I have to give you credit, Who, no other poster can twist and spin and piss me off like you can. You could land a job in any oppressive government's propaganda department (or even our own government, for that matter) with ease. You should be in advertising.
In the reputable field of psychiatry, forced incarceration is reserved only for dangerous mental patients with a real, diagnosed, mental illness. It often requires a court order to enforce an involuntary commitment. It often requires periodic court hearings to keep them there. I know this. My ex-wife is a board-certified psychiatrist. She has worked in both State Hospitals and in prisons. There are some very seriously, disturbed and ill people in the world that require this kind of protection and treatment. I showed her your post about comparing putting kids onto a school bus with forced therapy. She has also worked with addicted teens in NYC. Her response was, "That is so wrong on so many levels that I won't even bother to address it." She went on to say that the only time a teenager would need a forced residential program would be if the kid were a hard core, living on the street, heroin addict. At that point she said what all you programmies say; "It's a last resort." She also said, "It almost never works."
My ex-wife is a very direct person. To your statement, "Many of the kids (not all) adjust well to being away from their old environment, feel safe and respond very well to therapy." She simply said, "Like he would know."
So I went on to mention we were discussing efficacy and studies on efficacy and she broke in, "I thought you were smarter than that." I asked her what she meant. She said, "You can't study the efficacy of a program like that. It isn't possible." "Why?" I asked. "Because you can't compare apples to oranges. You can't toss a bunch of random kids into the wilderness and then measure to see who gets arrested and who does not after the fact, then draw any kind of meaningful conclusions. That is why you can't find any good studies on this, they would never pass scrutiny, so you won't find them in the Journal of Medicine. It violates sound scientific practice."
She used an analogy where every patient who goes to a doctor is prescribed the same medicine regardless of what their complaint is. Then you measure to see whose symptoms were relieved. Some patients may have recovered from their illness on their own over time, for some it might randomly have been the right medicine and helped. Others might die. Any way you look at it, the doctor is irresponsible and there is no way to determine what the medicine does, or if it does anything at all.
"What about testimonials?" I asked. She said, "You could just watch infomercials where lots of people will praise some scam or other. We don't listen to them either, do we?"
