Death in Texas at "On Track" Wilderness

[Anonymous]

Mark Wardle does not and has not worked for SageWalk in many years!

[Anonymous]

sadly yet not too surprising that after a crimminal investigation - no charges in the Chase Moody death.

[Anonymous]

On 2003-01-11 11:32:00, FaceKhan wrote:

"Considering the place like most fad treatment programs was falsely advertising its and its staffs qualification to treat kids in the first place, it should not even be a qestion as to what kind of restraint was used. Any restraint at these places should be considered assualt and deaths resulting from them should be considered felony murder (fraud and child abuse being the underlying crime) and the perpetrators should get a needle in their arm.
"

I went to On Track and was present when Chase died.  Call it a fad treatment program, call it what you will.  Wilderness programs have been around for a decent period of time and I know MANY MANY people they have helped, including myself.  I know On Track saved my life, because if I hadn't gone there because I was sent to a therapeutic boarding school where I learned more and which helped me further, I would have run away from the boarding school right away, stayed in denial, and stayed closed to receiving help, and done something stupid.  I would go back and do On Track all over again, if I could.  It was one of the most amazing and self-realizing experiences of my life.  The staff were very helpful and actually cared about me.  I know there are RTCs out there where the staff don't even care.  I'm just saying, take it easy on the bashing.

[Anonymous]

OK SO IT WOULDN'T LET ME EDIT THE POST SO READ THIS ONE INSTEAD....

On 2003-01-11 11:32:00, FaceKhan wrote:

"Considering the place like most fad treatment programs was falsely advertising its and its staffs qualification to treat kids in the first place, it should not even be a qestion as to what kind of restraint was used. Any restraint at these places should be considered assualt and deaths resulting from them should be considered felony murder (fraud and child abuse being the underlying crime) and the perpetrators should get a needle in their arm.
"

I went to On Track and was present when Chase died.  Call it a fad treatment program, call it what you will.  Wilderness programs have been around for a decent period of time and I know MANY MANY people they have helped, including myself.  And the kids who are sent to these programs, yeah some don't have huge problems maybe they could have made it on their own, but I know a large amount of people who went through wilderness and therapeutic programs who would have died without them.  The programs slowed them down at least if not stopped their craziness (I guess it depends on the quality of the place they were sent to).  I know On Track saved my life, because if I hadn't gone there because I was sent to a therapeutic boarding school where I learned more and which helped me further, I would have run away from the boarding school right away, stayed in denial, and stayed closed to receiving help, and done something stupid.  When I left home, I was suicidal, using drugs including heroin, promiscuous, running away, violent, and all that good burnout junkie crap.  I would go back and do On Track all over again, if I could.  It was one of the most amazing and self-realizing experiences of my life.  The staff were very helpful and actually cared about me.  I know there are RTCs out there where the staff don't even care.  I've heard stories about CEDO from girls who have been there.  But most of the kids who get sent there are sent by parents who don't know where to go.  There are educational consultants who can help parents because most of them keep track of their students and therefore know which programs help and what a student would need.  So On Track wasn't perfect.  I can't say I'm a great advocate of the Brown Schools.  But they did save a number of lives, just like other wildernesses like SUWS, Sagewalk, Aspen, Catherine Freer, Second Nature, etc.  I'm just saying, take it easy on the bashing.

[Anonymous]

How old are you anon?

How is it that you have come to be so very knowledgable about the industry? For a teen, which is what you sound like (a young one at that), you sure know alot about a number of programs, and all the program terms (ed cons, tbs, rtc, etc).

Which tbs did you attend?

Exactly how many people do you know that would have died without a program? I hope you realize that you are exaggerating, when you make that statement. Of course, death may have been a remote possiblity for any one of them, but what are the chances? Do you know what the statistics are? You might take that up as your next subject to research.

29 unnecessary deaths in wilderness. Another 16 in boot camps. It didn't save those kids lives, and chances are very good that they'd be alive today had they not attended a program. No form of therapy should include the risk of death.

