Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Hyde Schools

Fire at Hidden Lake Academy

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Anonymous:

--- Quote from: ""Ursus"" ---I personally know someone who was institutionalized for the grand crime of running away from home.  Student was caught because they did not want to interrupt their schooling and hence continued to attend classes (junior high) whilst sleeping on the run.  Talk about being dedicated beyond the parameters of common sense.  Kid was arrested at school, hauled into court and ordered to return home.  Kid refused due to fear of further abuse at home.  Kid was sent to a detention center filled with hard core budding rapists and arsonists who routinely set the walls on fire.  After a period of time, kid was hauled back to court.  Kid still refused to return home.  Kid was thence institutionalized in a psychiatric facility 'till the father's insurance policy ran out, thence discharged to a foster home, miraculously "cured."
--- End quote ---

"Someone's" story sounds remarkably like your own:


--- Quote from: ""Ursus"" ---I was semi-normal.  Had problems with my parents, had run away previously due to undue strictness and corporal punishment, and had spent some time in JuVie and a mental hospital for that (hospital/insurance scam, popular at that time, 'course I didn't know that then).  But, totally straight, zero drugs, zero cigs, no drinking, no sex.  In fact, I was caught for running away because I didn't want to interrupt my schooling, so they knew where I was during the day!  LOL!  So I was semi-normal, albeit traumatized.  After my stint at Hyde, I was even more traumatized, and I honestly feel like I have lost most of my life due to them.
--- End quote ---


I don't want to say "I told you so," but your story supports my point that the state doesn't institutionalize runaways. In fact, you were initially ordered home, not institutionalized. It was your refusal to comply with a court order and the acute need to resolve your homelessness that landed you in detention, asylum, foster care. I'm sorry about the traumas you endured at home and in the system, as well as the injustice you endured at Hyde. It sounds like there's blame enough to go around. You have my sympathy. As Chekhov said, "When I was a child I had no childhood."

Ursus:
::seg::  Yikes'um!  Seriously, Mike, I've done a lot of research over the years to try to put this in its proper perspective, and I've run into certain trends and facts, etc. because I've always had half an ear open, so to speak.  We live in a world where most of the elements that very much influence and shape the features of our lives and thinkings are held invisible, beyond our reach.  About the only things shoved in our faces have marketing ploys attached to them.  People begin to lose touch with their souls when the parts are always one step removed, never fat in the hand.

Mundane realities, Mike: States can lock kids up for even the suspicion of some behavior if somebody is willing to lie about it.  Go read the Gina Score story, talk to some U.S. professionals in the mental health field who are savvy to the troubled teen scene, oh hell, email some reporters that are old enough to have this issue in their back pocket!  This is old hat, everybody the least bit touched by it knows it, and I'm not going to waste my time today arguing with you about it.  Actually, here's a little tidbit from that article to get you started.  They are talking about boot camps here, in our day it was Juvie or mental hospitals or reform schools.  Sometimes, of the options available to the courts, psychiatric institutions may have appeared to be the kindest alternative.  I say may, as you have no idea about the kind of stigmatization that comes along with that package.

--- Quote ---The harsh punishment in boot camps has often outweighed the crime. Many states have placed not only gang members or others guilty of violent crimes in their facilities, but also those known as "status offenders" -- runaways, truants, and curfew violators. In the social service jargon of South Dakota, such kids are called CHINS, children in need of supervision. "Incarcerating CHINS goes against every moral, ethical expectation about what is right for children," says Dr. Susan Randall of the South Dakota Coalition for Children.
--- End quote ---


Enjoy your ivory tower; me, I'm still shoveling the horse shit out the barn so to speak, but damn, don't the apple trees smell fine this time of year!  :wink:

Anonymous:

--- Quote from: ""Ursus"" ---Enjoy your ivory tower; me, I'm still shoveling the horse shit out the barn so to speak, but damn, don't the apple trees smell fine this time of year!  :wink:
--- End quote ---


If you mean my academic ivory tower, expert legal opinions are but a phone call away.

If you mean the ivory tower I grew up in, I could tell you horror stories about the child abuse I endured. To be honest, my initial response to you was a variation of "Get over it, you're too old for this crap." That said, I do understand how hard it is to let go of past baggage. I continue to struggle with it myself. I'm "lucky" in that my wife has met my mom and dad and so can understand my anger and intolerance for them. Even now I frequently blow up at them on only the slightest provocation. But as frustrating as they are today, she still doesn't completely understand what it was like growing up in such a negative, miserable environment. I've given up trying to make them understand, or admit, their shortcomings: my mom still insists I had a perfectly happy childhood! I guess it makes them feel better as parents to believe that. So I don't mean to sound trite, but if you don't have anybody close who can relate to what you experienced, have you considered talking to a specialist? It just seems wrong that the past continues to impact your life in such a negative way.

Mike

Ursus:
Amazon link HERE

by Joe Sharkey



From the Inside Flap
As Americans examine the out-of-control spending on health care, Bedlam exposes one of the costliest and most insidious medical scandals of recent times: the rapacious advance of the for-profit mental-health industry. By the end of the 1980s it had managed to lay claim to about 25 percent of all money spent by U.S. employers on employee health benefits.

During the 1980s, as the Recovery Era dictated broader insurance coverage for an ever-growing range of disorders, addictions, and behavioral problems, investor-owned psychiatric hospitals expanded at a dizzying rate. Using "guerrilla marketing," co-opting the psychiatric profession, and even hiring clergymen, guidance counselors, and other trusted community figures as bounty hunters, these psychiatric hospitals sought to bring in paying customers to a plethora of "treatment programs." Most seemed to have one thing in common: Patients miraculously improved the day their insurance expired. Beyond the horror stories of patient kidnapping, fraud, and abuses of children and adolescents, Bedlam examines the unholy alliance between modern "biopsychiatry" and the hospital, pharmaceutical, and "addiction" industries. It is an alliance that has succeeded in establishing, as federal policy, the astonishing notion that in any given six-month period, more than 20 percent of Americans need professional psychiatric care - and should be covered for it with generous insurance benefits.

As new health-care reforms provide for expanded mental-health coverage - in a formula that reflects the lobbying goals of the psychiatric industry - Bedlam blows away the public-relations smoke screen and shows what happens when modern marketing strategies are applied to psychiatric care. This is a truly shocking and important book, and one that, once read, will never be forgotten.

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