This dude

[Deprogrammed]

This dude right here...needs to be a target of internal fornitsificators investigation, seriously. Look at his rap sheet.
Psy, Bill, Gingy?

          

David A. Deitch, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of phoenix house

Dr. Deitch, a clinical and social psychologist, re-joined Phoenix House in July 2007 as Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer. He has more than 45 years of national and international experience in the development of drug abuse treatment systems for adolescents and adults.

Dr. Deitch is a professor of psychiatry emeritus at the University of California, San Diego where he led the Center for Criminality & Addiction Research for the past 15 years. In the non-profit public health sector, he was Co-Founder of Daytop Village, Inc., and later served as Chief Clinical Officer for the Phoenix House Foundation. In the academic sector, Dr. Deitch had faculty appointments at Temple University, the University of Chicago, University of California at San Francisco, as well as serving as Chief of Substance Abuse Services for the University of California, San Francisco. In the government sector, he has served as Coordinator of Curriculum and Faculty for the United Nations East Central European Drug Abuse Treatment Training Project and he continues to consult to a variety of Departments of Corrections and Ministries of Justice and Health, in Latin America, South East and South Asia and Europe. Dr. Deitch served during the Johnson Administration as consultant to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Crime and Juvenile Delinquency, and the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. During the Carter Administration, he chaired the White House Task Force on Prevention.


Source: http://http://www.phoenixhouse.org/National/About/Leadership/KeyStaff.html

[Ursus]

For sure... He's already all over fornits, do a search. That's about the third or fourth time I've come across one of David Deitch's bios. Most of them are in the Daytop forum.

None of the bios themselves make reference to his involvement with Synanon, however. If I'm not mistaken, he was THE go-between or bridge from Synanon to the early addiction treatment TC spin-offs Daytop Village and Phoenix House. He also helped set up Gateway in Chicago.

[Deprogrammed]

For sure... He's already all over fornits, do a search. That's about the third or fourth time I've come across one of David Deitch's bios. Most of them are in the Daytop forum.

None of the bios themselves make reference to his involvement with Synanon, however. If I'm not mistaken, he was THE go-between or bridge from Synanon to the early addiction treatment TC spin-offs Daytop Village and Phoenix House. He also helped set up Gateway in Chicago.

[/b]
That is true....the synanon thing is true too.
He disgusts me...."Developing treatment systems", like we are some lawn springler unit in "development.....Even their terminology is unempathetic, and cold. These Elite are evil.

[Inculcated]

Deprogrammed, this was in the DV arena. Reading it made me love me some Levine.
A recent guest post on that thread indicated someone is at least giving project planning some thought, but it sounds messy.
I would like to know how the hell a psychologist ends up running the psychiatry department.(Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Director)
 Is med. School now just a CME option?

Harry G. Levine    http://www.hereinstead.com/sys-tmpl/htmlpage14/

The following letter is a reply to the long-time editor in chief of the most eminent alcohol and drug abuse journal in the world today. He was putting together a book of the journal's interviews with prominent addiction specialists. The book was to be divided into sections with a brief introduction by an appropriate outside expert. Dr. A (for Anonymous) wanted me to introduce a section called "USA Treatment: Not by Doctors"

He sent me only the last names of two interviewees. I did not immediately recognize either name, but I tracked down one of the printed interviews. The fellow turned out to be a major figure in the Therapeutic Community movement, and I found his views as expressed in the interview appalling. So I wrote back to the good doctor and editor to explain my problem with his assignment.

This was a professional correspondence and until now I have kept my letter private. But I think that drug courts, drug treatment, and therapeutic communities are becoming increasingly important political topics, at least in New York. And since September 11, 2001, it seems important to me to discuss things like this more openly. -- HGL, October 2001



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Harry G. Levine

Department of Sociology,
Queens College and the Graduate Center
City University of New York
Flushing, New York 11367
718-997-2800

______________________________________________________________________




January 10, 2001

Dr. A
Editor-in-Chief
(Journal Name Omitted Because It Is Not Relevant)
London, UK.

Dear Dr. A:

You occasionally make seemingly simple requests that, when scrutinized closely, turn out to involve very difficult issues. If I quickly agree to do the task, I immediately find myself in a thicket of sticky, complicated questions, and I'm forced to learn and think about a whole lot of things I had in no intention of getting involved with. However, if I closely scrutinize the proposal before accepting, then I am still confronted with the thicket of complicated questions, and I'm forced to learn and think about a whole lot of things that I had no intention of getting involved with. All as a result of a seemingly simple request.

You asked me to comment on "USA Treatment: Not By Doctors" with two names listed. David Deitch is not on the tip of my tongue, especially in the "Deitch" only version, and I still don't know who "McDermott" is. But your publisher was willing to sell me an electronic copy of Deitch's interview through the web for an absolutely exorbitant sum -- which I was very happy to pay because I wanted to see the mine field you were offering me a chance to run through.

