Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Synanon

Synanon and current-day rehabs.

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Antigen:
Castle, it has always been thus. So much of drug rehab lingo goes right back to Synanon it's silly. The word "empathetic" has actually made it into the dictionary by that course. I know a dude who's about my age and spent 17 years in a PA prison. They made him take rehab because he confessed to having smoked pot. WTH, gets ya outa the day room for a few hours, right? He and I can carry on a whole conversation w/ program hooks and buzz terms and completely lose everyone else in the room.

Yeah, it's rampant! In 69 or 70, Bobby DuPont as head of NIDA was tasked with finding The Remedy® for the expected wave of heroin addicted Vietnam vets. He toured Synanon and came back with the formal recommendation to replicate it across the at Federal, state, local and private expense. The Seed got over a million a year of that, and I only know that because it's spawn, Straight, fucked w/ a man who's right adept at that kind of research and he snapped out of it and started doing that research!  

Sooner or later, someone similarly motivated and talented will do the same chores wrt the CEDU line of Synanon programs. I seriously believe at this point that it'll come back to a psyops connection w/ x-ref to Jim Jones and the clams. But I'm no investigator, I'm just a mad clown gypsy, pickin and grinnin at the crossroads trying to pique the folks who will do that thing.

try another castle:
Yeah, I'm not much of an investigator myself. I'm at a loss on what to do with my video.

A CEDU connection to Jim Jones? Hmm. Well, I can definitely see a possible connection between him and Synanon, since they were both in the same part of the country. And of course, CEDU is connected to that. (I as of yet still have to find a definitive answer on what Mel's role was in Synanon. I know he had one. Someone said he was what was known as a "square", which means nothing to me.)

As for the clams, I remember the first time I heard about scientology I thought "fuck, that sure sounds like CEDU."


They just re-played the South Park scientology episode last week. Too funny. And that show is normally hit or miss with me, but I think that one, and the one about 12 step (bloody mary) were brilliant.

anythinganyone:

--- Quote from: "Antigen" ---Castle, it has always been thus. So much of drug rehab lingo goes right back to Synanon it's silly. The word "empathetic" has actually made it into the dictionary by that course. I know a dude who's about my age and spent 17 years in a PA prison. They made him take rehab because he confessed to having smoked pot. WTH, gets ya outa the day room for a few hours, right? He and I can carry on a whole conversation w/ program hooks and buzz terms and completely lose everyone else in the room.
--- End quote ---

Wait, are you stating the origin of the word "empathetic" is from Synanon?  I'm confused :(

try another castle:

--- Quote from: "anythinganyone" ---
--- Quote from: "Antigen" ---Castle, it has always been thus. So much of drug rehab lingo goes right back to Synanon it's silly. The word "empathetic" has actually made it into the dictionary by that course. I know a dude who's about my age and spent 17 years in a PA prison. They made him take rehab because he confessed to having smoked pot. WTH, gets ya outa the day room for a few hours, right? He and I can carry on a whole conversation w/ program hooks and buzz terms and completely lose everyone else in the room.
--- End quote ---

Wait, are you stating the origin of the word "empathetic" is from Synanon?  I'm confused :(
--- End quote ---

It's  not, actually. It was introduced in Oxford English in the late 1800s, if memory serves.

Still, I prefer to use empathic.

Inculcated:

--- Quote from: "try another castle" ---Anyone been to George Farnsworth's site?

This is what it says on the front page:


--- Quote ---NOTE: Synanon is no longer in operation. If you need help -- try these links: Narcotics Anonymous, Delancey Street, Walden House, Samaritan Village in Brooklyn, Amity Foundation or Phoenix House  all staffed or run by former Synanon residents.
--- End quote ---

 :o

Okay, I already know that Phoenix house is a huge sketch fest, but does anyone have info on these other places? Can anyone establish a connection?

My ex worked at Walden, and I'm gonna ask him about it. I doubt he knows anything, though. I remember some of the shit he used to write about the place, though. The main thing I remember is how they were mostly concerned with filling the beds, and that was his job, to fill the beds. Probably has a lot to do with retaining funding, since if you don't have full beds, the city will make cuts to your program. Anyway, he used to get a lot of shit if he didn't get someone he was doing "intake" with to actually enter into the program. There were several points where he thought he was going to lose his job because he wasn't making "quota".

I know that rehabs are a bunch of crap, but aside from the stepcraft connection, I had no idea that there was a possibility of a connection with a full-blown cult like Synanon.
--- End quote ---
NarcAnon aside, all of the others have in common that they are remand options.
Each of the programs recommended above makes considerable coin off of government funding for the rehabilitation of convicts.

The article excerpted below shows some research flaws of the short term memory variety (It reads as its written, as a sell for Amity)  mentions Amity, Walden House and others along with Synanon and of course David Deitch.

Clean Break The battle for drug treatment in California prisons By Joe Domanick
In a state with an astounding prisoner-recidivism rate, repeat offenses are often linked to drugs. In 1997--when more than 17 percent of the state's former inmates were sent back to prison for committing new crimes, and a staggering 51 percent for violating parole--most of those returnees tested dirty for drugs. Several recent national studies, in fact, have pegged the percentage of prison inmates with a serious alcohol or substance-abuse problem at somewhere between 75 percent and 85 percent.