[Anonymous]

On 2004-08-04 07:12:00, Anonymous wrote:

"

How old are you anon?



How is it that you have come to be so very knowledgable about the industry? For a teen, which is what you sound like (a young one at that), you sure know alot about a number of programs, and all the program terms (ed cons, tbs, rtc, etc).



Which tbs did you attend?



Exactly how many people do you know that would have died without a program? I hope you realize that you are exaggerating, when you make that statement. Of course, death may have been a remote possiblity for any one of them, but what are the chances? Do you know what the statistics are? You might take that up as your next subject to research.



29 unnecessary deaths in wilderness. Another 16 in boot camps. It didn't save those kids lives, and chances are very good that they'd be alive today had they not attended a program. No form of therapy should include the risk of death.



"

I'm 18 and out of programs now.  I attended On Track and then a boarding school in Montana, Mission Mountain.  What I know is from personal experience.  Why are you so spiteful towards anybody who opposes your opinion?  You seem to be afraid to accept that programs can do some good.  I know that I would have died, or been as good as dead since nothing was left but my addiction, if I had not been sent to those programs.  I don't give a shit about statistics.  I have known these people of whom I speak, known what they've been through.  Many of my friends back home got into heroin, and that's not an addiction you can just up and quit, unless there's some sort of intervention.  And believe or not, drugs do kill people, if not directly, then through the whole lifestyle of crime, violence, promiscuity, etc.  Programs helped them.  I know one boy who was sent to a bad program because his parents didn't know what they were doing and he got more traumatized.  If people used the right resources, such as good educational consultants, those situations could be avoided.  I go to NA meetings and there are people there who know that if they don't stay sober, they're dead, such is the extent of their addiction.  Most of the girls I knew were going downhill so quickly that they would never have hit bottom before death.  Of course there were the ones who would have survived, unhappily or maybe just fine, without programs.  There's always the ambiguity of whether somebody needs help or not.  I know two people, childhood friends, who had problems that their parents knew about.  But their problems weren't taken care of in any way because they could manage to make a show of having a normal life.  And they were the most normal of people.  I know how that is.  I did it before I snapped and started methodically destroying myself through my lifestyle.  Each of them committed suicide.  I wonder, if they had gotten help, if people would have scoffed and said that it was useless, because nothing would have happened any way.

I am not exaggerating when I say myself and others would have died without being sent away to a program.  It is not something I can show you through statistics or describe to you in a post.  It is something I learned through experience and saw and knew.  How many people die from suicide, DUI, drug overdose, lung cancer, kidney cancer, alcohol poisoning, drug or sexually contracted HIV, murder - and yes, gangs members do murder people, etc.??  How many people are raped while living the party life which leaves them more vulnerable to it?  I knew people who had caused the deaths of others, directly or indirectly, caused their own deaths or very sincerely tried to, prostituted themselves, stole cars, pushed drugs to children...  and their parents, at the time of sending them away, knew none of this (except the ones that died, they were already dead and didn't have a chance for intervention) until they later in the course of the program confessed.  So maybe if they had died earlier at wilderness or something, people would have said, "They were fine without programs.  They would have been alive and contributing to society if they hadn't gone to programs."

I am NOT justifying those deaths.  I AM saying that to use those deaths to condemn all programs is not helpful, and may even be harmful.  Nobody ever knows the whole story.  You seem to have a personal vendetta against programs.  Sure, I didn't love them.  But I can recognize that they helped me.  There are programs that are more dangerous and damaging to children.  We need laws enforced to protect against those.  By all means, work to get this kind of legislation in place or enforced.  But there are also programs that do a world of good, even if I don't agree with every one of their practices.  They cannot be put in the same category.  And there are differences between a single incident and between a bad program.  In the On Track incident, I know the staff tried to help us all.  Maybe they were improperly trained.  The details are sketchy.  The Brown Schools are not the best.  So learn from it and go from there.  You claim to educate people.  That's a joke.  Do something productive.  You don't always have to be right.  Maybe this is futile, and I just wasted my time because you seem very biased, and biases don't just look at both sides of a matter.  Well this is my opinion.  You know what?  I just won't come back here, because there is no use.  If you must say something to me, this is my email.  Thanks for your time.

