Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Troubled Teen Industry
Apologia - Serious debate only, please!
Antigen:
I copied this anon post from another thread. I'm asking, please, no personal attacks or goofing around in this thread.
This is just the type of subject I would have loved to have discussed w/ program people out in the more commonly accepted reality 20 years ago. This is a beautiful thing! No one's getting thrown to the floor, shut down, threatened w/ lock down or any other serious consequences for failure to agree.
If anyone wants to flame, please aim your flame thrower at the other copy of this post.
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... t=30#28946
I'll unlock this new topic in a little while.
--- Quote ---Anonymous
Thanks Ginger -
Your forum, as well as others, say that all programs for teens are torture. I guess it all depends on your definition of torture. Juvenile prison is torture, not just mentally, but physically. Suicide, cutting (self torture) bulemia, anorexia...symptoms of ADD (anger, self medication, stomped on self esteem by teachers, etc.) are torture as well.
Finding a program where the underlying reasons for teens self abusing can also be torture - for the parents that have tried so much and still nothing is bringing their child to be what could be considered normal. They torture themselves for not being able to handle it themselves. Torture for the kids that can no longer manipulate their parents into whatever they are manipulating them into.
Rules to following can be torture, sitting in an isolation room can be torture. Parents getting letters from their kid saying they are being abused can be torture. Separation can be torture.
Choices can be painful.
Watching your child destroy their life can be torture, even more torture, in the worst case, would be a lifetime of torture if the child dies and you didn't do anything.
So wwasp torture children...I guess all of these types of schools also torture children. These programs are "private pay" and that makes it a bad thing? What about the state run facilities that hire unqualified staff? Does it make it better because we are all paying for them? Problem with those types of programs/whatever you call them, is that are so short term, they rarely have positive results. Children in the private pay schools not only learn to make better choices, they actually have the time to apply what they've learned.
Do they come home perfect little robots? I wouldn't think so. They are better prepared for life's challenges, though...assuming they complete the entire program. Do they fall? I'm sure they do, we all do in life. We fall, we get up, we fall, we get up again...or not.
Your analogy of Jim Jones is digging pretty low, Ginger. Go to any bookstore and you'll find racks and racks of self-help books. The same things that these schools are actually having the students apply (Bradshaw, Covey, Thom Hartmann...just to name a couple).. not to just read.
Is it torture...could be, just depends on your perception. Kinda like newspaper articles and he said/she said allegations.
--- End quote ---
Locate the blind spot in the culture--the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not--because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve.
Terence McKenna
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Antigen:
Sorry I'm late. Had a customer support call.
As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that you understand what I'm doing or why you're paying me so much money. What's important is that you continue to do so.
--Hunter S. Thompson's Samoan Attorney
--- End quote ---
Anonymous:
If "torture" were necessary for recovery from teen behavior problems, it would be an interesting ethical debate: do the ends justify the means?
What WWASP and STRAIGHT parents and others don't seem to realize, however, is that WITH TROUBLED KIDS (AND ANY OTHER HUMANS), KINDNESS WORKS BETTER THAN ATTACK AND PUNISHMENT.
There is never any therapeutic need for degrading language, humiliation, putdowns, physical "consequences" and petty rules like "no looking at members of the opposite sex" and "no looking out the window."
There is never any therapeutic need for refusal of reading material or contact with the outside world including parents (unless they are extremely abusive) for longer than a few days. There is never any therapeutic need for isolation or restraint--these may be *RARELY* needed to protect someone from harming himself or others, but these tactics are never therapeutic.
There is never any therapeutic need to insult or attack anyone.
People say that only toughness works for "out of control" kids but the only evidence they have to support that is a few stories of out-of-control kids who say "it's the only thing that would have gotten through" and their parents and the salespeople who push these programs. Promoters never hear from those whose kids dropped out-- or they blame them, not the program. They do sometimes hear from program failures-- ie, my kid committed suicide the day I told him he was going back-- but these are simply reframed as "he would have done it years earlier if we hadn't sent him."
Any other failures are explained away as "he didn't do what he was supposed to" "he left early" "he didn't graduate." Never is it considered possible that the program itself could have failed.
