Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Elan School
Hanzomon4
DannyB II:
--- Quote ---Re: Hanzomon4
New postby Eliscu2 » 4 minutes ago
Let's not forget that Danny was an ASSISTANT DIRECTOR at ELAN.
Here is a liitle story from around his time so you can "Taste" it.
Just a little reminder for his sanctimonious ass.(excuse my spelling disorder)
http://www.bykevingray.com/stories/stor ... badcompany
--- End quote ---
Felice I was already gone for well over a year, but I get your point. You want to blame me for all the horrors of Elan you just can't find one to pin on me. Well let me help you, yes I am guilty. Seriously, very guilty. I have been saying this all along Felice you don't have to come up with a story from 1979 when I wasn't even there. What you seem to forget, "I was there through the darkest fucking days of Elan", why the hell do you think I get so angry at your sanctimonious ass, I watched people getting butchered and slaughtered all over the place like it was a butcher shop, I always wondered why the crowd during the festivities cheered, because they enjoyed it for that moment. We could all direct all our resentments, anxiety, attention towards this one person and obliterate them. I hated these moments at Elan worse then any other time, rings were a nightmare for me because I could fight and was bigger so I was asked often. By the end of my time as a resident I took joy in hiding out on the road as a driver because I did not have to see this shit. I grew up with this shit.
Then like a true corrupted delusional coward I turn around and work for the very program I hated, why because I was afraid to start life on my own all by myself. Yes I could have done it, I know that now but I did not then. My ego........needed money, power, work. I damn near killed myself trying to live this double life.
So Felice you don't have to bother trying to tell my story, I will do it myself. "ASK THE FUCKING QUESTIONS YOU COWARD AND I WILL ANSWER THEM", stop hiding behind your sanctimonious mommy dearest skirt, act like a women and confront me, I'm right Here. Jesus Christ you people are a joke...... Matt, you and everyone one of you from Elan that post here. I am here and you run and throws rocks from your houses, get out here and stand up. It is more beneficial then you think.
If Marc Rosenberg is reading this he will account for this in 1989 I went to Elan for a visit. I visited Joe at the track, Marty at Elan and Terry. Joe threw me out of his office at the track along with my wife, why because I confronted him on why he stole my vehicle from me years ago. This was at the end of a long conversation about nothing really just catching up and me trying to get the balls up to confront him. My conversation with Marty went very quick he had nothing to say, Marty had just gotten back to Elan after being gone for a few years, He co-owned a sports clinic in Arizona along with Marc. I asked him why he came back but he really had nothing to say. I thought the money.
Marc well my conversation with Marc was lengthy and confusing. He physically looked horrible from heroin addiction and drinking. I asked why he was back and once again money, at least he was honest. He would not get honest about the abusive violence being used there still. Just to say it was not as much as when we were there.
I went back there in 1992 after the Michael Skaekel trial, same thing, same conversations with Marc and Marty.
As I told Matt, Felice. You folks are not the only residents who were abused, there are many staff/Ass.Directors who were abused as residents then as employees it never stopped. Elan is unique in this regard because I have never heard of a Joe Ricci at any other program that abused his employees like he did. He owned your ass. House, car, clothes and bank account, it was all his to take anytime he wanted. Oh yes that was the problem also we all had big egos, at 18 yrs. old I had a house, brand new car, clothes and money, "yeah all off the backs of the abuse we put you residents through". I am very aware of this reality.
I fucked up and made a bad decision at 17, I wish it was different but it is not. So I take bad decision and I use it everyday to make good decisions with the causes I support.
Felice and Matt I am not perfect far from it, some would say I am damaged goods for the shit I went through in my life but I do know this, I made another decision in November of 1978 to leave Elan after 22mons. of employment and at 19 I finally decided to go out on my own and make it in this world. I did not do such a good job for 10 years but in 1988 I made another decision which revolutionized my life. I have not made excuses for my bad decisions since then. I experienced hell and I have a opportunity to help others walk through their hell and for that I am grateful yet for some reason I can't seem to make that happen here. I want to be a part of and get along but that just doesn't seem to happen. No matter what I do or not do. Yes I have contributed horribly to this but "again" I would like for it to stop.
