Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Thayer Learning Center
Thayer Learning Center in Kidder MO
Anonymous:
To find telephone numbers in the future, you could just try Getinfo.us . I know they used to search all the major phone directories such as Yahoo, Switchboard, AnyWho, etc.
Anonymous:
god bless you and keep up the good work my daugter is now at tlc and let me tell you it is so good to hear this story for i have been in tears for 50 min now scared worried and i miss my daughter so much and i pray that she has a sucess story. keep up your hard work
Anonymous:
I AM PAYING 47 THOUSAND AND HAVE NOT SEEN MY DAUGHTER SINCE MAY
Anonymous:
Well go get off your ass, and get her out, and tell her you'll believe anything she has to say, and go DO SOMETHING. NOW. And no, they can NOT say you cant see your kid or remove your kid.
This is your child. YOUR CHILD. Nobody else is going to protect your kid but you. GO GET HER!
Anonymous:
--- Quote ---On 2004-12-15 20:29:00, Anonymous wrote:
"I AM PAYING 47 THOUSAND AND HAVE NOT SEEN MY DAUGHTER SINCE MAY"
--- End quote ---
Sometimes when you pay a lot you get what you pay for.
Other times when you pay a lot you just get scammed.
Scammers are usually pretty good at making it look like you're going to get a lot for your money.
You'd do better to go pick up your kid and try again to handle her problems, whatever they are, in an at-home setting.
(Those of you on Fornits who are tired of my mental health rants will want to skip the rest of this---Timoclea :smile: :smile: :smile: )
-------------------------------------------
If she's a juvenile delinquent, let her know you're not going to rescue her if she does something to get herself locked up in juvie.
If she's mentally ill, try outpatient treatment including psychiatric help from a good pediatric psychiatrist. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps for some mental illnesses. Others need medication. Don't be scared off by Deborah's list of side effects. Yes, effective psychiatric medications can all have serious side effects, but not everybody experiences the side effects badly enough to outweigh the benefits they get, and patients who have side effects on one drug often don't have them on a different drug. So medical treatment with psychiatric drugs usually means the pdoc prescribes a drug that's good for your kid's problem and usually gives you samples or a small prescription so you don't have to buy a full bottle of the pills right away. Then they watch closely to see if the kid improves or starts showing signs of any serious side effects. If the kid starts showing signs of serious side effects or doesn't improve, they stop that drug (carefully) and try another one. Usually the kind of side effects or problems the kid has with one drug will give the psychiatrist more information that helps her figure out which drug or combination will actually work for your kid.
So yes, pdrugs *can* have serious side effects---but what the critics never mention is that if a particular patient starts showing signs of those side effects the pdoc doesn't just leave the patient on that drug----they take that patient *off* that drug and try another one until they find one that helps that that particular patient tolerates well. (I don't know if your kid has a mental illness, but a lot of kids who get sent off do).
Sure, therapy is vital in pediatric patients (and adult patients) until they learn how to cope with the challenges of managing their problems.
But if a patient has a mental illness, there are actual brain differences and damages that can be seen on a CAT scan (they don't normally do them because they're so expensive--but if they do one and look, there are definite differences between normal brains and the brains of mentally ill people), and for many patients therapy alone is just not enough.
If your child's problem is substance abuse, a lot of substance abusers are mentally ill and vice versa, so while AA or NA can be very good therapeutically, if there's an underlying mental illness and you don't treat it, your results won't be good. If there's *not* an underlying mental illness Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, with the rest of the family in AlAnon, is probably your best bet. If I had a kid with a substance problem I would worry more about the kid making it to meetings than occasionally falling off the wagon---the support from others at the meeting and from his/her sponsor is the best thing for getting the kid to experience accumulating sobriety as rewarding. I've heard far fewer bad things from people's experiences in real AA or NA living outpatient in the outside world than I've heard from people's experiences in these inpatient teen programs.
If your kid's problem is rampant promiscuity, check *carefully* with one or two pediatric pdocs to rule out bipolar disorder. Whether or not your kid was diagnosed ADHD as a kid, but *especially* if she was. A lot of times mania from early onset bipolar disorder is misdiagnosed ADHD, because the two diseases have nearly identical symptoms in children. Hypersexuality is common in teenage bipolars. If this is your daughter's problem, you may feel like locking her in a convent out of desperation, but you may get better results from treating the underlying medical problem.
