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1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead at own hand

Postby DannyB II » Today, 9:54 am
This story here resembles stories I've read here on Fornits about children in programs that committed suicide from years ago. It still happening in public schools and by the looks of it, it is getting worse.


http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-na ... .One.Town/

1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead at own hand

MENTOR, Ohio — Sladjana Vidovic's body lay in an open casket, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom. Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out her bedroom window.

The 16-year-old's last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults like "Slutty Jana" and threw food at her.

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

Now two families — including the Vidovics — are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it. The lawsuits come after a national spate of high-profile suicides by gay teens and others, and during a time of national soul-searching about what can be done to stop it.

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket — and laughed.

"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died."

___

Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming. She loved to dance. She would turn on the stereo and drag her father out of his chair, dance him in circles around the living room.

"Nonstop smile. Nonstop music," says her father, Dragan, who speaks only a little English.

At school, life was very different. She was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like "Slutty Jana" or "Slut-Jana-Vagina." A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.

Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she'd be dead in the morning, that they'd find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.

"Sladjana did stand up for herself, but toward the end she just kind of stopped," says her best friend, Jelena Jandric. "Because she couldn't handle it. She didn't have enough strength."

Vidovic's parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her.

She had already withdrawn from Mentor and enrolled in an online school about a week before she killed herself.

When the family tried to retrieve records about their reports of bullying, school officials told them the records were destroyed during a switch to computers. The family sued in August.

Two years after her death, Dragan Vidovic waves his hand over the family living room, where a vase of pink flowers stands next to a photograph of Sladjana.

"Today, no music," he says sadly. "No smile."

___

Eric Mohat was flamboyant and loud and preferred to wear pink most of the time. When he didn't get the lead soprano part in the choir his freshman year, he was indignant, his mother says.

He wore a stuffed animal strapped to his arm, a lemur named Georges that was given its own seat in class.

"It was a gag," says Mohat's father, Bill. "And all the girls would come up to pet his monkey. And in his Spanish class they would write stories about Georges."

Mohat's family and friends say he wasn't gay, but people thought he was.

"They called him fag, homo, queer," says his mother, Jan. "He told us that."

Bullies once knocked a pile of books out of his hands on the stairs, saying, "'Pick up your books, faggot,'" says Dan Hughes, a friend of Eric's.

Kids would flick him in the head or call him names, says 20-year-old Drew Juratovac, a former student. One time, a boy called Mohat a "homo," and Juratovac told him to leave Mohat alone.

"I got up and said, 'Listen, you better leave this kid alone. Just walk away,'" he says. "And I just hit him in the face. And I got suspended for it."

Eric Mohat shot himself on March 29, 2007, two weeks before a choir trip to Hawaii.

His parents asked the coroner to call it "bullicide." At Eric's funeral and after his death, other kids told the Mohats that they had seen the teen relentlessly bullied in math class. The Mohats demanded that police investigate, but no criminal activity was found.

Two years later, in April 2009, the Mohats sued the school district, the principal, the superintendent and Eric's math teacher. The federal lawsuit is on hold while the Ohio Supreme Court considers a question of state law regarding the case.

"Did we raise him to be too polite?" Bill Mohat wonders. "Did we leave him defenseless in this school?"

___

Meredith Rezak, 16, shot herself in the head three weeks after the death of Mohat, a good friend of hers. Her cell phone, found next to her body, contained a photograph of Mohat with the caption "R.I.P. Eric a.k.a. Twiggy."

Rezak was bright, outgoing and a well-liked player on the volleyball team. Shortly before her suicide, she had joined the school's Gay-Straight Alliance and told friends and family she thought she might be gay.

Juratovac says Rezak endured her own share of bullying — "name-calling, just stupid trivial stuff" — but nobody ever knew it was getting to her.

"Meredith ended up coming out that she was a lesbian," he says. "I think much of that sparked a lot of the bullying from a lot of the other girls in school, 'cause she didn't fit in."

Her best friend, Kevin Simon, doesn't believe that bullying played a role in Rezak's death. She had serious issues at home that were unrelated to school, he says.

After Mohat's death, people saw Rezak crying at school, and friends heard her talk of suicide herself.

A year after Rezak's death, the older of her two brothers, 22-year-old Justin, also shot and killed himself. His death certificate mentioned "chronic depressive reaction."

This March, her only other sibling, Matthew, died of a drug overdose at age 21.

Their mother, Nancy Merritt, lives in Colorado now. She doesn't think Meredith was bullied to death but doesn't really know what happened. On the phone, her voice drifts off, sounding disconnected, confused.

"So all three of mine are gone," she says. "I have to keep breathing."

___

Most mornings before school, Jennifer Eyring would take Pepto-Bismol to calm her stomach and plead with her mother to let her stay home.

