Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Peninsula Village

Former PV counselor's opinions

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ZenAgent:
_ Zen Agent:_________
Thanks for posting, it's interesting to hear from a PV counselor who went through the Covenant transition. The program is off the rails these days. If you don't mind me asking, were you there when Dr. Vance Sherwood was clinical director, and do you know if Bob Pegler has a degree in Psychology? I appreciate any input you might have from your time there.


Reply from expvstaff
Honestly, I'm a bit unsure about posting here. It is very upsetting to me to read from folks (you included) about what the Village is seen as now or how it was experienced. This guy Turtle was there when I was there, and I surely worked with him. I felt like most of what I did (what PV did too) was helpful and therapeutic and probably unique. I worked with an Administrator who often agreed to keep a kid for an extra 2 or 3 months after the expiration of insurance benefits because that's what they needed. We did discharge kids who ran out of benefits sometimes but I really felt like we had a good relationship with many families and many insurance companies.

It's hard to reconcile that spirit of goodwill and energy with what is being related here. Not saying we saved everyone or turned every kid around, but I was proud of what we did and knew that I was making a difference. That was very important to me, because I knew that we were tough and demanding.

Covenant opened up the floodgates of state-custody kids (foregoing the majority private insurance kids) and that brought in huge numbers of very challenging patients who were facility-hardened and not interested in therapy. They were much angrier on the whole, and staff assaults (and consequently, PCI's) went up.

I worked with Dr. Sherwood and found him to be a pretty brilliant guy, actually. His ideas on group dynamics (treat the individual by creating a group dynamic that rewarded the group for an individual's efforts) were a key to what we did. He felt that since peer pressure is one of the biggest influences on adolescents, then that should be used to help in positive ways. Working with Dr. Sherwood was one of the better things about working there for me. He struggled with the Covenant transition and left by the 1997 or so.

Bob Pegler, as I said, doesn't resemble to me the person described in some of the posts. Bob's "gift", to me, was a natural ability to get to the heart of the matter with kids who desperately needed to be understood. He was a no b.s. kind of guy but I never


Zen Agent
29 November 2007, 11:52

Thanks for the insight into the old PV. I think they suffer from program drift and the corporate bottom line mentality. DCS quit referring kids to PV after some unknown disaster, so PV may be suffering from a drought of patients.

 expvstaff
1 December 2007, 11:50
    

I absolutely think that bringing in more kids in state custody compromised the program in many ways. You ended up getting more patients who spent longer times in STU or whose goals for treatment were modified to no longer include a stay in the cabin program. We saw kids come in and we knew that we'd only have them for 3 or 4 months; once they were "stabilized" in STU, they were discharged to group homes, foster care, home, or other facilities. Naturally, they often had little motivation to progress as they knew they were short-timers. The use of group dynamics and treating the individual by treating the group seemed, in my opinion, less effective. Some of the state patients had no interest in progressing. When you've been in 15 different placements in 3 years and you're hopeless as a result, it is really difficult to believe that anything that you do is actually going to make a difference or that somehow you can break the cycle.

Beyond that, some of the newer patients were nuts. Just totally screwed up and at times psychotic. Pardon my frankness, but they weren't budging from their orientation to the world, and it didn't matter to some of them if they destroyed the group dynamics. They were scared, scarred, and damaged and they weren't giving in, no way, no how.

An unused cabin on both the boys and girls campuses were then utilized as "STU cabins", with round-the-clock awake staffing (as opposed to regular cabin staffing in which the counselors slept at night). Some cabin staff and some STU staff transferred to those programs; others were hired directly and trained specifically for these hybrids.

I believe that a security alarm system was rigged up for the STU cabins, in the event of a restraint or something. I know that lighting was an issue, and so a system with car batteries and lanterns was used so the overnight staff could record patient notes and more easily monitor the patients.

These "developments" further moved PV away from its origins as a unique environment designed to treat the treatment-resistent adolescent and into a place that seemed poised to mine whatever they could from whatever was out there.

Dr. Sherwood eventually grew disillusioned with the changes and left as well, I think by 1997. 






Message from expvstaff
1 December 2007, 14:36
   

after reading here (and on Fornits) about that counselor, I searched a bit and found the links and your email exchanges with her. It looks like her MySpace pages are gone, by the way.

One of the great fears about bringing in new staff is that, especially after Covenant came in, salary and standards were lowered (high school diploma okay instead of BS degree preferably in psych) and you got people with all manner of experience and inexperience. I know that there were a few people hired who had worked up at Mountain View in Dandridge, which was pretty different from PV at the time. PV ended up taking people who were less qualified and were willing to work for less money. A bad combination, as it turned out. We could no longer be as exclusive and picky when it came to hiring, as other places paid more.

