On 2006-01-04 07:32:00, Anonymous
Based on my experience, which was founded on doing things for myself, it's hard to see how the process is blamed for a failure. I have always put the success or failure on the shoulders of the indivdual.
I generally think this is true as well, but you are getting into a muddy area here. What is failure, success? These are terms we define individually.
Generally however, holding a gun to your head and pulling the trigger could be categorized as failure, as was done by one kid before group one day. What causes a seed atendee, in the midst of all that "awareness" and "love" to kill himself? What causes a seed grad to stick a needle in his arm in front of his family with a lethal dose of drugs inside?
What drives people to do such things?
There is ample evidence that psychological torment can and does cause these things. There are also stories from the day from pyschologists that were treating kids released from the seed that were suicidal and had feelings of worthlessness. There is a story of a 15 year old girl that ran from the seed in st pete and hid in the woods near her home for a week, to scared to go home..and this after attempting to slit her wrists in the bathroom and then instructed by staff not to tell her parents (honesty?). And then there is the story of a seed grad that got in his car and drove from florida until he was broke and ran out of gas in Illinois because he knew his father was making plans to recommit him to the seed. This kid also choose to take a much harder path that involved other abuses in order not to reendure the Seed, and was scared to even speak to his father again for years. That kid was me, and the seed ripped to shreds my family because I chose to take an intellectual and personal stand against the program dogma after graduating the seed. I am not alone either Neil, many a kid ended up choosing the autonomy of their own mind over the mind-rape of the seed cult, and a huge price was extracted from us kids.
Neil, I am glad you feel the seed gave you a good result. But as Ginger says, there was a price to pay, and that price was paid by the many other kids that felt oppressed, tortured, coerced, scared. The price was paid by kids that weighed the costs and choose to run from their families and ended up a continent away, their family ties forever broken. The price was paid by kids that put guns to their heads, that jumped off bridges, that Overdosed on drugs, that otherwise died suspiciously, by kids that felt lost and rejected and spiraled into depression and mental illness.
This treatment model has shown itself, in all its incarnations from CEDU to the seed, from straight, Inc. to KHK, and from Wasp and other programs, to cause harm to a significant portion of the attendees. While doing this, it also has kids that claim it saved their life.
So again, who pays the price for the saved kids? That is the question being proferred.