Felice if you want to know what abuses, slights, altercations, or what have you I committed at Elan just ask me. I will answer or try to remember what happened. Why is that such a problem for you. Is it that you don't have the control then well really neither do I.
Danny
Eliscu2:
I SEE BENNIKRUGLICKGOTTLIEB-BOT IS AT IT AGAIN............
I CAN'T READ WHAT HE SAID BUT STILL, I JUST KNOW IT'S RIGHT OUT OF THE HOW TO MINDFUCK ELAN DIRECTORS MANUAL.
I will be usefull and provide a few links for your reading pleasure.
Let's start with this: http://http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/01/a-miscarriage-of-justice/4759/
KEEP POSTING ELAN-BOTT I GOT LINKS I HAVE COLLECTED FOR 10 YEARS LET'S GET THAT INFO OUT THERE!
::puke::
DannyB II:
--- Quote ---
--- Quote from: "Eliscu2" ---Let's not forget that Danny was an ASSISTANT DIRECTOR at ELAN.
Here is a liitle story from around his time so you can "Taste" it.
Just a little reminder for his sanctimonious ass.(excuse my spelling disorder)
--- End quote ---
Felice, yes I was Staff and Ass. Director from 1/77 till 11/78. Thanks for pointing that out.
Just "REMEMBER FELICE" in your self-centerness you are not the only one seeking
justice and peace.
http://www.bykevingray.com/stories/stor ... badcompany
Bad Company
Once upon a time, when a very different Lord of the Flies haunted the classroom.
On a February morning in 1979, deep in the piney woods of Maine, 20-year-old Liz Arnold watched as a houseful of teens berated a weeping girl who'd just wet her pants. The girl's name was Kim. She was 17. Moments before, she'd been spanked with a paddle in front of the 100 fellow delinquents and drug addicts—more than two thirds of them men—who made up the student body of the Elan School, a therapeutic community of last resort that, during its seventies heyday, may have been something far from therapeutic.
As the residents surged over the scuffed linoleum of the dining room, knocking over metal chairs, Kim curled into a ball. "You fucking bitch, fucking whore, fucking fuck-up!” Kim was enduring a "learning experience." She'd mouthed off to the school's senior residents, and at Elan in the seventies, this was the response. But the lesson was getting out of hand. "[We] were whipped into a mob," says Arnold, an ex-speed addict who'd arrived at Elan in 1978 after a phony suicide attempt forced her affluent Ridgewood, New Jersey, parents to seek professional help. "It was brainwashing. People like Kim were gonna be junkies or hookers if we didn't make them get their shit together." Arnold soon added her voice to the eardrum-breaking sound of 100 young adults caught up in the adrenaline rush of anger. To an outsider, it must have looked like madness, a Lord of the Flies outpost with castaways who were regularly dressed in tinfoil, diapers, and "hooker" skirts. Some had signs around their necks that read: I’M AN EMOTIONAL VAMPIRE or ASK ME WHY I’M A BABY or CONFRONT ME AS TO WHY I’M A WHORE. All were red with rage. "Kim," Arnold recalls, "was semi-catatonic."
No one can say what became of Kim after she left Elan five months later. But her story, and dozens like it, continues to haunt many former students. Some three decades later, there is a growing chorus of voices waking as if from a bad dream. Many say they were paddled; others say they were put into boxing rings, chained to chairs, restrained in straight jackets, all in the name of “personal growth.”
For 31 years, Elan—which remains open to 184 residents at $44,596 a year for a two-year program—has been among the most controversial of the nation’s residential therapeutic communities. Though the school no longer employs such Draconian methods, its administrators claim that the behavior modification they practiced was the only effective way to salvage delinquents. The approach—tearing down destructive character traits through relentless peer pressure—has even been praised by several parents and by some of the psychologists who treated the students; a number of former residents claim to have found emotional and mental calm through Elan’s rigidity.