This is a sign that something is pseudoscience and cultish-- not based in reality. Any real treatment will have failures since "one size" actually fits none.
And no one can ever know "this was the only thing that could have worked for me"-- I might believe that I was cured of cancer because I had a car accident and the next day my cancer was gone, but few people would be insane enough to crash their cars to try to cure their cancers as a result of my telling them this and charging them $1000 for my insight. I have no real evidence that "nothing else could have worked" if I say so after my accident-- even if I find three other people who say chemo failed and car crashes helped.
The *only* way to know whether something works is to put one group of people through it and leave another alone and/or put another through something different and see who does better. Period.
If WWASP wants to say its programs work-- let them prove it by this method. Bring in an external group of academic researchers and let them do a proper study with control groups and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal.
If it really works, why aren't they doing this? They aren't doing so because their tactics would never pass a human subjects internal review board and because they know that what they are doing works great to bring in $$ and bodies but doesn't do anything to help kids. If anything, it harms-- there is research evidence that "attack therapy" like that used in the seminars and groups causes lasting psychological damage in approximately 10% of normals subjected to it. God knows what % are harmed when it's troubled kids who are exposed.
Sure kids who are "acting out" need boundaries and limits and rules-- but they don't need abuse, humiliation and petty dictatorship. They may even need to be "confronted" about their behavior-- but this offers insight only when it's done in the manner of "I'm worried you are harming yourself because every time you do drugs you wind up in the hospital" not "you're a fucking junkie loser who will never amount to anything."
Since most people who use drugs excessively do it to escape, why do we think giving them more things to want to escape from will help? Why do we think increased pain will make them want fewer painkillers?
Where on earth did we get the idea that love only heals when it is delivered with a barbed wire whip? Why do we believe that treating basic human rights as "priveliges" will make teens more likely to respect us rather than resent us? Why on earth do we think that my fucked up kid can heal your fucked up kid because he's been subjected to a treatment scheme for three months longer than mine? Why do we believe that making depressed kids more miserable will cure them?
Antigen:
Dear Anon,
I'll concede every point up to and including "Choices can be painful", except for one.
--- Quote ---Anonymous
Your forum, as well as others, say that all programs for teens are torture.
--- End quote ---
Some people in this forum say that, yes. Depends on how you define the term "program" I guess. I signed my kid up for a gymnastics program, that includes some rules and some risk. I think it will enhance her self esteem, give her a chance to make good friends and, btw, to have fun. All that is well worth the risks involved, and the expense. I do hold to a hard line, though, on involuntary involvement in a program, especially where older kids are concerned. The older the kid, the greater the liklihood that whatever disagreement they may have with authority is a sign that they've been paying attention, not a symptom of some illness or character flaw. That's why our society has always gradually given more legal weight to our children's wishes and choices as they get older. We don't let 16 year olds vote or drink or enlist in the armed forces, but we let them drive. They can handle that. We generally leave it up to them, too, whether to play football or join the chess club or not, which friends to choose, what to read and think, etc. After a certain age, we start to pull back from directing their personal growth and let them take charge of that aspect of their lives.
--- Quote ---So wwasp torture children...I guess all of these types of schools also torture children. These programs are "private pay" and that makes it a bad thing? What about the state run facilities that hire unqualified staff? Does it make it better because we are all paying for them? Problem with those types of programs/whatever you call them, is that are so short term, they rarely have positive results. Children in the private pay schools not only learn to make better choices, they actually have the time to apply what they've learned.
--- End quote ---
It's not so easy to tell the difference anymore, but theoretically anyway, a kid has to actually do something pretty bad to some non-consenting victim in order to land up in juvenile detention. In that case, we're not protecting the kid from himself so much as we're protecting others from him. Judge Jim Gray nailed it when he said "We should reserve our jail space for people we're afraid of, not people we're mad at." Our criminal justice system is looking more and more like the Program, though, these days. Here's a post about that:
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... t=10#28735
One of the primary flaws in the Program model, in my view, is that they are involuntary AND they have no concern for the civil rights of their clients. The only diagnostic criteria that matters is the level of distress in the parent. And they go to pretty obscene lenghts in their advertising, lobbying and proselytizing to generate as much of that kind of distress in parents and other caregivers as they possibly can.
