Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Daytop Village
DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
SEKTO:
--- Quote ---The key thing here is that they created the illusion of being able to leave (and told us this often) while at the same time making it nearly practically impossible. The end result is a deep-seated feeling of learned helplessness, eroding any shred of self-confidence "students" have left. It's a trick many cults use. Scientology's Sea Org uses similar tactics to keep their members from leaving. Did Daytop do any of that or did they rely exclusively on psychological debilitation?
--- End quote ---
Did Daytop do any of what? I am not sure that I understand your question psy. But I'll tell you what I remember:
From what I remember, it was usually put to us in terms of, "Those doors aren't locked. I'm not putting a gun to your head and making you stay here. You can leave whenever you like, and it's your choice. Don't let the door bruise your butt on the way out."
If a kid lived at home they'd mockingly say "It ain't easy, living on the streets, but you'll find that out once your mama kicks you out of the house for splitting the program. You made your bed, and now you've gotta lay in it. This place ain't called PLAYTOP. We can't make you stay. Up to you. Bye."
Or if the kid was probated there, the counselor would say, "You want to leave huh? Well, this place is called DAYTOP, not DAYCARE. OK, no problem. I'll just call your PO, and I'm sure that TYC will have a bed ready for you."
The counselors and staff would never physically force anybody to stay there. If a given kid wanted to leave, he or she could walk out the door whenever they wished. The counselors were never allowed to lay their hands on anybody, unless it was to break up a fight or something, or under some extenuating circumstance. If it came to breaking up some altercation, or if it came down to a counselor defending him or her-self, then the counselor could (and would) step in and physically stop a kid from hurting another kid or something like that. And I did see an instance in which a counselor stepped in and physically stopped one kid from kicking another kid's ass by putting him (the kid who was ready to beat somebody up, that is) in a bear hug.
But no, they'd never physically stop anybody from leaving. They'd let the kid walk right out the door, and would call his/her parents and/or PO right away.
This was in the middle of Dallas, mind you, an urban area, not out in the sticks. It would have been easy to hop on a bus and get away. But where would you go?
Does that answer your question, psy?
Antigen:
--- Quote from: "SEKTO" ---My judgmental attitude, self-perceived "authenticity" and lack of tolerance for what I perceived as the "phoniness" in others is/was so systemic in my thinking that that was my mental "baseline" for all of my adult life! You know?
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Yup! And you can just imagine how popular that kind of attitude made me with other kids when my older bors and sis were in the Seed. It was a big part of the effective social isolation netting. We were more or less cajoled or coerced into being assholes to outsiders so we had no vector into anything if we did leave. And the longer you stayed involved the narrower and more tenuous any of those old ties might become.
SEKTO:
After deliberating with myself over this, I have decided to disclose these people's names.
DAYTOP outpatient started out in Richardson TX; I first went there in March of '92. Then they gradually moved the operation to the Dresser building, near downtown Dallas, beginning in spring/summer of '93 and into early '94. I graduated in approximately August of '93, and DAYTOP left TX entirely in approximately '96.
So here they are, all of them. These are the staff who were working at DAYTOP when I was there:
I'd love it if some of you floated these names around and tried to see what can be come up with on these people. Especially Marcy.
First is Ruben SILVERIO (maybe SYLVERIO, I cannot remember the proper spelling). A Puerto Rican DAYTOP grad from NYC.
Next, Marcy LANGSTEIN (pronounced Lang-STEEN) this is the one whom I refer to as "Marcia;" she was a totally bullying, confrontational "diesel dyke." Again, I am not making fun of her; that's how she described herself to us at the time. I remember her as a kd lang loving, folk-music playing, flannel and cargo-pants wearing, pickup truck driving type. She is also a DAYTOP grad from NYC; I think that she was a grad from the Queens outpatient facility.
If what I was told about her is true, then Marcy indirectly killed Mike GOMEZ through her abuse and negligence, IMO.
Mike GOMEZ was the kid I told of, whom Marcy (going against his parents' wishes) told that he was adopted, according to my sources. This led to Mike becoming very disturbed and running away, eventually getting killed while driving drunk. The kid had FASD, and was learning-disabled. We all treated Mike very poorly, and I regret that. He was the guy who was made to walk around with the pacifier.
The DAYTOP directors' names back in my time were these:
When I first got there in March of '92, the director's name was Mike GORMAN. He was a chain-smoking ex-jazzbo from NYC who claimed to have played the drums in Billie Holiday's band. He chain smoked filterless Pall Malls, spoke in this raspy voice, and he's the one the always went around with that "When you think you're looking good you're looking bad, and when you think you're looking bad, you're looking good" crap. He'd been to prison and had a small teardrop tattoo near one of his eyes, I cannot remember which one. Mike Gorman graduated from DAYTOP way back in the '60s and had worked for their organization for a long time. He's been dead for over ten years. He was pretty old when I knew him, and I heard that he died in Florida at his daughter's house. He died in '93. I am pretty sure that Mike Gorman had been part of Synanon back in the day, too.