But many Elan survivors say they’ve suffered lasting psychological scars. In 1975, deep in the heart of the flower-power, bell-bottomed sexual revolution, a team of investigators from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services accused the school of abusing the eleven Illinois residents in its charge. After removing them, the team issued a report detailing “an atmosphere of pervasive fear and suspicion,” in which residents become “automatons.” The report charged Elan with starving its children, forcing them into useless labor, handcuffing them to chairs. Elan’s practices, it concluded, “violate…civil rights and liberties and deprive…children of their self-respect and dignity.” Another 1975 inquiry, by the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, noted that residents were subjected to “severe humiliation” as well as “painful” punishments, including putting “bullies” in boxing rings to fight other residents (in one case, the bully was a pregnant girl).
Despite the charges (which were later disputed by Maine’s Department of Human Services), the attention eventually faded. And no one looked very closely into what happened to the young men and women of Elan for nearly a quarter century.
Now Elan is once again under scrutiny, this time thanks to activity surrounding the school’s most high-profile alumnus; a former teen preppy from Greenwich, Connecticut, named Michael Skakel.
Skakel, a nephew of Ehtel Kennedy’s, is charged, as the tabloids have repeatedly trumpeted, with the 1975 Halloween Eve murder of his neighbor Martha Moxley, who was found bludgeoned and stabbed with a golf club on her family’s estate. Skakel was 15.
Last year, Connecticut prosecutors filed charges after two former Elan residents told a grand jury that Skakel, now 41, confessed to the killing in 1978, when he was a resident at the school. Skakel enrolled at Elan as a 19-year-old alcoholic and spent two years dying out (he’d later call the place a “concentration camp for kids”). A fellow resident claims to have heard him brag: “I am going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.”
It turns out the Kennedy name didn’t help much at this very undemocratic enclave: According to a classmate, Kennedy was pummeled in the boxing ring and forced to wear a degrading five-foot dunce cap and model a sign that read I AM AN ARROGANT, RICH BRAT. CONFRONT ME ON WHY I KILLED MY FRIEND MARTHA. Skakel’s attorney has said that any alleged admissions at the school were simply attempts to avoid more abuse.
In an effort to look back at the three decades of similar practices, Details talked to more than 30 former residents and staff members, as well as several adolescent therapists. Oddly enough, Elan opened amid the peace and understanding of the seventies counterculture. But left to its own devices, the school became and emotional cauldron of peer pressure and humiliation, scorching some of the very souls it was meant to save.
Route 26 is a two-lane highway that winds from the town of Gray, nineteen miles northeast of Portland, to the fire roads of Polan Spring, home to America’s favorite bottled water. The drive takes you past car-repair shops, plastic deer on tidy lawns, and swimming holes abandoned by tourists on this warm September day.
The Elan campus is a cluster of cream-colored cabins and trailers set on 33 acres of lakeside forest. On a picnic table, four teens chat with happy intensity. The place seems otherwise deserted. It’s a pleasant picture, making what once transpired here all the more unbelievable.
Elan was conceived in 1971 by Joe Ricci, a former addict and petty criminal from Port Chester, New York, and Gerald Davidson, a Boston psychiatrist. The pair set out, with one house and thirteen residents, to create a moneymaking venture; their small operation would grow into a multimillion dollar business with 100 staff members, fifteen buildings, and 184 residents from 26 states and three foreign countries.
More than anything, Elan was forged by Ricci’s swaggering charisma.
Raised by blue-collar grandparents just 32 miles outside New York City, Ricci was hooked on heroin by 15 (thanks to a car accident that started him up the painkiller ladder); he was busted for robbing a mail truck at 18. A judge gave him an ultimatum: seven years in federal prison, or time at the residential rehabilitation facility of Daytop Village in New Haven, Connecticut. Ricci chose rehab.
At Daytop, Ricci ran smack into a boot-camp-style commune. There was a rigid chain of command, menial jobs, and placards on addicts describing their faults, a device Daytop had adopted from California’s Synanon, the granddaddy of all therapeutic communities. The goal was sel-discipline combined with the grueling reshaping of personality through fierce confrontations. The emphasis was on pain.
At the time, corrections officials across the nation—with the blessing of sociologists—had begin to question conventional rehab, turning instead to hard-core therapeutic communities. These programs seemed to accomplish what few others could: a profound change in outlook and behavior that allowed hopeless junkies to begin their lives anew. With a surge of government money, they sprouted across the country, many of them run by Synanon graduates.
