Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Aspen Education Group

Aspen - failure again

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Oscar:
Just one more example of how residential treatment fails if you don't work very hard on the home environment:

Britain's fattest teen starts to pile back on the weight she lost (The Daily Telegraph, october 28, 2009)

Returning home she had to take care of her parents who is unable to cope for themselves. Of course she could not remain on a healthy path. Not even the non-troubled but hardworking obediant teenagers can benefit from residential treatment if the origin of the problem isn't removed while they are away.

Aspen shouldn't have promised good results without demanding that the parents should move to a nursing home before this girl was sent back. Like with 90% of the teenagers who is recommended to residential treatment, a treatment of the family unit can produce way better results.

This girl could have benefitted from:

1) having a dietician coming into the home giving advice on meals to both her and the parents
2) been given a free membership to a health club with personal trainer
3) having the county to provide the parents with a health care aid for some hours while the daughter was away in the health club.

Guess what: It would be cheaper than the Wellspring Academies.

Troll Control:
Yes, this is the problem with the behavior modification principles on which Aspen programs are built.  In fact, it's the same problem as almost every b-mod plan: the learning is situation specific.  In other words, the subjects fail to generalize the behaviors they learned inside the lab to outside the lab, or, in this case, at Aspen programs to the real world.  

This is why Aspen is a failure across the board.  As soon as the kids leave, they go right back to what they were doing before.  Even according to limited research done on ASR by a college student, most behaviors that caused the placement were worse upon leaving the program.  Kids did more drugs after program.  Kids drank more after program.  Kids got into more trouble after program.  The whole model is a failure, so the results aren't surprising to me at all.

On top of that, according to Dave Marcus' book about ASR, 25% of the kids followed ended up DEAD and the remaining 75% RELAPSED immediately.  This book, touted as support for ASR, actually shows a 100% FAILURE RATE.

Whooter:
What book are you talking about?  Who is this guy/

Oscar:
From our datasheet about ASR:

What It Takes To Pull Me Through" (ISBN-10: 0618145451) by David L. Marcus.

I have seen the book because Covergaard bought it. It is a rather good portrait of how ASR was back in the days where they used Psychodrama as treatment (Internally known as Livestep).

The author has his theory about the cause to the traffic toward programs. He blames a the double income society and the parents priority regarding pursuing own goals rather than being a factor in the lives of their children.

Ursus:

--- Quote from: "Oscar" ---From our datasheet about ASR:

What It Takes To Pull Me Through" (ISBN-10: 0618145451) by David L. Marcus.

I have seen the book because Covergaard bought it. It is a rather good portrait of how ASR was back in the days where they used Psychodrama as treatment (Internally known as Livestep).

The author has his theory about the cause to the traffic toward programs. He blames a the double income society and the parents priority regarding pursuing own goals rather than being a factor in the lives of their children.
--- End quote ---
If I recall correctly, Psychodrama started to be used in psych wards in the 1960s, perhaps even earlier given the time table of Jacob Moreno's development of his Theory of Interpersonal Relations. Apparently, it didn't always have "props" or role-playing back then, despite the "drama" descriptive. Probably depended on the facilitator.  :D

Without the props et al, it sounds more like "good old" TC with a fancier title to me...

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