Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Daytop Village
DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
SEKTO:
--- Quote ---The chair, I assume was a chair in the middle of a circle of chairs (the one in the center being the confronted one).. a hot seat technique. We had this in the program I was in. It was like a firing squad.
--- End quote ---
Yes, everything I am describing to you all took place at the outpatient level.
No, the Hot Seat technique was in the form of the encounter groups, which were done in a big circle with nobody in the middle and the all attention given to whoever was getting yelled at. The encounter group usually consisted of, oh, 15-20 people, including at least one counselor, maybe two sometimes. These encounter groups were conducted once a week if I remember correctly, twice sometimesand lasted an hour or two at the most, or until everybody felt properly ventilated, depending on whatever else we had to do that day.
Then there was another form of the hotseat, the more brutal "haircut" sessions, in which you'd go into a small room and there would be three seats lined up on one side and one on the other. The person receiving the "haircut" (a term borrowed from Synanon and going back to the early days of DAYTOP, also the term "splitee" for that matter, which was the DAYTOP word for somebody who'd run from or "split" the program) would face, from the single seat on the one side, the coordinators and/or counselors on the other and they'd take turns screaming at you and telling you what a fuckup you were and all this, and it would go on for as long as they felt necessary.
Also there were "dealtwiths" with were pretty tame, really. You'd basically tell a person what he or she did wrong and not to do it again, maybe some light punishment, say, they have to do dishes for a week or something. After somebody got two or three "dealtwiths" for this or that offense, they'd get a "haircut." But, if it were a serious enough matter, they'd get a "haircut" right away.
For example: say you catch somebody smoking out back. No big deal, relatively speaking, give them a "dealtwith." But if you catch them smoking out back on a regular basis, then it's time to give 'em a "haircut."
Now, The Chair was just that: some kid would be made to sit in a chair and face the wall in a corner like a child for a day or two, hands in their lap and both feet on the floor, not being allowed to speak and nobody allowed to speak with them. They'd have to take their lunch in The Chair. If some counselor deemed it necessary, sometimes the kid would be made to wear a paper sign taped to their back, with some message like "I am rebellious" or "Don't talk to me, I'm in The Chair." Or sometimes, I remember now, they'd make a kid walk around with some sign all day but NOT make him sit in the Chair: "Ask me why I got a haircut today" or "I have issues" or "Ask me why I am so babyish" would read the humiliating message on the sign.
One time they made me wear a sign that read, "Ask me to bark like a dog" and all day long kids would come up to and ask me to bark like a dog, and I'd do it.
Another time Marcia made me dance around in Morning Meeting like a spazz, to "help" me "overcome my social hangups." That stunt I recall to this day, and only added to my social hangups.
One time they made a kid walk around all week with a pacifier around his neck and whenever somebody asked him why he had the pacifier around his neck, he'd have to tell them "Because I am such a baby."
That particular kid is dead now. He split from DAYTOP, stole a car, got drunk and high, coked up, went joyriding and ended up in...I think it was Oklahoma, and got he killed after running a red light. Got broadsided by a truck and it decapitated the kid. I still remember his name and went to the boy's funeral. He was seventeen when he died. That's a true story.
There are three kids who I was in DAYTOP with who are dead now. I could tell you their names, too.
What do the people who come up with this stuff think they're going to accomplish (that is constructive) by making kids do this stuff?
More in a bit.
Ursus:
--- Quote from: "psy" ---
--- Quote from: "SEKTO" ---If you still didn't go along with it, did too much complaining or asked too many questions, you might have to spend time in "The Chair" after a series of "haircuts."
--- End quote ---
The chair, I assume was a chair in the middle of a circle of chairs (the one in the center being the confronted one).. a hot seat technique. We had this in the program I was in. It was like a firing squad.
--- End quote ---
I've read that Hazelton was using the "hotseat" in the early-mid 70's when they were incorporating Synanon techniques (Hazelton participated in trainings at Eagleville Hospital just outside of Philadelphia; Eagleville learned their stuff directly from Synanon). But the "hotseat" is a concept probably as old as therapeutic communities are, which predates Synanon by at least two decades.
We had "haircuts" at Hyde School too, literally, haha! That was one way of addressing a "phony image." Some of us also had to dig our own graves, 6x6x2 holes that - if the measurements were off - would need to be filled and re-dug. Again. And again. Joe Gauld got some of his ideas from Cool Hand Luke. It was required viewing for years. Perhaps it still is...
Ursus:
--- Quote from: "SEKTO" ---...If some counselor deemed it necessary, sometimes the kid would be made to wear a paper sign taped to their back, with some message like "I am rebellious" or "Don't talk to me, I'm in The Chair." Or sometimes, I remember now, they'd make a kid walk around with some sign all day but NOT make him sit in the Chair: "Ask me why I got a haircut today" or "I have issues" or "Ask me why I am so babyish" would read the humiliating message on the sign.