Ricci became convinced that such programs would make him rich. But it wasn't until he met Davidson, a psychiatrist and Harvard lecturer, that he found his true calling: his own full-blown therapeutic community, where he could implement his particular brand of in-your-face psychotherapy. The Elan School opened for business on May 30, 1971.
Ricci was soon ministering to the nation's hardest of hard-luck cases (many of whom were provided for with state money), addicts and criminals who'd bounced from jails to group homes to hospitals to rehab and back again. Alongside these felons, Ricci welcomed refugees from America's affluent suburbs—kids whose social rebellion had led them from Hendrix to heroin. Youngsters from Harlem slums worked out their pain with the children of CEOs from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. After the first year, Elan had 40 residents. Ricci was soon presiding over a student body in which residents were regularly shouted down by dozens of their peers. "I've never seen a sponge like you." "You've been a parasite all your life." Meanwhile, Ricci dug into the emotional core of his targets. "If you didn't come here, you'd be in a mental institution," he would growl. "People weren't put on earth to accommodate you."
"Joe was a Doberman," says Everett Dulit, emeritus professor of psychiatry at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who referred several Elan patients in the seventies.
"He'd say, 'Now, you listen to what I'm going to tell you, asshole. Because it's gonna save your worthless piece-of-shit life.'"
"Joe was very challenging in groups," adds Stuart Berry, who entered Elan as a 20-year-old junkie on opening day and became its first graduate in 1972; he briefly became a therapeutic director the following year. "There were some pretty bad guys; he needed them to understand their facade wasn't working."
Berry was a typical Elan elite: white, middle-class, and strung out from "living on the lunatic fringe" of the sixties. A grandson of a Cape Cod pharmacist, he'd found his way into Grandpa's medicine locker after a book on the Hell's Angels triggered his curiosity. Drugs turned out to be a great chaser for youthful alienation.
But as Berry soon learned, Ricci had his own cure for apathy. It began with hard work and peer pressure, using the strict hierarchy of a military outfit. Newcomers toiled on kitchen and grounds crews, working their way through the ranks, from "ram- rods" (crew foremen) to department heads to expeditors (who acted as a secret police that "booked incidents" of bad behavior on notepads), and, finally, coordinators, who were charged with overseeing such house activities as group therapy.
"The goal was responsible citizenship," says Dulit, who remains committed to such tactics. "It's fighting fire with fire. These are people who have caused enormous trouble in their lives. And I think people who tiptoe around these adolescents are wimps. You need a powerhouse to fight a powerhouse. And Joe was that model for me."
If a resident disobeyed an order, or if he failed to "relate" his feelings on a regular basis, punishment could come in the form of a "haircut." At Daytop, this meant shaving one's head in atonement. At Elan, it became a verbal firing squad.
Ken Zaretzky was Elan's 22nd resident. He was 15. He'd come from swank Highland Park, Illinois, hooked on heroin. Though the program set him straight, he has many complaints about Elan's tactics—including the time he was accused of stealing cigarettes. The punishment for such a crime? A "general meeting," the highest form of retribution, in which, he says, he was forced to eat four packs of cigarettes—coated with ketchup—in front of the entire house, until he got sick.
"Things could be out-and-out abusive," Zaretzky recalls. Now 45, he owns a suburban Chicago software company and runs a Web site, ElanAlum.com, where former Elan residents (and their parents) compare experiences. "They were nuts from time to time," says Zaretsky. Stuart Berry claims the kids' value as dollar signs outweighed any cause for concern. "Joe was accepting them because of the money," he says.
When Ricci began ordering quarrelsome residents to dig pointless ditches and created a boxing ring as a learning tool for bullies, Berry was appalled. Students were suited up with headgear and sixteen-ounce gloves. Then the entire house would form a human ring as the bully was forced to duke it out with four or five people in a row, until defeated. "There would be blood, there would be crying, there would be cheering," says Cindy Rob-bins, a suburban-Chicago runaway and chronic truant who entered Elan in 1982, at the age of 16. "A lot of people were just afraid. But it's not like you could step in and stop it. You'd be punished."
