This whole thing just kills me.
Online games as an addiction on the same level as drug abuse? Come on! First off, WoW is a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game. Much of the attraction is the social interaction and the people you meet playing them. When I have played such games, for one I find them cheaper than going to movies every week. You meet really interesting people and get to know them quite well. In fact last Summer I lost a friend I had made whom I had known through the game for five years. Died of a stroke in his sleep. During the time I played, I knew people as young as fourteen and as old as seventy four. Yes, retired people even play these games. Even my dead friends father played, having gotten his son involved, and the father was sixty six. The adults who played were all employed, the younger kids were in school. I knew one kid who was sixteen when I met him, and five years later he was graduated with his four year degree, a year ahead of his peers. Why? Because we encouraged him.
The "addiction" is that you can really meet some good people who you can actually get emotionally involved with. And I don't mean sex. When my buddy died, a was deeply saddened. But the lure is the social networking. Many of these players get together in places like Las Vegas or New York City, or some place where they meet up and hang out for a weekend, bring their computers and play together. It is fun, a source of both entertainment and a place where some fit in. It sure beats going to parties and having to deal with alcohol, drugs, loud music... Much safer and innocent.
And clearly if your child is playing it so much he isn't doing anything else, YES, take the graphics card out. Most modern computers have a built-in graphics card on the mother-board fully capable of running the machine. But there is no way in hell it will run a game as graphics intensive as an MMORPG like World of Warcraft.
Personally when I read the post it just seemed too much like an advertisement to me. Just another angle, a new addiction to get parents to think their kid has a problem requiring abandonment and isolation to the Wilderness to be treated. And when the last post showed Lon Woodbury responding, that made me laugh. Because towards the beginning of the story, the woman, Ellen, speaks about someone counseling her on the correct program for her son, but then specifically stating that the person was in no way connected or affiliated or receiving kick-backs from any of the programs they recommend... Ha! They all do! Lon Woodbury is the original kick-back king. When I was at Rocky Mountain Academy in North Idaho back in 1984, Lon Woodbury, who was recommending programs to parents, had an office on campus! I saw him nearly every day. And all of those counselors at Rocky Mountain Academy went on to start their own programs. Whether Wilderness or Boot Camp or Therapy School, not a single one had any education or experience in counseling, treatment, therapy, psychology, psychiatry. None. Yet all proclaimed themselves experts because they had used drugs or were prostitutes, or had harmed others, or were promiscuous in their past, and because they had been "counselors" at one of these teen gulags.
It just amazes me that with the power of Google and Yahoo search engines that parents don't take five minutes to turn on the computer, search for these schools and get some background themselves. And that coming here to Fornits, with thousands of posts that are negative by thousands of different survivors doesn't at least make them hesitate in sending their kids to one of these places. And the two or three Guest posters and Anonymous posters who say great things about the programs but never seem to come clean about who they are. Always asking for proof of survivor testimonies, yet never seeming to offer much in the way of proof that these programs really offer anything in the way of legitimate, peer-reviewed, independent evidence that they really are the miracle cure for every issue teens have.
And the story was perfect in how it covered all the Warning Signs sites like ASTART tell parents to watch out for. Like rushing to make a decision. Using professional kidnapping services to take your child away for you. Limiting your access to your child. Your child not having ready access to a phone or the US Mail to contact the parents or advocates 24 hours a day in the event they think they are being abused. Places that are located in extremely remote locales. Programs that don't even bother to professionally diagnose the problems of your child but insist they have the cure. No clear-cut, step-by-step program guide detailing exactly how they intend to "fix" the child. Or diagnosing the problems of the child over the phone or internet and then saying the child is in immediate danger of being permanently impaired if the parents don't ACT NOW!! The story was a textbook example of how NOT to approach a problem.
Lon Woodbury.... That guy just never goes away, does he?