One time they made me wear a sign that read, "Ask me to bark like a dog" and all day long kids would come up to and ask me to bark like a dog, and I'd do it.
--- End quote ---
Ah, jeez, the friggin' signs... Elan School was real big on the signs. Hyde School even had them for a while. I think I remember one particular awful episode where some kid was forced to wear a big diaper (he was quite overweight, and this was one of the issues he was being confronted about), and a sign reading "Ask me why I'm such a baby."
From an old Time article in 1975:
Faced with a rebellious applicant, Gauld once shouted, "Listen, I'm telling you either change your attitude around me or I will jam it down your throat."
Although annual fees for tuition, board and room add up to a hefty $4,700 [not any more! lol], life at the small (enrollment: 175) coed boarding school is almost as rigorous as that of a Marine boot camp. Many of the students are troubled, and short-tempered Gauld treats them like a drill instructor faced with a platoon of left-footed recruits. He occasionally slaps and routinely humiliates the kids--with their parents' tacit consent--in a no-holds-barred effort to toughen them up and build their characters. "The rod is only wrong in the wrong hands," Gauld likes to say. When he finds that a student has what he considers a "bad attitude," Gauld may order him to wear a sign saying I ACT LIKE A BABY, or tell him to dig a 6-ft. by 6-ft. trench and then fill it up. He has even conducted a public paddling ceremony at Hyde...[/list]
SEKTO:
One time they made a kid walk around all week with a pacifier around his neck and whenever somebody asked him why he had the pacifier around his neck, he'd have to tell them "Because I am such a baby."
That particular kid is dead now. He split from DAYTOP, stole a car, got drunk and high, coked up, went joyriding and ended up in...I think it was Oklahoma, and got he killed after running a red light. Got broadsided by a truck and it decapitated the kid. I still remember his name and went to the boy's funeral. He was seventeen when he died. That's a true story.
There are three kids who I was in DAYTOP with who are dead now. I could tell you their names, too.
One of turned into a junkie after he left DAYTOP, and got shot while trying to steal a car for heroin money.
Another kid went into a gang, and I heard that he got shot and killed in a drive-by.
Mike (the kid with the pacifier) got decapitated by a truck after splitting from DAYTOP.
Truthfully, I feel bad about Mike to this day. I myself gave that kid vicious haircuts and made fun of him and laughed at him in group with everyone else.
You're either a predator or prey in that situation, like psy said.
Mike had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and was actually a sweet-natured kid with problems, not some fuckup. And I made the kid suffer too. God, I wish I'd tried to be his friend now!
I am tearing up, remembering Mike at this moment. It makes me emotional. I hadn't though of this stuff in years, kind of blocked it out. I remember the guy well. He was a good kid, really. He was so scared and vulnerable. He didn't need to be there. He didn't deserve that. He should have been in Special Ed, not some brutal environment like DAYTOP.
Here's the story with Mike: Mike's parents confided to Marcia that they'd adopted him as an infant, but didn't know whether they should tell Mike of this, or how to go about it. They told Marcia this in confidence, and asked her not to tell him. But she did anyway. Marcia then broke their confidence, and "accidentally" told Mike that he was adopted. She sort of slipped it into a conversation with his as if she assumed that he already knew...she took Mike aside one day and it went something like "So Mike, how old were you when you found out that you were adopted?" The bitch thought she knew what was better for Mike than his parents did, and took it upon herself to tell their kid that he was adopted.
So Mike freaks out, steals a car with some kid who split with him, they get all coked up and drunk, wind up in Oklahoma, run a red, and Mike winds up getting his head removed, just a two or three days after Marcia spills the beans.
The other kid in the car got out of it without a scratch and told me about it himself at Mike's funeral.
We found out what Marcia had done only after she'd been fired; If I remember correctly the director of out facility told us about it.
So "Marcia" (not her real name) gets fired from DAYTOP over that shit and last I heard she worked for UPS. She'll answer to her maker someday.
Like Forrest Gump said, that's all I have to say about that.
SEKTO:
--- Quote ---Gauld may order him to wear a sign saying I ACT LIKE A BABY, or tell him to dig a 6-ft. by 6-ft. trench and then fill it up. He has even conducted a public paddling ceremony at Hyde...
--- End quote ---
DAYTOP outpatient would do stuff like that too, make us wear signs, sit in The Chair all day, carry around baby bottles or wear pacifiers, make you bark like a dog, I never saw somebody made to dig a hole though, nothing quite so extreme; after all it was outpatient and we didn't have time for that...I remember they'd make kids walk around and pick up exactly 500 cigarette butts or exactly 500 blades of grass, some number like that, and label them all with tiny pieces of paper and tiny pieces of tape. Lots of humiliation and degradation. And then put you on the van and send you home. And our parents let them do it. DAYTOP had them thinking that this was all a good thing too, same as us kids. Crazy, right?
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