"I didn't like that at all," says Berry of Ricci's ring. "But at this point, Joe was out of tricks. Sometimes I think he did it for his own amusement."
As the years progressed, Joe Riccibecame a millionaire, a larger-than-life evangelist who'd strut through Elan in a leather coat, fedora, and aviator sunglasses, his silver Mercedes parked out front. "He called himself the god of therapy," recalls Liz Arnold. "But he looked like a pimp. He was cocky as hell."
As Ricci's demeanor became more eccentric, so too did the tenor of his therapies. Promiscuous young women (even kissing is not permitted at Elan) were tarted up in hooker costumes with garish makeup and forced to carry poles with signs that said 42nd street. Their male counterparts were dressed like hustlers. A person who acted like a child would be put in diapers and given a rattle. If you "reacted" negatively, you were encased in a tinfoil box with nuclear-reactor symbols and red buttons. One guy, caught peering into the women's dorm, was forced to wear a Peeping Tom raincoat.
The physical punishments also took on a more severe character. In between the paddling and the boxing ring, says Harry Kranick, who entered Elan at 16 in 1977 with a taste for Quaaludes—and mourning the recent death of his father—"[residents] were thrown into a cold shower. When they came out, they were spanked again. This went on for days." Kranick himself—who says the program straightened him out, though he remains bitter about its tactics—was the target of humiliating punishments. After the Elan football team lost several games against local high-school rivals, Ricci screamed at them "for being a bunch of pussies," recalls Kranick. "And I said, 'You know something, Joe, we're not here to play football. We're here to get our shit together.' He made us sleep naked in the dorm, guarded by guys with bats. I had to wear a sign around the house that said I’m a pussy and I can't express my feelings." But that wasn't the worst for Kranick, a witness in the Skakel case. After getting belligerent with a senior resident one day, Kranick says, he was stripped to his underwear, forced to put on a diaper "made of a nasty rag," and ordered to climb into a Dumpster and clean it with a spoon and a toothbrush. The task took two days. When investigators from the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services made their visit in 1975, they were horrified by what they found. Jerry Docherty, a member of the team, says Elan's "born-again" philosophy was well-meaning, but that he had doubts about any positive effects. "You're reinforcing negative behavior with negative behavior," says Docherty. "I had real problems with that."
Ironically, the 1975 state investigations at Elan— and the later exoneration by Maine health officials who ruled that its therapy was "innovative, appropriate, and beneficial"—only emboldened Ricci, says Zaretzky, who claims to have helped cover up practices during the Illinois review process.
"We lied through our teeth," says Zaretzky, a five-year Elan vet who started out as a resident and became a therapeutic director by the time he was 20. "That was my family. And my family was under attack. But everything the investigators said was true. That should have been a warning to mellow out. But we let it get worse." Zaretzky believes Elan's practices violated residents' civil rights—especially when they ran away and were hunted down. "We'd break into shooting galleries in the Boston slums, places where our guys had run off," he says. "We'd just grab them and say, Anybody that wants to fuck with us, you're welcome to.'"
By 1975, Elan's Gerry Davidson, the program's psychiatric director and co-founder, had begun accepting "full-blown" mentally ill patients, says Zaretzky. One of the biggest indignities newer residents suffered was the "electric sauce." Rumored to have contained feces, it was a simple goo, says Zaretzky, of kitchen trash, syrup, mustard, and ketchup. Upon being coated in sauce, some residents would scream, rip off their clothes, and lash out at counselors and fellow residents.
"We could not deal with these people," Zaretzky explains. "[They] should have been in a nice, warm hospital. We were absolutely not equipped."
Last January, Elan founder Joe Ricci died of lung cancer. He was 54. During his entire, 31-year tenure, Ricci had vehemently defended his practices (Elan claims that 80 percent of its graduates go on to college, though the school does not follow up on alumni academic success thereafter). Ricci also denied that Skakel ever confessed to the Moxley killing. Current school administrators, still reeling from his death, refused to comment.