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, drug arrests and a $100 billion war on drugs have replaced America's War on Poverty, and California has helped lead the way. In 1980, about 7.5 percent of California's 23,000 inmates were incarcerated for drug offenses. Today, of California's 158,000 inmates, over 25 percent of the men and almost 35 percent of the women are imprisoned solely for drug offenses. And almost 60 percent of the prison population has been sentenced for nonviolent crimes frequently related to drugs. To put it another way, the number of California inmates imprisoned for assault with a deadly weapon or for other assaults and batteries at the start of 1996 was approximately 11,500. More than three times that many were incarcerated for drug offenses.
"Substance abuse is one of the major issues we deal with in the parole population," confirms Devon Johnson, manager of the Department of Corrections South Bay parole office. "Most of the people in state prison have substance abuse problems, and when they come back [to society], they still have them." In Santa Clara County, the revolving door is very real, he says.
(Here’s a memory lapse…)
'THERAPEUTIC communities," where addicts work to help each other reinvent themselves while quitting drugs, had been tried in prisons as early as 1961, when one was established at New York City's Terminal Island correctional facility. But the more modern roots of today's movement began in the late '70s, in New York, with a program called Stay N' Out. After that program spread to Delaware, its success began catching the attention of a small number of law-enforcement professionals as something that was working. Then, in 1987, Amity began an experimental program in a Tucson, Ariz., jail.

Schuettinger's prominent role in Amity reflects the program's genesis, when it and other therapeutic communities arose out of the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the late 1950s, Charles Dederich Sr., a self-destructive alcoholic of gargantuan appetite, started his own A.A. group in his small beachfront apartment in Los Angeles. He was a garrulous former salesman for Gulf Oil, a man so full of himself, as the story goes, that he was thrown out of his local A.A. chapter because he wouldn't stop talking and give anyone else a chance. Soon, drug addicts joined the alcoholics at the meetings and stopped using drugs--something that was then unheard of. Until that time it was generally thought that alcoholics could clean up, but not junkies. The two federal hospitals dealing with addicts--at Lexington, Ky., and Fort Worth, Texas--had been dismally unsuccessful in trying to cure them.
Out of those meetings grew a community known as Synanon, established when Dederich and the others bought a little storefront and started living together. The group's fundamental philosophy was the same as A.A.'s--when addict A helps addict B, addict A, the helper, gets better. He gets his life together by helping others. Synanon differed from A.A., however, in that people were now living together, and in a confrontational atmosphere. The order of the day was to tell someone they were full of shit when you thought they were full of shit, and demand total honesty.
The original members of Synanon were a rough crew--chronic junkies, hookers, ex-cons--whose efforts succeeded, though the group itself eventually disintegrated into a dangerous and scandal-plagued bunch. From them, the concept of therapeutic communities grew into a movement during the rebellious counterculture of the '60s. An exploding rate of drug addiction had become a hallmark of the times, and the medical and psychiatric establishments--which had so utterly failed in the treatment of addiction and alcoholism over the preceding 40 years--continued their irrelevancy.

In that vacuum, a new therapeutic-community movement developed, using the early years of Synanon as a model. Many of its pioneers were recovering addicts, who insisted that the leaders emerge from within the community itself. The philosophy broadened beyond the precepts of A.A. and group confrontation, and took on elements that Dr. David Deitch* (himself an early member of Synanon, and now a clinical professor of psychiatry at UC-San Diego and a consultant to a newly established therapeutic community in the bloody state prison at Corcoran) describes as "humanistic and behavioral psychology, the Essenes and other early religious sects, the Methodists, Calvinists and Zen." The movement's broad goal was far more ambitious than mere freedom from substance abuse; it was personal transformation through the development of self-reliance within a supportive, humane community. This was to be achieved through personal and group encounters, seminars, psychodrama, community rituals, and written and oral exercises. Each member would progress individually, from one benchmark to another. Once healed, the ex-member was obliged to be part of a wider social transformation. Out of the congealing of all these aspects grew the now universally accepted drug-treatment methods used by such therapeutic communities as Daytop, Phoenix House, Walden House and the Amity Foundation.
Rod Mullen, now Amity's CEO, was once a Synanon student volunteer. A veteran of the free-speech and civil rights movements in Berkeley in the '60s, Mullen became deeply impressed with Synanon's racial harmony, the concrete changes it made in people's lives and its model of addicts aiding themselves by aiding other addicts.

EVERYONE WHO WORKS for Amity has been through the Amity program

ANOTHER HALLMARK of that "alternative culture" has been the program's racial harmony, strikingly at odds with the racially charged atmosphere of most prisons. The Amity community is about 40 percent black, 40 percent Chicano and 20 percent white. Making that diversity work took a lot of time and effort, according to David Deitch. "You can bet that when they started, every prisoner was watching for any hint of favoritism. If you're a counselor in this kind of program and you spend more time with black guys than others, that will be noted. Convicts have nothing but time to watch and calculate." (Deprogrammed was right this guy is everywhere)

Oh and *David Deitch is also the brother-in-law of this article's author. (lol)
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro ... -9923.html

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