On 2005-05-03 14:22:00, Dolphin wrote:
"Break them down and build them up again? Okay, so tell me what the public and private schools are doing when they break down the kids that are "different", like AD/HD? They don't even attempt to build them up again.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong here. The people that want programs shut down are actually the kids that have been there. Or people that don't want programs to exist because they might get sent to one. Very few parents (that have never bee in a program) want them shut down from what I'm reading.
So, here we are, reading forums that in essence are here to brainwash people into thinking the worst. It's based on fear and isn't that what you say Teen Help does? Difference is that the parents already know they need serious intervention.
How many kids are dying or have no ambition because their parents are afraid to get program help? A whole lot less than could ever die at the hands of any program. Just a reminder. WWWASPS has never had a death at the hands of staff or even in direct relationship to anything they did.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. :razz: "
I don't buy it.
There are good public and private schools for special needs kids like kids with ADHD. There are ways to learn to advocate for your child to get your kid's educational needs met.
If you have a really lousy school system, and you don't want to take them to due process hearings or can't prove they're foot dragging, there's homeschooling.
How many kids are dying that are not in the programs? Well, given that there are 296 *million* people in the US, at any given time there are a lot of teens dying from everything from car wrecks that are someone else's fault to accidental drownings to suicide to cancer.
What a weasel wording to say kids haven't died *directly* because of anything the programs have done.
Without *effective* treatment, bipolars have a 20% fatality rate from the disease. *With* effective treatment, that rate drops to 11%. NIMH says that the programs, which put mentally ill kids alongside juvenile delinquents, do the mentally ill kids more harm than good---that the programs are *NOT* effective treatment.
Well, that would work out to for every ten bipolar kids the program takes in who come out scared of treatment and very reluctant to go to psychiatrists for ongoing treatment, statistically one of those ten will die needlessly.
We *know* from program survivors on here that their program experiences make them *very* reluctant to trust psychiatrists, or to go in for any kind of psychiatric treatment.
A facility that is *ineffective or harmful* at treating mentally ill children, as NIMH says many of them are, that nonetheless takes in those children anyway---a facility that releases those children back into the world so skeptical of mental health care that they avoid it like the plague---that's not a prescription for "saving" your mentally ill teen.
That's a prescription for doubling his/her risk of dying over what it would have been if you simply continued with conventional treatment OR put your non-medication-compliant child in a mental health facility that operates on a medical model rather than a behavioral model.
You can say your favorite program, whatever it is this week, doesn't *directly* kill kids all you want.
The fact remains that NIMH says programs that put mentally ill children alongside juvenile delinquents do more harm than good.
And when those mental illnesses have fatality rates that are reduced by *effective* treatment, doing those children more harm than good, in statistical quantities of children, equates to more (needlessly) dead kids.
Sure, okay, so your program staff (whichever program(s) you're cheerleading for) don't *directly* kill kids. Fine. I'll accept that for the sake of argument, that they don't directly kill kids.
But dead is dead, "direct" or not.
Timoclea