Though Ricci can no longer defend his school, understanding what drove him may explain what took place there. Over the years, as residents swapped stories of abuse, Elan, with its autocratic leader and his demand for complete devotion, has drawn comparisons to cults—such as the People's Temple and the Unification Church—with Ricci standing in for Kool-Aid shillers like Jim Jones. "The group process was very powerful," says Professor Dulit, "and in some respects, very cultlike."
Ricci's rigid insistence on absolute faith in his tenets seems to have created an army of true believers. But instead of producing believers, says Daytop co-creator David Deitch, now a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, Ricci may have been turning out "closet fascists." Elan, it seems, empowered aggressive young men—and women—to crush the weak and fragile. Its residents learned to crave that power; many became emotional despots.
"You run the risk of training sociopaths," says Dulit. "They're people who operate just this side of legal. The other person never counts for much unless he can be used or exploited."
Over the years, say former Elan staff members and residents, Ricci himself became cruel and vicious—and he freed others to do the same. "It all got crazy," says Berry of the early seventies. "He'd unleash this rage on someone in a meeting for hours." An Elan consultant, Marvin Schwarz, now chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Glen Oaks Hospital in Illinois (and a Harvard classmate of Davidson's), referred more than 100 adolescent patients to the school. But by the decade's end, he says, "the tactics were destructive rather than therapeutic," with the school's infamous haircuts little more than "symbolic castrations—and these were sick kids." He later quit in protest.
By the early eighties, several former residents claim, Ricci was getting drunk and smoking pot regularly. Though never proved, this tainted the program's credibility and made residents cynical. One day, in 1984, the internal attitude was so bad (by this time, Ricci had bought the state's largest harness racetrack, Scarborough Downs; he would later suffer two unsuccessful runs for governor) that several Elan staff members were busted to entry-level positions. Ricci sauntered in, says Ben Foster, a former truant and suburban "burnout" who was 15 at the time, and delivered a hypocritical soliloquy. "I'm going to go home, pour a nice glass of wine, and smoke a joint," he told a general meeting. "And you're all going to be here scrubbing floors."
In 1987, a woman named Bethany Berry claimed that she'd suffered sleep-and food-deprivation as well as assault as an Elan resident between the ages of 16 and 18. She later filed a lawsuit against the school, Ricci, and the state of Maine, charging abuse (it was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum). No other former residents who spoke to Details say they have any interest in suing; most only want to put their toxic memories behind them. "They wasted two years of our lives," says Barrie Hughes, who entered Elan in 1983 at 14 after her mother placed her in a psychiatric hospital. "That pisses me off. But it's done."
Former residents wouldn't have much recourse if they changed their minds anyway: The Maine statute of limitations for physical or emotional abuse expires after six years, a term that begins for minors on their 18th birthday.
Nevertheless, wary perhaps of such lawsuits, Elan has changed many of its practices over the years. The school no longer forces its residents to wear humiliating signs. There are no more spankings. And the boxing ring hasn't been used in over a year, stopping, coincidentally, when the Skakel media coverage was at its height. (General meetings are still held here on occasion, as Elan's attorney, John Campbell, told Details in a brief letter, "when a student has not been responsive to other learning experiences.")
Meanwhile, the harsh glare that came with the Skakel case may be fading. A critical witness, Gregory Coleman, one of two former residents who claimed to have heard the alleged confession, died of a heroin overdose in August, a development that has weakened the prosecution's case. As Details wentto press, Skakel's attorney was seeking to return the case to juvenile court, where, if convicted, the Kennedy cousin would likely face little or no jail time.
And back at the Elan School, safe in the woods, a new student body is learning how to get along.
--- Quote ---Thank you danny....for all the P.T.S.D. you helped to create! :notworthy:
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Felice one thing that has not been discussed here is your perpetuating the P.T.S.D. for me, by constantly and deliberately accusing me of false unsubstantiated abuses you know I did not do but were done to me at Elan. Are you making a mockery of the abuses I went through at Elan. Why would you do this Felice. You know I was a resident there have you no shame. Do you think you are better then me so you can put me down. Felice you are doing to others what was done to you and making a joke out of it. Shame on you.
Danny
DannyB II:
--- Quote ---
--- Quote from: "Eliscu2" ---I SEE BENNIKRUGLICKGOTTLIEB-BOT IS AT IT AGAIN............