David Deitch, as they say in America, is "a piece of work" -- or to translate into another American slang expression: he is "sumpthin' else." That he is, as you properly understand, an American temperance character is only part of the story. He is a temperance character as pictured by Mark Twain, especially in Huckleberry Finn. He is the con man, chiseler, thief, hypocrite, ne'er do-well and do-gooder, adventurer and jolly companion, all rolled into one. He cheerful embraced shaved heads and busting people as good for them, and he opposed methadone maintenance as close to the devil's work. Then he more or less cheerfully abandoned those views eventually becoming an administrator of, yes, methadone programs.

Dr. Deitch claims to have played an important role in calling the lock-em up and bust-em down approach to curing drug addiction a "therapeutic community." But in his interview Deitch reveals that he is unhappy with the name therapeutic community. He regrets not using the term "humanizing community" to characterize these punitive, moralistic, authoritarian, infantilizing institutions. I believe that earnestly using the opposite term to name something is properly called "Orwellian." Since the fifteenth century, "humanism" has been about respect for human freedom, creativity and autonomy. Most American TCs push pretty much in the opposite direction. And Deitch hasn't a clue to the ironies and contradictions in his ideology.

I've never seen Deitch, but in the late 1980s I did meet George DeLeon (who is a more serious thinker than Deitch). I had an extended conversation with George about what he believed. I was fairly astonished to discover that, deep in his heart, this gentle, nice man passionately believed in keeping drug addicts (but, conveniently, not alcoholics) in what to his dismay I insisted on calling "pink padded prisons."

Unlike the nineteenth century temperance speakers, who just spread the message of their personal reformation, Deitch's project (like Synanon's) has a more punitive and sadistic edge. And this preference became even more pronounced as Deitch became more professionally successful. It does not seem surprising, therefore, that after a while Deitch's work emphasized the institution TCs most resemble: prisons. Especially prisons in "Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka," and "Latin America." It takes someone later than Twain, Graham Greene perhaps, to invent a character who proudly reports in his interview that

"some of the best staff I ever trained were in the Malaysia prison system. They now have four therapeutic communities in Malaysia in the prisons run entirely by uniformed personnel. Thailand has 54 prisons using therapeutic communities."
I'll bet they do. Yet even Deitch doesn't tell us in which Latin American countries he trained prison personnel. Argentina under the Generals? Pinochet's Chile? Cuba? Does anyone doubt that if Kim Il Song invited Deitch to set up "humanizing communities" in the prisons of North Korea, that David would not leap at the chance. He might even get to dig out the old Ché poster that he reminisces about.

East Germany, by the end, was filled with characters like David Deitch, George DeLeon and Mitchell Rosenthal [the director of Phoenix House] -- high status and successful professionals who believed they were "serving the people," doing good for ordinary folks by humiliating them, coercing them, depriving them, punishing them, and lying to them, for their own good.

I know a couple of knowledgeable observers who say that just about the only careers that successful graduates of American drug treatment TCs have is working for a TC. If so, David Deitch is emblematic of that pattern. No matter how many twists and turns his life took, or that the drug-free therapeutic community movement took, Deitch stayed onboard. Maybe he's the most successful TC graduate of all time, the greatest one of all. And now he trains prison personnel in how to reform inmates in countries whose prisons are nightmares, including those of the state of California.

The problem, Dr. A, is that these kinds of comments are not appropriate for your purposes.

The legitimacy of TC's in the U.S. is a big problem, and not to my mind an accomplishment. Most of them probably have made things worse for hard-core drug addicts, for people with drug problems, and even for non-problematic drug users.

I offer one personal anecdote. About a year ago, my then 18 year old son brought home a friend of his to talk with me. Jeffrey smoked marijuana a few times a week, most often perhaps before going home to his often feuding parents. He was a bit goofy but sweet, and my son had worked on an after school project with him for two years and knew him quite well. Jeffrey had never been a great student, but he was doing better academically than ever before. He had a girl friend at another elite school, he'd been accepted at a decent university. He was happy,18, and in his last semester of high school. He and another dopey friend got arrested by undercover police for smoking a joint in Central Park, near their homes. Mayor Giuliani has increased marijuana arrests from about a thousand or so a year to forty thousand a year. Mainly teenagers and young adults get caught, including lots of middle class kids like Jeffrey. What happens? No one knows for sure, but this story may not be that unusual.