I'm trying to remember some specifics about family therapy. FT was required but it usually wouldn't start face-to-face until after the kid had been in STU for about a month or had reached the 2nd level. That was one of the "carrots" that was held out to newbies. "See your family when you get to level 2."

I worked with some awesome family therapists who pushed and prodded, supported and examined, and worked those family dynamics. That went really well when there was an actual family involved. As I mentioned before, that happened a lot less with patients in state custody. Therapists began to come and go a bit more around 1993 or '94 and also as before, when that happened you lost that history, that sense of purpose that PV had early on. The newer FT's were professional but, if my memory is correct, were often pretty new and inexperienced. FT was a key component of what we were doing since the family was the preferred placement upon discharge. Patients were given TA's (therapeutic assignments) home for the weekend to "try out" coping strategies with the family in the months prior to discharge. Again, that was something that happened with kids who were at the Bear level (level 2 of 4) in the cabins.

I don't recall many instances of parents who were actively questioning what we were doing in the early 90's. Certainly we weren't given carte blanche and did whatever we wanted; I think it was more of a comprehensive approach to treatment that kept them involved and informed.

We had kids who got pulled out early (according to our treatment plan) by parents who had issues or grew impatient o



Zen Agent to expvstaff
1 December 2007, 16:41

Your last message got cut-off at the end - is there a word limit? The staff's blog disappeared after I emailed a link to PV's administrator and CC'd it to HIPAA/OHRS.

We were not allowed to question the program, anywhere. All we were told was "If you're against the program you're against your child". We were given a guideline that made the rounds of the mental health professionals we know, including some from CAFETY- to a person, all were shocked.

The program lost its direction, that's obvious. Every PV clinician we encountered seemed de-sensitized and intolerant of parental concerns, openly laughing at some questions and occasionally losing their tempers when questions came up they did not want to think about. One psychologist flipped when questioned about PV's success statistics - my wife knew they were based on a questionnaire sent to 121 people, I believe. Anyway, only 33% returned them, and that was PV's database. The psychologist got angry when this was brought up and growled "Why are you ASKING these questions?'




expvstaff
1 December 2007, 16:57
   

   
oh shoot...hate to see that it got cut off. It was a good one

I guess my main point is that parents were involved in therapy from the beginning, even if their kids were in STU and unable to attend FT meetings due to their level. Parents still came in for sessions. Dr. Sherwood believed that kids needed to take responsibility for what they were doing now as a result of things that had happened to them earlier in their lives...that they couldn't go back in time to figure out what had happened to them but would benefit instead from trying to understand how things in the past (and at home) were affecting them currently. FT was a big part of that, so I don't think that it is necessarily correct that he (or PV at the time) didn't promote FT or attempt to treat the family as a unit.

Che Gookin:
good stuff...can't wait to see more of it... staff are starting to come out of the woodwork more and more..

ZenAgent:

--- Quote from: "expvstaff" ---
wow...been reading here and on fornitz for about 2 hours. I worked at the Village for several years in the early 90's in both the boys cabin and STU programs.

I oriented new kids to STU, did strip searches, wore the buzzer, participated in group therapy sessions, sat in treatment teams, worked with family therapists, slept in a cabin (hell, I actually helped BUILD one), drove a van to AA/NA meetings, chased down kids who eloped, restrained dozens of kids, and occasionally helped train staff to do the same. I guess I'm the enemy here.

I worked with nurses who abused prescription and IV drugs, line staff who left work at night to drive to Knoxville bars and then came back to work at 3am unnoticed, staff who met upstairs in the YC to screw at night, a counselor with a scab on the back of her hand from the back of her teeth (she got that from sticking her fingers down her throat to make herself vomit), aggressive STU staff who were quick to hit the buzzer to initiate a PCI (one kid called it "Patient Carpet Introduction"), and professional staff who seemed to set up line staff against each other at times, with the end result being a bunch of staff who were just as f&^ked up as some of the kids.

I also worked with incredibly talented and gifted staff members who truly made an effort to help damaged kids understand what they needed to do to turn things around. Peglar was one of those guys. I don't recognize him, from the way a few of you have described him. He was a caring, deeply intuitive guy who had a knack for reaching some of the toughest girls. Of course, I am talking about the early 90's, and he worked in the girls cabin program. Some of those other staff are long gone, as they recognized the tide of changes that came about in the mid-90's.

I felt at the time that much of what we did (I did) was helpful but in the back of my mind, I always wondered what happened after kids were discharged. Some of them made it...we heard from them and trumpeted their successes. I attended reunions a couple of times in the early 90's. One kid actually walked the Appalachian Trail after discharge. Others just disappeared. Sometimes I read about their deaths...two boys that I worked with committed suicide. One was an Army vet who went to Iraq in 1991 and was playing Russian Roulette. The paper said that "it was unclear if ____ knew that the gun was loaded." I thought damn...if you're in the Army, you KNOW if the gun is loaded. He didn't care.