I CAN'T READ WHAT HE SAID BUT STILL, I JUST KNOW IT'S RIGHT OUT OF THE HOW TO MINDFUCK ELAN DIRECTORS MANUAL.
I will be usefull and provide a few links for your reading pleasure.
Let's start with this: http://http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/01/a-miscarriage-of-justice/4759/
KEEP POSTING ELAN-BOTT I GOT LINKS I HAVE COLLECTED FOR 10 YEARS LET'S GET THAT INFO OUT THERE!
::puke::
--- End quote ---
--- End quote ---
Felice these responses are not necessarily for you, they are also for the purposes of documentation. I am rebutting and I want the population here to know my opinion.
Danny
Eliscu2:
More skeletons in the closet???
http://http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/americas-tough-love-habit
America's Tough Love Habit
For decades, Americans have tolerated "tough love" treatment not just for terrorists, but for vulnerable youth.
— By Maia Szalavitz
Mon May. 4, 2009 12:50 PM PDT
We are, famously, blasé about our acts of torture overseas. But why? The laser-like focus on fixing the economy, wanting to avoid more political divisiveness, the diminishment of watchdog journalism—are all part of the explanation. But there's another overlooked reason as well.
Americans tend to valorize tough love—at times, even tough love that verges on torture—in prisons, mental hospitals, drug rehabs, and teen boot camps. We aren't squeamish about the psychological aspects of torture. We might even admire them.
Thousands of troubled children, for instance, now attend tough "wilderness programs" "emotional growth boarding schools" and other "tough love" camps where they face conditions like total isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, and daily emotional attacks.
Thousands also attend religiously based residential programs, some of which claim to "cure" homosexuality and stop teen promiscuity. In this context, the recent poll showing that evangelicals are the group with the highest level of support for torture begins to make sense.
If we think humiliation, stress positions, and isolation are OK for disobedient teens, why not for suspected terrorists?
As the author of the first book-length history and expose of the troubled-teen industry, I’m familiar not only with the distressing stories of abuse coming from these programs, but also with their roots in the same tactics now being exposed in the CIA torture program.
If more people understood the psychological and physical consequences of these "thought reform" techniques, I don't think we'd find them acceptable for anyone.
Here's what is known about the parallels between "enhanced interrogation" teen boot camps and the idea of "thought reform" programs first described by psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton in the 1950’s—and about how they damage the mind and body.
As we’ve learned from the torture memos, the tactics used against suspected Al-Qaeda prisoners were based on American military counter-interrogation training known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape). SERE tried to teach soldiers to resist tactics that were used by the Chinese and Koreans in the 1950’s to break American servicemen and their own citizens.
Breaking someone, it turns out, needn’t involve much of what conventionally has been called torture. Instead, by the skilful control of the environment and use of things like complete isolation from the outside world, stress positions, hard physical labor, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, temperature extremes and humiliation, one can create a regime that relatively quickly warps the mind and produces at least the illusion of compliance.
(Details in the 1963 CIA Interrogation Manual here.)
All of these tactics—everything short of water-boarding—have been found to be used in a surprising number of teen programs. In 1974, in fact, a Congressional investigation said that tactics used by The Seed program on kids were "similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans in the early 1950's."
Hundreds of programs operating now are directly or indirectly tied to the program that was the model for The Seed, a cult called Synanon.
In an October 2007 Congressional hearing, Government Accountability Office investigators and other witnesses described teens being publicly humiliated, sleep deprived, starved, denied medical care and "forced to eat vomit [and] lie in urine and feces." So this has been done to kids for at least three decades.
The key to understanding why these controlling, humiliating regimens work to produce apparent compliance and how dangerous they are to mental health is social neuroscience. It turns out that the human stress system is modulated by social support. That means that what turns off—or on—our stress systems, is mainly other people.
In fact, keeping one's stress hormones balanced requires the comfort of others: Even short periods of forced isolation can make them spiral out of control.
If in addition, you deprive someone of all physical affection, further overload the stress system via temperature extremes, low calorie diets, and physical stresses like over-exercise or confinement, you have a perfect storm of traumatic experience.