When Jeffrey's parents were told to come to the police station and get him out, they became very upset and worried. They sought out a competent professional to examine Jeffery, and were given the name of a top doctor. His name happened to be Dr. "E" (as in Addiction Expert). As you no doubt know, he is a professor at a prominent medical school and a long-time member of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

Dr. E did not want to see Jeffrey, but only his parents. He listened to them and may have said that Jeffrey was in serious danger. In any event, he firmly told the parents that they and Jeffrey should all go to Phoenix House. When the three of them arrived at Phoenix House, the parents and Jeffrey were separated. The Phoenix House staff told the parents that they had seen many cases like this. They said that Jeffrey was in very serious trouble, he was on the way to becoming a drug addict, his life was in danger. They said that Jeffrey must immediately enter a Phoenix House program, and the parents could attend a group too, so as to better help their son. Jeffrey's parents told him that, given all these professionals' advice and experience, he had no choice: he was to begin treatment at Phoenix House in few days. During that time my son brought Jeffrey to me.

When Jeffrey came to my house a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in drug cases happened to be there. This good doctor listened to the whole story along with me and was flabbergasted to hear that an eminent physician and medical professor had recommended Phoenix House for someone he=d never met. Jeffrey himself was most upset that almost overnight his parents had become deeply fearful and distrustful of him: they fully accepted the idea that he was in immediate danger of becoming a drug addict and destroying his whole life. He found this prognosis amazing, especially considering that he had never done any other drugs, and he didn't even like alcohol.

I then brought Jeffrey to another drug expert physician who interviewed him at length. He told Jeffrey that, in his opinion, Phoenix House would not be the best place for him, and that if Jeffrey wanted counseling or psychotherapy there were a number of alternatives to consider. The physician also said that, unlike private counseling or psychotherapy, Jeffrey's treatment by Phoenix House for drug abuse might well become part of his permanent medical and health insurance records -- with serious implications for career, reputation, and future health insurance. The physician also said he would say all this to Jeffrey's parents if he wished.

Jeffrey thought it all over that evening, and then bravely told his parents that he did not want to go to Phoenix House, and he wanted to consider other treatments. His parents went ballistic, and fought with each other and him. They then called Dr. E to ask him what to do. Dr. E said that now he did want to see Jeffrey. However, before, going to meet Dr. E, Jeffrey was directed to meet a girl, about his age, who had been in Phoenix House for a couple of years. She told him what a great place it was and how he could meet interesting people there. Jeffrey said she was also pretty good looking.

Jeffrey and his parents then went to Dr. E's office where it was announced that Jeffrey would be interviewed by another doctor -- who just happened to be Dr. E's wife. Jeffrey talked with her for quite a while. Then she came out and reported to the parents and Dr. E that Jeffrey certainly did not need to go to Phoenix house, but instead would be in treatment with ... her.

The story goes on, but that's enough. Now I know the world is full of crazy people, but it is also full of crazy institutions -- and American drug treatment therapeutic communities are disproportionately of that class. In the U.S., TCs have enormous credibility, and prominent addiction physicians work closely with them. It's my sense that the majority of TCs -- or at least the ones like Phoenix house -- probably should be regarded as "treatment" in much the same way that, 200 years ago, Benjamin Rush's ice baths and preference for locking patients in closets were treatment.

Unfortunately, the machine that caught Jeffrey and his family rolls on. Jeffrey's experience has produced no new collective knowledge. He's now far away in college and doing very well -- more sober-minded, in fact, than the heavy-drinking dormitory mates he finds all around him. For understandable reasons he hasn't told many people, and his parents don't want anyone to know what happened. I tried to get a New York Times reporter interested, but unless the family was willing to go on the record there was no story, and no one wants this said about them in the papers.

So this year, when the thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of New York City high school students, younger perhaps than Jeffrey (17, 16, 15, or 14 years old) get caught smoking marijuana by Mayor Giuliani's police, some of them will get referred to expert physicians who will send them and their families to a TC. There, these mostly innocent (in the fullest sense) people will meet experienced, compassionate professionals and treatment personnel who will say and truly believe that the teenager must, of course, come only here, immediately. And some of those many thousands will enter treatment.

What would David Deitch say about all this? He would likely say what a great place Phoenix House is and that he helped out the young "Mitch" Rosenthal early in his career. He might say that perhaps a few inappropriate referrals are made, but not many, and besides, just smoking marijuana is a danger sign. He might also say that TCs are, after all, very beneficial institutions, even for people without drug problems. For Dr. Deitch, with the right approach, even horrific third world prisons can be "humanizing communities."

Now, who was that other guy you wanted me to comment on? And what can I possibly say about him or Deitch that would be appropriate for your volume? Of course these are all important issues that should be discussed, but not I suspect in the 1200 word introduction to two interviews in a book of interviews.

But I may misunderstand the situation, so please advise.