Standards for staff were pretty high until Covenant came in around 1994 or 95. They wanted to save money and if I remember, they cut the starting hourly rate for STU counselors by a buck and dropped the college graduate requirement. This immediately resulted in a less-talented pool of applicants and created tension among staff when they realized that the old guys, doing the exact same job, got paid a dollar an hour more. I left a while later.

I took another job (not in the industry) and a few months later, a kid that I worked with at the Village saw me. I remembered him and said hello. He confronted me. He told me that he was not a bad kid but had made some bad decisions and that the Village had f^&ked him over and it took all he had to get out of there somewhat intact. He was angry but controlled. He made eye contact and measured his words carefully. He really needed to say what he said. I think I mumbled "thanks and I hope things are better for you now" or something like that. That's been 10 years, and I still remember it.

Someone was asking about the placement of the pee tubes. When I was there, the pee tubes were at individual cabins and were rarely moved. I helped a group dig a new site once...the bottom of each hole was covered with gravel, the tubes were placed, and the rest of the dirt was replaced. Occasionally we'd throw lime in the tube to help with the smell. The boys would use the bathhouse bathrooms when we could, and the pee tubes at night. I don't remember ever punishing a kid or harassing them for waking me up at night to go pee. Not saying it didn't happen, but I don't recall doing it myself.

I never saw anything that would constitute sexual abuse by any staff member. There was a program director (the one who crashed her car into a KPD cruiser on I-640) who was gay and seemed to hire a lot of gay women (and once really upset a counselor for implying that SHE was gay) but I don't recall any concerns or allegations at the time (early 90's) about that kind of thing.

That's all for now.
--- End quote ---

ZenAgent:

--- Quote from: "expvstaff" ---
The whole reason that I went to work at PV was because I figured that I could help kids who were lost/messed up and needed help. For most of the time that I was there, I felt like that was what we were doing. The program back then had a large Native American spirituality-based program of levels (Mouse, Bear, Eagle, and Buffalo) and used the Medicine Wheel to signify the journey from damaged to healed. A Mouse sees only that in front of his own face and whiskers, and must investigate everything. A Bear is capable of taking better care of himself but is still careless and doesn't know his own strength. An Eagle has vision and can see things that are in the distance. A Buffalo possesses all of those skills and uses them as necessary to share your experience with others.

Are these concepts even used anymore, or is that lost now?

I know it sounds hokey, but I felt that it put recovery into terms of heroic action and reflection about beauty and pain, as well as the obligation to reach out to others. I don't remember having any patients who earned their Buffalo while there, but there were several who returned after discharge and received it in a special ceremony in front of everyone. It was a BIG deal.

The Native American stuff began to lose it's cachet there around the time that STU was opened. It was still used, but the woman who instituted it was marginalized and eventually left all together. It made the Village less special, if that's the right word for it.

We expanded from 2 boys cabins and 1 girls cabin (maybe 28 patients altogether) to 3 boys cabins, 2 girls cabins, a boys STU, and a girls STU (both under the Youth Center.) Eventually the nurse's station was remodeled and moved downstairs, the staff offices were moved to a trailer across the parking lot, and a new, larger Girls STU was constructed in the old nurse's station. The old Girls STU (under the YC) was turned into a 2nd, smaller Boys STU. Capacities were approximately: Boys STU 1: 15 patients. Boys STU 2: 8 patients. Girls STU: 14 patients. The family therapy office was also constructed at that time.

At some point more cabins were constructed and so by maybe 1994, there were, if I remember correctly, 4 Boys cabins (may have been 5), at least 3 Girls cabins (and probably 4), and the three STU units mentioned above. At an average of 10 kids in each cabin, that makes at least 70 kids in the cabins (and maybe 80) + 23 in STU. I can remember seeing reports where our census was up above 100, so those numbers are close.

That was some major growth, and clearly PV had opened up the gates and began seeking a wider variety of patients and disorders to treat. We began seeing lots of kids diagnosed with codependence; that was a popular thing at the time and it was garbage...it simply was something that was reimbursible through insurance and so it was used a lot. I don't really remember our docs using it much; I remember seeing it on lots of admission summaries from other facilities. I also know that we often wanted to take kids off their meds when they first came in to get a feel for what was really going on with them. There was the thought that they were overmedicated and that we wanted to experience the patient without the meds to make a proper diagnosis. We didn't always trust what we were told prior to admission.

okay, I'm rambling and it's late...I hope some of this junk is helpful to someone.
--- End quote ---

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