This is great! @Psy: That Metro Pulse article on PV from 1997 was deliberately buried due to pressures from Covenant. Someone screwed up and it made it to Archive.org. It was like finding the Holy Grail after hearing about it from long-time local advocates and shrinks. I've been trying to contact the author, Betty Bean, to see if she'd want to do a follow-up, since nothing has changed but the ugly faces. Still trying.
@Psy: We got the hook-up for the WATE-TV piece, but it was never damning toward PV. WATE is heavily dependent on Covenant Health as an advertiser. Lori Tucker, the reporter who did the story wanted to interview my family after we wrote to her. Tucker refused to allow any local advocates or mental health pros with negative PV views to be involved, so we followed gut instinct and backed away. It is a great source of embarrassment for Covenant and WATE-TV since Ryan Sullivan, the young man featured as a "PV Success Story", relapsed shortly after the story aired and is still not speaking to his parents. It appears from Ryan's MySpace that he is in college and doing well, he's just pissed at his folks and getting high. He lives near Act.da. Act, feel like looking up a fellow survivor for an interview? Ryan's comments would be interesting. FreeWeAreNot lives about those parts, too, but that would be a taxing interview.
My wife and I are writing the parent perspective together, I'm putting together a history of PV from it's murky origin as some government-funded mental program in 1970. Two gov't funded mental facilities were established in TN very close together: Moccassin Bend in 1969 and Jones Bend (Peninsula) the following year, both built on nearly identical peninsulas. Three sides surrounded by water = one way out, a well-planned prison.
As long as this is private...[Redacted]
Let's do the bastards.
