Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Facility Question and Answers

Into the Belly of the Beast, the Comparison

<< < (2/9) > >>

Muppeteer:
Matt's post is dead on accurate in terms of Elan, he has done an incredible job of painitng an Elan still life from memory, and all of it rings true from my experience close to a decade later.

I would simply like to add here, the program at Elan began to experiment with the CEDU exercises (aka Propheets/Workshops) by the mid-80's when I was there. I do not know how long they continued to use them. Ricci felt he was in competition with Wasserman, for sure, and Brown as well. He would occasionally reference a furniture salesman in Palm Springs with great disgust. I have since been able to connect those dots to Wasserman.

The takeaway is that Elan did evolve, as did Synanon and Daytop before it.

For example, I can recall only three or four rings occuring in the E-3 dining hall from early 85 to mid 86, and a cowboy beatdown was practically unheard of by then. Edit to add: Primal scream was also phasing out at the time, so much so that I want to say only certain houses were practicing it, and I can't recall participating in it, and certainly not regularly. That is not to say we didn't have a lot of yelling anyway in Raps (encounter groups),GM's and haircuts.

Finally, I have come to believe that my enrollment was (in part) part of an effort by Elan to change their demographics from state placements to private placements during a time when state placements were on the decline, and the Pinehenge school had lost accreditation, thus preventing some states from even considering the program.

Edit to add: having been there during most of the time that Ms. Curley's book was written, finally having had a chance to read it has been extremely enlightening. We (most of the house I think) knew it was being written at the time, it was a poorly kept "secret," but really just another feather to tickle Ricci's ass. Too bad the author did not see through the veneer at the time, or the whole place would have been exposed many, many years sooner.

Che Gookin:

--- Quote ---I would simply like to add here, the program at Elan began to experiment with the CEDU exercises (aka Propheets/Workshops) by the mid-80's when I was there. I do not know how long they continued to use them. Ricci felt he was in competition with Wasserman, for sure, and Brown as well. He would occasionally reference a furniture salesman in Palm Springs with great disgust. I have since been able to connect those dots to Wasserman.
--- End quote ---

Now that is interesting. My story is stranger than fiction at times. My brother got me into working for a program back in 2000. He in turn spent 19 months in Rocky Mountain Academy, and he's quite familiar with CEDU and Wasserman. He's doing fine now, been program free for ages, and has been a proud collector of Staffer Sobriety tokens at the Staffer's Anonymous meetings (lame joke).

I'm not ducking out on the thread, just been very busy at work. I'm a teacher by trade and at times, primarily the weekends when I do most of my classes, I'm quite swamped. I printed out Matt's post and I'll carefully read it before the weekend is up.

Till then, questions for me?

I think this thread is going pretty well. I'm willing to open it up to questions about Eckerd's Youth Alternatives as well. Get a 3 way comparison going if we get that far.

What sort of level system was in Elan?

3 springs it was

new group member
group member
responsible group member
distinguished group member? (could be wrong)
Senior Group Member

Treatment team met weekly to decide who got a stage increase, whose stage remained the same, who got consequences, and who got home visits. Treatment team consisted of the group goons (counselors), group head goon (supervisors), family coordinator goon (family worker), and possible a unit director goon (unit director, and occasionally the program administrator goon (head cheese). These meetings could take 3 or more hours as we went through heaps of nonsense about about each and every kid to decide their fate.

We talked about all sorts of things, 3/4ths of it we had no place discussing as none of us were educated enough in Psychology to be commenting on it.

How did this sort of thing work in Elan for graduating from the program?


mod edit: trimmed out the unnecessary remark towards another poster.

Muppeteer:
"What sort of level system was in Elan?"

The level system was commonly known as "The Dichotomy" and as Matt mentioned, we had to memorize it like a cadet memorizes the military chain of command. The actual chart was on a blackboard on a wall in the room where we gave haircuts (known in Elan at that time as "VR's" or Verbal Reprimands).

This will be a test for my memory, so please forgive me if there are a few positions out of place...from lowest to highest, I believe it was something like this:

shotdown
worker
ramrod
expeditor trainee
department head
full expeditor
chief expeditor
shingle expeditor
coordinator trainee
guru
full coordinator
re-entry

psy:

--- Quote from: "Muppeteer" ---shotdown
worker
ramrod
expeditor trainee
department head
full expeditor
chief expeditor
shingle expeditor
coordinator trainee
guru
full coordinator
re-entry
--- End quote ---

It sounds to me like these are staff levels.  Were participants in the programs groomed to become staff?  Also, what's re-entry?

Muppeteer:
"It sounds to me like these are staff levels. Were participants in the programs groomed to become staff? Also, what's re-entry?"

Yes, Elan was always interested in retaining a handful of "true-believers" (for lack of a better term) to retain as staff. That is exactly how some long time Elan staff arrived at their jobs. Jeffrey Gottlieb, Clare Woodman among them.

Re-entry was the final level prior to graduation, and generally speaking it involved separating physically from the house you had been living in (and it's daily routines) and moving to the "re-entry" dorm. It usually lasted about three months. Once in re-entry, you could work off campus if you were of age to do so, or you could work in the Elan 3 kitchen for low/minimum wage.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page