[Deborah]

Dang Dude,
Where did you grow up? Sounds like it was a rough neighborhood. Kinda like the barrio. According to my research Heroine is the least used drug among teens, a very small percentage. Were they all in your neighborhood? Just kidding.

Interesting, I was a teen at the height of the free love, sex, drugs, rock and roll era. Anything you could want was available.  There was pot and drugs at every teen venue I attended. I know no one that died from drug use or ?promiscuous? sex, not that I'm condoning that for you.

Yes, you are exaggerating, but I?m sure you don?t realize it.
2,416,425 deaths in 2001. In 2001 a total of 21,683 persons died of drug-induced causes.    That?s .009 of total deaths. If my math is correct, that?s 9 out of every 1,000 deaths due to drugs.
And, that includes ALL ages, and deaths due to legal drugs (medications) as well.
The number is so low that it doesn?t get a mention in the Top 20 causes of death.

Most teens die in auto accidents. Should we lock them up to prevent that? My hunch is that many parents do incarcerate their teens to deminsh their fears.

The number of deaths in Wilderness programs and Boot Camps since 1980 was 45. That?s 1.9 per year. If we add RTCs and other out-of-home placements that number exceeds 100. And, I know my list is not conclusive.

I spent several hours looking for statistics on teen deaths due to drugs. I couldn?t find any!! This site says 19,000 people, that?s all ages, and all drugs (legal and illegal)
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/drug_su ... atment.htm

Republican Policy Committee says  ?Thousands?
http://rpc.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1998/drugrise.htm

Found nothing at NIDA, except reports stating that teen drug use is down.
http://www.nida.nih.gov/DrugPages/Stats.html

Found no death statistics at PDFA
http://www.drugfreeamerica.org/Home/def ... 1&grp=Home

But, both NIDA and PDFA can provide you with up to the minute statistics on how many teens are supposedly USING/ABUSING drugs and how many emergency room visits there were, but no stats on deaths. I find this a bit curious.

I think Mike Males hits the nail on the head.
http://www.fair.org/extra/0011/teen-drug.html

Perhaps we should be waging a ?War on Prescription Drugs? ? The annual death toll from synthetic prescription drugs, both from the correctly prescribed and the incorrectly prescribed, amounts to about 231,000 deaths every year. To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent of a world trade center disaster every week for over a year and a half or the crash of two fully loaded 747 aircraft every day of the year.   http://www.heilkunst.com/drugs2.html

Well, that's almost 11 times more deaths due to ?legal? drugs than illegal.
Point being, the stats just don?t warrant the hysteria around this issue. An independent study in Tx recently revealed that kids were 5 times more likely to be hurt or killed in out-of-home placements. Those statistics are unacceptable. And we haven?t even broached the subject of mental/emotional abuse.

Just a word about Ed Cons. My son was placed (provided a referral) by an EC to a TBS she knew nothing about. It was a bad experience. My neighbor was referred to a Wilderness program by an Ed Con. Her son didn?t come home. He died. Pardon me if I sound like I have a vendetta. I could tell you a few more stories too.

You didn?t mention what your addiction was, but if it was as serious as you implied, a wilderness program doesn?t sound appropriate to me. Are they really equipped to deal with withdrawal symptoms?
As far as confessions go, I don?t consider confessions under duress to be true confessions.
Too many teens have told me they confessed to end the constant badgering.

You have a lot to learn. I?m glad you survived. Your drug ?addiction? AND your programs.

[Anonymous]

Kid, you're counting *lung cancer* as one of the "deadorinjail" risks of not going to a program?

*Lung cancer*?!!!

Everybody dies of something.

Lung cancer is a rough way to go.