If your kid's problem is a smart mouth or school refusal, or obnoxious friends or bizarre music and fashion tastes, and your kid *isn't* mentally ill, you may just have a kid with a difficult adolescence and she may just have to live with her mistakes and use her twenties to dig herself out of the hole she's getting herself into in her teens.
It's not easy to have and help a kid who's a bit of a wounded bird. You just have to do the best you can do and hope it's enough. I understand this, because my much beloved daughter is a bit of a wounded bird herself (as am I).
From what I've seen on the internet, I wouldn't pick TLC as a place to send my kid no matter what her problems were.
I met and talked extensively with someone who is/was a staffer at Three Springs in Alabama. While I don't recommend programs unless the kid's situation is so acute even an adult with the same problems would be involuntarily committed (imminent danger to self or others), or unless the kid agrees to go to a drug rehab or program with a *good* reputation (Betty Ford, forex) and the parents can afford it, Three Springs is less bad than some.
Let me tell you why I say that:
1) They have actually demonstrated that they *will* fire staffers if they catch them screaming bad things at the kids, and they don't appear to wilfully look the other way and just allow that to happen.
2) They have actually stood up for the kid and told the parents to lay off when what the parents were upset about was that the kid was gay. They told the parents, "Your kid's gay. We can't change him and you shouldn't try. You need to come to terms with it." If you're very Christian, keep in mind that if this particular kid was very Christian, gay wouldn't have to mean sexually active. There *are* Christian gays who are celibate---so being gay isn't in and of itself terrible moral turpitude on the part of a kid.
3) They typically treat kids coming in from the nightmare programs in Utah and such elsewhere in the industry (and they are *no* relation to such) for PTSD. They recognize that bad programs cause trauma and deplore it.
4) Their strictest sanction for bad behavior is sending the kid off one on one in the woods to camp with a counselor. The kid gets a sleeping bag and a tarp to make a tent and cold meals. If he wants a fire to heat his food and for warmth, he has to collect the wood and ask the counselor, with please and sir, to light the fire. Other stuff gets earned back by being polite and civil with the counselor. Huntsville is actually someplace where you *can* camp year round in the woods without getting sick---my husband grew up there and has done it.
*Normally* the kids live in dorms, and in hot weather they make sure the kids get lots of water and if it's too hot the kids stay inside in the air conditioning.
I know some bad things have happened there that have occasionally caused staffers to be fired, and I *certainly* still believe a child's place is in her own home and that good outpatient care will solve the vast majority of even serious problems.
*HOWEVER*
If you simply *must* put your child in a program, Three Springs in Huntsville, AL is considerably less bad than the nightmare places in Utah or TLC. I haven't searched exhaustively, but I don't think they've *ever* had a death there---which is more than you can say for TLC. You also don't have lots of kids showing up on here talking about how horrible it was the way they do about Provo, TLC, Bethel, etc.
I am in no way affiliated with Three Springs, they don't pay me, and the reason I know the staffer is because she and her husband are active in the Science Fiction fandom community. It's a small community with a very gossipy grapevine and it's significant, to me, that I've never heard anything but good of either of them. So while I don't know her *well* personally, I believe her that Three Springs is pretty much as she described it.
So if I were you I'd bring your daughter home from Thayer *NOW*----then I'd evaluate, as a parent, what problems she still has, or what new problems she has, and make a real good try at outpatient care for those problems.
Then if you think you just *have* to send her to a program, at least pick one whose reputation isn't quite as bad as TLC's.
Personally, *I* wouldn't commit my child as a minor for anything I couldn't commit her for if she did it as an adult. The exception to that would be if I couldn't get her medication down her and she had a history of dangerousness to herself or others, I'd either get them to give her a shot at the hospital if they could, or I'd commit her until she was stable on meds again. But that's consistent with some state's laws on something called outpatient commitment (you have to take your meds and if you don't you get immediately rehospitalized until you're stable again)---laws I agree with and think all states should have, that should apply to seriously mentally ill adults.
But if you're just got to use a program, at least pick one of the least-bad ones.
Timoclea
(I focus on mental illness because a lot of teens that get sent off by desperate parents have a major mental illness, a lot of times undiagnosed, that is the root cause of their problems. My understanding of mental illness, for whatever it's worth, comes from a bachelors in psychology, living with bipolar disorder since I was five years old, being the mother of a child with early onset bipolar disorder, and having just about every close blood relative have either bipolar disorder or one of the lesser mental health problems that run in the same families as bipolar disorder.)
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