As for the primordial days of Synanon for the most part what I’ve come across tells of Dietrich starting running his game or the precursor to it in the twelve-step setting and then breaking off to form Synanon.
I have no links that provide additional details about Deitch and his journey from The Narcotics Farm to Synanon. This one that turned up covers the book and expands just an ity bit
http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/201 ... 1935-1975/I guess I'm gonna have to call Deitch himself and ask him what came first the brainwashed chicken or the Feds on Maoist acid?
LMAO! Do please, let me know how that call goes.
Excerpts from a cached version of this article which may or may not be already pasted on another thread Deitch tells a slightly different (perhaps more forthcoming or revised) version than others. In this interview he attributes his recovery to Synanon whereas previous accounts acknowledge his relapse following his time on The Narco Farm, but mentions of his subsequent journey to Synanon were brief and along the lines of seeking training. Interestingly, in this interview he also asserts that Synanon was his "first exposure to peer based mutual help".
David Deitch, PhD and George De Leon, PhD on Recovery Management and the Future of the Therapeutic Community
Written by William L. White, MA Tuesday, 21 September 2010 16:44 Counselor Magazine
This article—the third in a series of articles profiling pioneers of modern addiction treatment—engages two leaders of the international therapeutic community (TC) movement. Dr. David Deitch is one of the most singular figures in the American TC movement and one of the few people whose career transcends the infancy, adolescence and maturation of TCs around the world. Dr. George De Leon has spent a career conducting and publishing scientific studies of TCs, and using the results of these studies to guide the evolution of the international TC movement…
David Deitch: It’s a delight to participate with you and George to reflect on the evolution of the therapeutic community. I come to this discussion with a lengthy history of over 60 years in the addiction world.
My first education was regrettably my early use of heroin, which I began at the age of 15. In 1951, I was arrested for drug possession and entered addiction treatment at the federal prison/hospital in Lexington, Kentucky (known as “the farm”). Upon release, I finished high school and became excited about learning, particularly philosophy and psychology. I continued sporadic college education amidst a continued cycle of relapse, crime and arrest. I was unable to get it together in spite of multiple treatments. At each institution, I tried hard to understand what was wrong with me. I attended every group, had great and caring psychiatrists, but always relapsed upon my return home. Then in 1961, I left New York in search of a new rumored “cure” called Synanon in Santa Monica, California. Synanon was the beginning of the American TC movement and my first exposure to peer-based mutual help. It had everything—a charismatic leader, colorful ex-cons, con artists, motorcycle gang members, great jazz musicians, liberated women. We (recovering addicts) did everything, including security. Everybody started at the bottom and earned their way up. It wasn’t a treatment program; it was an amazing community, and everyone contributed to its magic. Synanon was a new society that honored the outsider, played to the rebel. It was a place where we entered to get clean and ended up seeing ourselves as the heroes of a new movement. These were the days before Synanon evolved into a cult and eventually imploded.
Many of us who left before Synanon developed into such a closed community were called upon by different agencies to help start new therapeutic communities. Daytop Lodge was the first. The lead psychologist for the Brooklyn Department of Probation, Alex Bassin, and the Chief Probation Officer, Joseph Shelly, visited Synanon and embraced it as an answer to the growing heroin problem in New York. They sought funds from NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] to place addicts on probation into a Synanon-like setting and recruited me to develop that program. In 1965, we, along with Monsignor William B. O’Brien, formed Daytop Village. Daytop Village marked a break from Synanon and set the model for future TCs in terms of acceptance of government funding, evaluation procedures and external governance.
1965-1970 in New York was a breeding ground for TCs due in great part to the influence of Dr. Efren Raimirez, a psychiatrist recruited as New York City’s first “drug czar” by Major Lindsay. Efren, who had been trained in the Maxwell Jones TC model, persuaded me to use the term therapeutic community (TC) as a more scientific way to describe our method. Until that time, we had proudly used the term, “A Humanizing Community.” Efren hosted regular meetings of key people interested in the treatment of heroin addiction. These meetings included Mitch Rosenthal, who developed Phoenix House; Judy Densen-Gerber, who founded Odyssey House; and a young social worker, who helped create Samaritan Village. Within a few years, Daytop graduates went on to help build Gaudenzia in Philadelphia, Gateway in Chicago, Walden House in San Francisco, and Marathon House of New England. By the 1970s, a full fledged TC movement was spreading across the United States, Europe and Asia. TC methods became more diverse across these different geographical, cultural and political contexts. Since this period, I have had the privilege of observing and participating in the worldwide spread and evolution of the TC as a treatment for addiction.
Bill: Thanks, David. George, could you introduce yourself to our readers and add your thoughts on the early evolution of the TC movement?
George De Leon: As a jazz musician, years before my career as a psychologist, I understood the drug problem through its impact on friends and fellow musicians, some of whom turned their lives around in Synanon. I had early contacts with Daytop Village and Synanon groups in New York, but my work in the TC movement began when Mitch Rosenthal asked me to bring my research skills to help in the development of Phoenix House, circa 1967.