But as an adult you have a *lot* of years to make the choice, over and over, of whether you want to keep smoking or you want to quit.

I don't think anyone questions whether your friends that suicided needed "help" or whether you needed "help" if you were addicted to a psychoactive drug.

What most of us question is whether involuntary residential treatment was necessary and appropriate.

You say you go to NA meetings now.  Many of us would argue that NA would be the *first* thing to try *before* involuntary residential treatment.

It's not that all residential treatment is bad, or that residential treatment isn't sometimes necessary and helpful.

The Big Ethical Question is whether human beings with addictions or other mental health problems should be subjected to the highly restrictive treatment of involuntary commitment when there is no *imminent* danger of serious harm to self or others and there are effective outpatient treatments available.

In the case of criminal misbehavior, the Big Ethical Question is whether human beings should be subject to incarceration for months or years with not even the semblance of Due Process of Law.

If you *chose*, with fully informed consent, to enter a residential program for treatment of some mental health problem, or to help you learn some skills that would help you improve your behavior, I don't think anyone here would have the least little problem with that----as long as the place was safe, effective, and practiced truth in advertising.

If you stick someone with depression in a mental hospital against their will, yeah, you may keep them from committing suicide.  But if outpatient treatment would *also* have prevented them from committing suicide, and the risk was *not* imminent, does anybody have the right to force the  patient to be shut away in a mental ward instead of getting that effective outpatient care?

For adults, the ethical question has already *clearly* and *firmly* been decided---the answer our society has come to is a resounding NO.

Most of the people here *either* want, through education, to persuade parents to afford their children the same consideration of offering the least restrictive effective treatment available (as long as there's no imminent threat of violence to self or others), or to change the laws to ensure quality care, truth in advertising, and some sort of professional review as a balance against parental misjudgements----or both.

Almost nobody here is completely forever and always against residential treatment.

We just have various reasonable ethical concerns and are engaging in reasoned debate about when and how.

Deborah and I disagree on many things about the best treatment for certain mental health problems, but what we have in common with each other and most everyone here is that we think the ethical debate about involuntary commitment of minors, and truth in advertising, and quality of care, are all vitally important issues that responsible people of good will need to debate and discuss in the public arena of ideas so that whatever we as a society decide to do about these issues is the best choice possible for the present and future generations of individuals and their communities.

Please realize that there are enough programs that are not safe, that do not offer quality care, that do not offer Truth in Advertising, that this debate about ethics and standards is necessary.

Timoclea

[nite owl]

I JUST READ THE COMMENTARY HERE - WITH THE 18 YEAR OLD WHO CLAIMS TO HAVE BEEN A PATIENT - ALTHOUGH HE SOUNDS MORE LIKE AN EMPLOYEE OF THE PROGRAM.  I'VE SEEN MANY EMPLOYEES MASCARADE AS FORMER PATIENTS ON SURVIVOR AND OTHER SITES.  HE JUST SOUNDS LIKE ONE OF THOSE....SORRY, I DON'T BUY IT...

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.


--William Osler

[Anonymous]

okay so i wasn't going to come back but i received an email about one of my posts. i'm not an employee and i'm not "he." i'm female. i sure as hell didn't want to be committed to a wilderness or boarding school. i fought it. but i wouldn't have come around myself. after two years of intense therapy i still have trouble and i left early. so maybe the numbers aren't high. fuck that. numbers don't take every aspect of life into consideration. it helped me. believe it or not teenagers don't always know what is best for them. i grew up in the rich suburbs of chicago. heroin got big with certain groups of kids in my town because pot shrooms and e were everyday, crystal meth was too hard to get and a couple kids started pushing it. i forget now what else i wanted to say. you can go ahead and be condescending to me. i know what i've been through and maybe i'm not perfect like you. plenty of my old friends went to outpatient or short rehabs and they didn't do anything but meet other drug users and dealers. they went to na because they were forced to and didn't get anything out of it. addicts are self-centered and feel omnipotent. if you go to meetings with that kind of mind set it's hard to take anything in or even start the first step. there's always people there who just get their card signed and leave. if  they have to sit through any of it they look half-asleep. fuck it this is pissing me off. and yes i have been to bad therapists, psychiatrists, mental health clinics, so i can tell the difference. i don't claim to be 100% right. so come on, pick away, you bitches. actually i appreciate people who try to give different perspectives and who do correct me as with the numbers. but also follow the law not the letter of the law, as in please listen to my meaning too... and it's just annoying how some of you seem as if you think you're always right. okay this is choppy and rambling and probably full of fallacies but maybe when it's not the middle of the night i'll write a decent argument for your consideration.                        anyway if somebody from on track who was a student or staffed around october 2002, email me if you want to. it's [email protected] (yes i know it's not spelled correctly it was given to me as a nickname, so don't start).