The next director after Mike was a guy named Eddie CINISOMO. He was a DAYTOP grad from NYC too and would always tell us that we were just statistics to him. I don't know how or why he got removed from the directorship, but he did. He is dead now too, from some kind of natural causes, but I know no details of his death or the circumstances of it. His wife worked for DAYTOP too, as an administrator, but I do not remember her first name.
After Eddie was M******* another Puerto Rican, ex-heroin addict. I am not mentioning here name here to protect her privacy in case she is still alive. She started out as a counselor in DAYTOP and eventually got promoted to director of our outpatient facility. She was (according to my sources) HIV positive but none of us knew it at the time, and I heard that she is dead now too. She's the one that went to work for Dallas' Phoenix House facility after DAYTOP was shut down in TX. She eventually died (or so I heard) from an AIDS related disease.
So all three of the directors at our outpatient facility are dead now. I do not know for sure, 100% about M*******, but feel that it is likely that she is indeed dead. She's not mentioned as part of Phoenix House's Dallas facility anymore.
Also on the staff as counselors were Greg THOMAS and Leroy BREWSTER. These two were these two huge black dudes that used to be football players. A kid named Mike told me, swore up and down, that he and another kid named Jerry once smoked a joint with Leroy on DAYTOP property and laughed about it together. Leroy supposedly UA'd them shortly thereafter but nobody involved cared. What are they gonna do, make me sit in the Chair? Was Mikes' reasoning. DAYTOP never kicked anybody out of the program, just shipped 'em too Athens if things got out of hand or if the kid was too rebellious or whatever. Greg Thomas was an ex-college football player who had to quit playing because of an injury and eventually started working "in the industry." Leroy Brewster was a guy who used to deal Ecstasy in the mid '80s, and had worked for the Buckner orphanage before he got hooked up with DAYTOP. I am pretty sure that Leroy was from Lake Highlands and went to Lake Highlands High School.
The other kids who eventually died were named T.J. THURMAN and Robert ROMAN. T.J. was the guy I told of who was a junkie and eventually got shot trying to steal somebody's car, and Robert was this Mexican kid who eventually joined a gang and got killed too.
One time in 1995, I was driving in Old East Dallas and saw Marcy out in her yard mowing her lawn, so I pulled over and got out of the car to say hi to her. I do not recall our conversation much but do recall that she told me she was working for UPS.
Let's see what can be done to hold 'em accountable.
The name old DAYTOP Dallas outpatient staff psychologist (whom I referred to the other day) is Susan MERLIN (like the magician) and the old staff social worker's name is Joyce RATNER. Joyce eventually quit working for DAYTOP because (as she told me years later) she began to see how abusive they were. I was in touch with Joyce a little bit over the years, off and on; as late as the year 2000/2001 I ran into her in a restaurant and we talked about "the old days" over lunch. Joyce actually apologized to me for what they'd done. I didn't "get it" at the time, what she was talking about, but sure do now. Joyce was a really nice lady.
I actually believed that DAYTOP had helped me for years after the fact.
That place really, really screwed with my mind. It took me fifteen years to see that.
Last I knew, Joyce was retired and I have no idea at all about whatever happened to Susan.
SEKTO:
All this reminiscing about DAYTOP that I have been doing lately reminds me of the old Cheech and Chong routine (I believe it is on an album called Big Bambu) in which one of them was playing some Jesus hippie guy who said: "I used to be all messed up on drugs, but then I found The Lord. Now I'm all messed up on The Lord."
All of we old Daytopians from Dallas in the early '90s were saying, "We used to be all messed up on drugs, but then we found DAYTOP. And now we're all messed up on DAYTOP."
Antigen:
I gotta go play my role in the combine now, but I just wanted to respond to this cause it made me realize a tragic loss and tear up.
--- Quote from: "SEKTO" ---And we did lots of acid and other psychedelics together in later years, too, to try and undo some of the DAYTOPian programming but that only re-enforced and strengthened the groupthink bond. Taking a bunch of acid together in a tight-knit group like we were was like doing surgery on OURSELVES, like doing brain surgery on your buddy with a knife, fork, and spoon. A different form of psychic surgery in an effort to try and correct the surgery that the non qualified "doctors" messed up in the first place. Needless to say, crude, and very dangerous. Very easily abused, or it's maybe more accurate to say, misused.
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Among the minor disabilities I had going at life to begin with is an odd difficulty in marking a new face or name. I guess I started to realize it around middle school age; that the people around me just had an easier time of getting to that familiar get along with others where you can call someone by name naturally, spontaneously, without having to rack your brain for the name and how you know this person. Being that my family were all in the Program already and my mother drinking most deeply and lustily of the kool-aid, I didn't have a single confidante who I could talk to about things like this except my brother, Jack. And he wasn't around all that much in those days. I think he was drunken and heartbroken in Tallahassee or something.
Anyway, I never put it together till now, but I was already working on that. I used to doodle all the time. In school, I used to do a lot of portraits of teachers and students. I never got back to that, nor to improving my handwriting and playing guitar, though I've had one or two in the house practically all of my adult life.
Nothing wrong with a little psychic self surgery. In fact, short of total milieu control, which we know to be haphazard and harmful, there is no other way to do psychic surgery, is there? I almost wish I had done more acid.
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