Cheers,

Harry G. Levine

[Inculcated]

http://www.phoenixhouse.no/
Welcome to Phoenix Haga

Research Report
The Third Generation of Therapeutic Communities: The Early Development of the TC for Addictions in Europe
Eric Broekaerta, Stijn Vandeveldea, Veerle Soyeza, Rowdy Yatesb, Anthony Slaterc
http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/pr ... tNr=224233

-Department of Orthopedagogics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;
-Department of Applied Social Science, University of Stirling, Scotland;
-Phoenix House Haga, Mysen, Norway

Abstract
Aims: It is the goal of this study to investigate the first development of the drug-free therapeutic community (TC) in Europe. The paper aims at systemizing information, scattered all over Europe and is the first stage in an ongoing study to record the development of the European TC movement and its influences. Design: After a study of the grey (hidden) literature, TC pioneers and experts per country were contacted to further elaborate the first findings. Subsequently, a preliminary summary of our findings was published in the Newsletter of the European Federation of Therapeutic Communities (EFTC), inviting additional information and corrections. The authors completed the results for this article with relevant first-hand information, obtained through interviews with European pioneers. Findings: The findings are summarized under three topics: chronology, interconnections and European identity. It was found that from 1968 until 1989, a new therapeutic approach arose all over Europe, modeled after Synanon, Daytop and Phoenix House, New York, through Phoenix House, London and Emiliehoeve in the Netherlands. Therapeutic communities were established in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland as well. These communities were closely-knit and interconnected in their reaction against psychiatric and methadone treatment. The European TCs developed an own identity compared to the American ones. Conclusions: The European TCs adapted the model of their American predecessors to their own culture, influenced more by milieu-therapy and social learning. Instead of harsh behaviorism, more emphasis was placed on dialogue and understanding. Professionals occupied a more pivotal role and took over the dominant position of ex-addicts. Research, executed by TC professionals gradually entered the TC. A generic network of TC connections, through which the development evolved, was uncovered, and clear regional trends can be observed.
Copyright © 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

[Inculcated]

The pernicious influence of David Deitch reaches well beyond Daytop. So, I'll post this here as well:

Deitch himself reports that his program time was served inside the Narco Farm in Lexington Kentucky. The Narco Farm is notable for being the first attempt at a T.C. in this country and for being located within a prison. It is of notorious repute for researching the treatment of addiction with LSD
(inmates as “voluntary” test subjects) and for being closed in the 80’s due to its controversial research involving providing cocaine and opiates to subjects.
(All of the above information was gleaned from references posted on Fornits under the Narco Farm thread)

Deitch sought his initial “training” at Synnaon with the megalomaniac Charles E. Dederich – (Synanon Founder).
Thus began the long career of David Deitch, the man responsible for the propagation of countless TCs.
*Each of them based on Synanon’s founding principles. These still apply to today’s TCs that treatment should provoke “dissonance,” meaning discord or conflict, to individuals’ self-image so they are no longer comfortable with whom they are.*(That last bit *-*is paraphrased from a source linked on Fornits … somewhere)

The following is excerpted from an expansive report published in fellowship with the World Health Organization 1967:
Synanon
Synanon, an ex-addict community with several facilities in California, has proved to be an effective way of organizing treatment. It has, however, discouraged ex-addicts from leaving Synanon and re-entering the larger community and has zealously maintained its separation from government programmes. Further, Synanon, after a rapid growth between 1958 and 1965 has now apparently stabilized its size at approximately 600 residents. Because of the nature of its programme, it is unlikely to increase significantly in size.
Daytop Lodge
This is an open voluntary treatment programme originally serving drug addicts placed on probation by the local courts of Brooklyn, New York. Technically it is a half-way house, but has a much more active treatment programme headed by an ex-addict, Dave Deitch, trained at Synanon. The lodge is staffed chiefly by ex-addicts; its major features are:
1.   The newly referred addict is made to fight his way in to the programme.
2.   Rigid high standards for behaviour in all areas is expected and enforced, by all patients.
Drug dependence in the U.S.A. 19
1.   The new addict is treated as a helpless child first, but gradually moves from menial to responsible jobs at the Lodge and finally to work outside.
2.   Vigorous, aggressive "gut level" group sessions are held frequently.
3.   More intellectual philosophic seminar sessions are also held. The similarity to Synanon is striking, the major difference being that the former is a purely voluntary private organization, while Daytop Lodge was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health Grant. It was also originally under court sponsorship. The Daytop Lodge programme now receives support from the City of New York and now also accepts voluntary admissions and patients from sources other than the Brooklyn Courts.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime UNDOC
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and- ... ge003.html

More on "This Dude" and his pestilence (shouldn't this topic title have his name in it?) when I can stand it…

[Ursus]

The Narcotic Farm
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=28143[/list]