"She used to sob to me in the morning that she did not want to go," says her mother, Janet. "And this is going to bring tears to my eyes. Because I made her go to school."

Eyring, 16, was an accomplished equestrian who had a learning disability. She was developmentally delayed and had a hearing problem, so she received tutoring during the school day. For that, her mother says, she was bullied constantly.

By the end of her sophomore year in 2006, Eyring's mother had decided to pull her out of Mentor High School and enroll her in an online school the following autumn. But one night that summer, Jennifer walked into her parents' bedroom and told them she had taken some of her mother's antidepressant pills to make herself feel better. Hours later, she died of an overdose.

The Eyrings do not hold Mentor High accountable, but they believe she would be alive today had she not been bullied. Her parents are speaking out in hopes of preventing more tragedies.

"It's too late for my daughter," Janet Eyring says, "but it may not be too late for someone else."

___

No official from Mentor public schools would comment for this story. The school also refused to provide details on its anti-bullying program.

Some students say the problem is the culture of conformity in this city of about 50,000 people: If you're not an athlete or cheerleader, you're not cool. And if you're not cool, you're a prime target for the bullies.

But that's not so different from most high schools. Senior Matt Super, who's 17, says the suicides unfairly paint his school in a bad light.

"Not everybody's a good person," he says. "And in a group of 3,000 people, there are going to be bad people."

StopCyberbulling.org founder Parry Aftab says this is the first time she's heard of two sets of parents suing a school at the same time for two independent cases of bullying or cyberbullying. No one has been accused of bullying more than one of the teens who died.

Barbara Coloroso, a national anti-bullying expert, says the school is allowing a "culture of mean" to thrive, and school officials should be held responsible for the suicides — along with the bullies.

"Bullying doesn't start as criminal. They need to be held accountable the very first time they call somebody a gross term," Coloroso says. "That is the beginning of dehumanization."

___

Associated Press writer Jeannie Nuss in Columbus contributed to this report.

Just post what your tired of........

I am tired of people who don't post all weekend then come on Monday and try to add their thoughts.

.

http://healthland.time.com/2010/10/01/3 ... -on-drugs/

30 Years After the Phony Heroin Addict Article, the Media Still Blows It on Drugs
By Maia Szalavitz Friday, October 1, 2010 | 15 comments
 
This week marks the 30th anniversary of one of journalism's most embarrassing events: the publication of "Jimmy's World," a completely fabricated front-page story about a child junkie in Southeast Washington, D.C.

The Washington Post ran the article, written by reporter Janet Cooke, on Sept. 28, 1980. It began: "Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms."

"Jimmy's World" won a Pulitzer Prize, which the paper ultimately had to return. Cooke had written fiction: no 8-year-old heroin addicts could be found in Washington's poorest neighborhoods, despite an extensive search.

As Richard Prince wrote on Wednesday on the website of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, marking the anniversary:

    Thirty years later, Cooke's name is synonymous with the hoax she created. Her story is taught in journalism schools, and some say a portion of the damage she wreaked on the credibility of the news media remains.

Rarely mentioned in media discussions about fact-checking and editorial credulity, however, is the key reason that no one seemed to question "Jimmy's World": the fact that the story was about drugs and addicts. (More on Time.com: Addiction Files: Recovering From Drug Addiction, Without Abstinence)

As I've written before, the topic of illicit drug use has an "anti-skeptic" effect on the media. If the explanation for any statistic or phenomenon involves drugs, then you're pretty much guaranteed that no editor will query it.

For example, by 1990, 10 years after Cooke's article ran, the national media was filled with stories about IV drug use and the rise of AIDS. These articles repeated dangerous myths — most irresponsibly, that IV-drug users share needles because they like to do so and therefore would not respond to being given clean ones to reduce risk.

My very first article in a major publication appeared in the Village Voice that year, attempting to correct that misinformation from the perspective of a former heroin addict. It noted the fact that the media tended to see addicts as selfish monsters until it came to needle sharing, when all of a sudden we were all apparently into peace, love and charity:

    The myth was that sharing was somehow part of the high — like passing a joint. But no one asked addicts why they share. The media was all too willing to point out negative attributes of drug users, but when it came to needles we were suddenly supposed to be generous.

    In fact, I never saw needle sharing as a ritual and never heard of anyone who has. Needles are not meant to be reused. The second user gets a duller point. When you shoot someone else's blood, you might get a highly unpleasant reaction — called a "bonecrusher" on the street.

    The only person I've known who was eager to share was notorious for it — because no one else liked to do it. He was the poorest of the crowd of junkies I knew. He injected other people's blood because he thought there might be dope left in it. (He later died of a cocaine overdose, leaving behind a pregnant, HIV-positive girlfriend.) [Full article reprinted here.]

Indeed, when research was done on needle-exchange programs, they proved to be a huge success: in New York City alone, they helped cut the infection rate among addicts from over 50% to less than 15%.