A critical element here is combining these tactics to undermine any sense of control—the more helpless a person feels, the more dangerous traumatic stress becomes. The psychologists who devised the "enhanced interrogation techniques" explicitly wanted to create dependence, reading the literature on what psychologist Martin Seligman termed "learned helplessness."
Learned helplessness is actually based on an animal model of depression, and has also been linked with causing PTSD, panic attacks, and even reduced immunity.
Another aspect that interrogators recognize to be critical in destroying a person's sense of self is humiliation. This includes seemingly benign things like taking away preferred clothing and more extreme identity degradation tactics like keeping people either naked or in humiliating outfits and denying bathroom access, including hygiene.
Constant emotional attacks—particularly sexual humiliation and insults that emphasize worthlessness and hopelessness—also help leave people vulnerable to the provision of brief moments of kindness, for which, by that point, most people will do or say anything.
It seems hard to believe that it is that easy to break people’s wills—but understanding the brain’s stress system again offers insight. Under intense stress, higher brain regions have less control over the mind and body: the faster, more reactive regions dominate in order to facilitate fight or flight.
This literally makes us less intelligent and more pliable—and that makes evolutionary sense. Early humans who were contemplative during emergencies probably left fewer descendants.
And chronic, intense stress can be even more damaging: it "burns in" these hair-trigger responses and connections that give greater control to lower brain regions while damaging the area needed for long-term learning and memory, the hippocampus. This can produce depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.
However, because of social modulation of stress and the importance of a sense of control, these conditions do not have anywhere near as great an impact if the person chooses voluntarily to undergo them, has social support and knows that the ordeal will end at a certain time.
Comparing a teen who chooses to stay up all night partying or a guy who likes to stand while working at the office with people who are forced to do those things is thus invalid. The physiology of voluntarily undergoing time-limited stress induced by people you trust and being forced into it by those you don’t are completely different.
There would be an interesting debate to be had on the use of these regimes if they produced lasting positive behavior change in the direction desired by their enforcers. In terms of interrogation, some people might find it acceptable to intentionally provoke depression and PTSD in suspected terrorists if that could prevent attacks. In terms of addicts and teenagers, however, it makes no sense at all, given that both PTSD and depression increase the risk of developing new addictions or relapse to older ones.
And, in fact, imposing traumatic stress—as the researchers who studied the victims of the Koreans and the Chinese discovered back in the 1950’s and 60’s—is not a good way of producing either reliable information or behavior change. Damaging the brain regions responsible for concentration and memory and potentially inducing psychotic delusions is not a good way to discover the truth or promote better behavior.
Stories of teens held in abusive drug programs are instructive here: there are countless cases of false confessions. Kids who had done nothing more than smoke pot came out with tales of shooting heroin and smoking crack—virgins told stories of becoming prostitutes forced to have sex with animals in order to support their habits. These were not isolated events—having interviewed dozens of kids with this experience, false confessions were a common thread, many of them bizarre. Drug-related behavior after the program was often far worse than before.
Further, while many people are resilient to traumatic stress and some are made stronger by it, the damage done by imposing it doesn’t just affect victims. Perpetrators are harmed, too—by feelings of guilt, by having to shut off compassion and empathy and by the corrupting nature of having absolute power over people.
This also produces an acceptance of the previously unacceptable, a culture of callousness that erodes trust and replicates itself, causing more hopelessness and calls for even more extreme measures.
If we want to return to America’s ideals, we have to look at why we’ve tolerated this kind of treatment for anyone—not just terrorists, but vulnerable youth—for decades.
Most of all, we need to stop thinking that getting tough is the answer to everything. It’s often harder to resist kindness and compassion than it is to submit to brute force and tell your captors what you think they want to hear. This is, in part, why the FBI wanted nothing to do with "enhanced interrogation." The data on both teen treatment and legal interrogations by the FBI are clear: torturous tactics are both unnecessary and harmful.
By eliminating these coercive regimes from every aspect of our culture, we will not only do good, but do well.
Maia Szalavitz is the author of "Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids."
Maia Szalavitz is an author and journalist. She covers health, science and public policy.
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