly agoraphobic, paranoid, and with occasionally very noticeably poor social skills due to being trained in dissecting what I thought were other people's problems and then telling them about it.
I still struggle. The etiology of despair is not necessarily obvious. Those who are incarcerated now may have years of feeling like things aren't right, like the pieces of themselves are stuck together all wrong. Or, like they are just completely missing. This can take a long time to come to the surface. I am not surprised that recent undetainees still speak highly of whatever cult prison they were in.