[Anonymous]

Any word on this lawsuit? Who might be handling it since Cochran died? Is it even still happening or has it been dropped?

[Anonymous]

No word on who is handling the lawsuit...

But, the story was scheduled to be on Dateline NBC last week (the pope's worsening condition overtook the story), and is scheduled to be aired within the next few weeks.

The story will include Moody and Hadden (1988 death from improper restraint use to which Moody's father defended Brown Schools) and discussion of the case.

I pray all of this will bring peace to the families of these unfortunate victims who so unrightfully died in the hands of Brown Schools.


"

Any word on this lawsuit? Who might be handling it since Cochran died? Is it even still happening or has it been dropped?"
[/quote]

[cherish wisdom]

Hey I just re-read some of this. I think it's interesting to note that an estimated 300,000 people die from medication errors by their physicians, hospitals, pharmacies and so forth. There are many others who die as a result of drug abuse - The most abused drugs happen to be perscription drugs.  The worst drugs of all - responsible for the most deaths - Alcohol and Tar and Nicotine from cigarettes - are legal.  

I'd like to add that the only think that helped my daughter was AA - it's a great program and it's FREE.  To truly get cured from an addiction one must first WANT to and ADMIT they have a problem - this is the first step.  

To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy.

 

-- MIT Assasination Club slogan

[Anonymous]

Cherish:

As I agree with you regarding AA and alcohol/drug abuse...Brandon Hadden's problem was unrelated to either of these.  He had a closed head injury and was recovering from that...not an abuse issue.  What happened to him was an illegal restraint...IT IS NEVER APPROPRIATE FOR AN INDIVIDUAL TO PIN SOMEONE DOWN FACE FIRST IN A RESTRAINT POSITION.  Also, there is NO WAY that any individual with any common sense cannot notice that a patient is vomiting and/or aspirating!  As a healthcare administrator...these two deaths make no sense and would not be tolerated at my facility or in my state.  

Also, 300,000 people dying from medication errors per year is significantly higher than the "actual" number.  The 300,000 deaths you are referring to DID have medication errors at some time during their stay...but, by no means, did a medication error contribute to this many deaths.  This statistic is inaccurate...A death as a result of a direct medication error is termed a "Sentinel Event" and is monitored EXTREMELY close by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and state agencies.  You can obtain factual numbers regarding med errors from their statistics.  Hope all of this helps clarify these issues.  Thanks.

[Anonymous]

http://www.drugintel.com/pharma/iatroge ... _death.htm

The number of deaths each year due to non-error adverse reactions to medications adverse reactions is greater than the number of deaths of American military personnel in the entire Viet Nam war.

Deaths/Yr and Cause
7,000 Medication Errors in Hospitals
12,000 Unnecessary Surgery
20,000 Medical Errors in Hospitals (excluding Medication Errors)
106,000 Non-error, Adverse Reactions to Medications aka Drug Adverse Events
Total: 145,000

48 Times more people killed ANNUALLY than were killed on 911, and these mad scientists are still heralded as heroes.

Many are treated... few are healed:
http://www.drugintel.com/pharma/many_are_treated.htm
Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.

http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... =100#72562