You talk about kids who are cutting and starving themselves, but you seem to not understand a couple of important things. MOST of the kids who land up in these places don't have that kind of problem. Many of those who do have those kinds of serious problems have the problems in the first place because their parents have been feeding them a steady diet of this same, though less potent, medicine for as long as they can remember. For a lot of these kids, putting them in this type of program is a lot like the way George Washington's doctors inadvertantly killed him or, for that matter, how just a little more money is supposed to fix our schools or just a few more bombs will bring world peace; just a little more of the same medicine is sure to do the trick.
--- Quote ---Do they come home perfect little robots? I wouldn't think so. They are better prepared for life's challenges, though...assuming they complete the entire program. Do they fall? I'm sure they do, we all do in life. We fall, we get up, we fall, we get up again...or not.
--- End quote ---
How can you even say that? Do you know how many of the people who frequent these forums are Program graduates? Do you really want your family reunion in the year 2025 look like a Program reunion? This is a very old scam here, friend. Not only is the problem to be solved wholely or partially imaginary, but the patented cure is also completely unproven. We know, to a dead certainty, that the methods used in them can be very harmful. Not just unpleasant at the time, but harmful in the long term. And the only evidence of efficacy are testimonials, often outdated and no longer supported by the authors, and what the programs have to say for themselves. Any of them have a real impressibe alumni list? Lots of star athaletes, brilliant doctors and scientitst? Happy, healthy families who, 20 years later, all get together at the holidays to share the season in good cheer? Where the hell are they? I've been chumming the waters for any and all program vets for a number of years now and I haven't run into a whole lot of people who attribute their success and happiness in life to the Program.
--- Quote ---Your analogy of Jim Jones is digging pretty low, Ginger. Go to any bookstore and you'll find racks and racks of self-help books. The same things that these schools are actually having the students apply (Bradshaw, Covey, Thom Hartmann...just to name a couple).. not to just read.
--- End quote ---
No, that's actually not digging at all. Jim Jones started out his career as a cult guru by taking in junkies and employing a little behavior mod to straighten them out. His tactics were controversial but, as claimed by his followers, very effective and right. They and the authorities in this contintent agreed to disagree and that's why they moved to Giana. Same with Synanon, only that one fell apart after Chuck Deiderich was convicted of conspiracy to murder in an attempt to shield his cult from litigation. He tried to off the lawyer representing the plaintif by having a rattle snake with the rattle cut off left in his mailbox. Damned near got him, too, but for a neighbor who found him twitching on the ground in his driveway. To what lengths will these programs go to protect their higher purpose?
--- Quote ---Is it torture...could be, just depends on your perception. Kinda like newspaper articles and he said/she said allegations.
--- End quote ---
Lots of things are torture. I'm going to have some oral surgery pretty soon. It promises to be torture. But I have given fully informed consent to it. I know just what they're going to do, why they're doing it, the risks and costs involved, the likely benefits. I think it's worth it so I'm going to do it. Please wish me luck and don't expect me to make a whole lot of sense during the first week of the new year. I'll be legally, therapeutically and (hopefully) blithely stoned off my rocker for a few days. Maybe I'll put a call in to Rush's open line just for shits and giggles.
But these programs are neither volunary nor demonstrably beneficial.
I tried for years to live according to everyone else's morality.
I tried to live like everyone else, to be like everyone else.
I said the right things even when I felt and thought quite differently.
And the result is a catastrophe.
---Albert Camus
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Anonymous:
Other than in the case of a suicidal patient being protected from abusive correspondence, or the outside world being protected from terroristic threats of a violent patient, and that restriction only being for a couple of weeks at most, nobody should *ever* be deprived of the right to send and recieve uncensored correspondence.
Okay, the other case is soldiers whose mail is sometimes censored for national security reasons.
The only reason to cut off someone's uncensored correspondence is to prevent them screaming for help, and to induce Stockholm Syndrome.
ALL programs that cut off correspondence are abusive, and should be forced by the ongoing supervision of Child Protective Services to shape up, or should be shut down.
Some things are okay to do. Some things are not. Shutting off or censoring correspondence is one of the things that is NOT okay to do.
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