The media's unquestioning credulity when it comes to drugs is the reason the Cooke story made it onto the front page. Anyone who knew anything at all about addiction would have dismissed it as fakery. For example, her article claimed that every day from age 5 to 8, Jimmy's mother's lover or "someone else" would "plunge a needle into his bony arm." (More on Time.com: The Addiction Files: How Do We Define Recovery?)

Think about it: would poor addicts living in a shooting gallery really be likely to give expensive drugs — which they need themselves in order to avoid withdrawal — to a child every day for the weeks it would take to become addicted? And would any kid willingly agree to, let alone ask for, any kind of shot, as the Cooke story suggested — especially one that typically makes people vomit wretchedly the first time they do it?

Sociologists Craig Reinarman and Ceres Duskin did an extensive analysis of the issue in 1992, which, unfortunately, is not at all out of date. (You can read it in full here, and I highly recommend it.) Among other improbabilities in the Cooke piece, they pointed out:

    There is nothing in the scientific literature to suggest that addicts recommend addiction to anyone, much less their own kids. The media apparently knew so little about heroin that they could simply assume it induced depravity and transformed users into the sort of vile subhumans who think nothing of doing such things. Clearly, heroin can be powerfully addicting but even if it were capable of morally lobotomizing all addicts, why would such addicts *give away* the very expensive stuff for which they reputedly lie, cheat and steal?

Reinarman and Duskin sum up:

    [A]merica's guardians of truth had no touchstone of truth on drug problems apart from their own scare stories. In this the Washington Post was no worse than most media institutions in the United States. When seen as part of the historical pattern of news "coverage" of drug issues, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fraud was less a "lapse" than part of a long tradition. On almost any other subject, editors' "crap detectors" would have signaled that something was amiss.

Today's media doesn't do much better. Jack Shafer of Slate has made a sport of finding and unpacking a “Stupid Drug Story of the Week." One of his favorite recent targets was the "pharm party," a social function at which drug-seeking teens blindly choose unlabeled pills from a bowl, hoping that the one they get isn't a lousy Tylenol.

Common sense should debunk this urban myth: if you want to get high and have good drugs, why would you risk getting someone else's rejects? But the story comes up again and again, virtually always without anyone who has ever attended such a party being quoted directly.

And just this summer, the New York Times and other papers reported on a new practice, discovered in Africa, "so dangerous that it is almost unthinkable": addicts sharing each others' blood-filled needles, hoping to get high on drug remnants. The phenomenon was, according to the Times, "first described five years ago" in a medical journal — but as you can see from my 1990 Voice story cited above, it is not unique to Africa and has had various incarnations, probably since the first syringe was used to inject morphine in 1853.

So to readers: especially when you read about drugs, please think critically. Unfortunately, the media often doesn't.

More on Time.com:


Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/10/01/3 ... z118I988dX
 
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/10/01/3 ... z118IZ2gUU

http://apne.ws/aLYLdS

AP  ?"This is the first time we've found that children with ADHD have chunks of DNA that are either duplicated or missing," said Anita Thapar, one of the authors of a new study on the condition.
Kids with ADHD more likely to have missing DNA
 
Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are twice as likely to have missing or extra chromosomes than normal children — the first evidence that the disorder is genetic, a new study says.

**************************************************************************************************************************************************
 http://apne.ws/aLYLdS

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng, Ap Medical Writer – 1 hr 48 mins ago

LONDON – Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are twice as likely to have missing or extra chromosomes than normal children — the first evidence that the disorder is genetic, a new study says.

British researchers compared the genomes of 366 white British children from 5 to 17 years old with attention deficit hyperactivity, or ADHD, to those of more than 1,000 similar children without the disorder. The scientists focused on a sequence of genes linked to brain development that has previously been connected to conditions like autism and schizophrenia.

In children without ADHD, about 7 percent of them had deleted or doubled chromosomes in the analyzed gene sequence. But among children with the disorder, researchers discovered about 14 percent had such genetic alterations. Scientists also found that 36 percent of children with learning disabilities in the study had the chromosomal abnormalities, compared to those with a normal IQ.

"This is the first time we've found that children with ADHD have chunks of DNA that are either duplicated or missing," said Anita Thapar, a professor at the MRC Centre in Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University who was one of the study's authors.

She said the findings are too early to affect diagnosis or treatment and are only applicable to people of European Caucasian descent because studies have not been done yet on other ethnicities.

The condition is estimated to affect millions of children around the world, and scientists have long thought the disorder has a genetic component.

U.S. experts estimate that ADHD affects from three to five percent of school-age children in the United States. There are no figures for developing nations.

The study was paid for by Action Research, Baily Thomas Charitable Trust, the Wellcome Trust, Britain's Medical Research Council and the European Union. It was published online Wednesday in the medical journal Lancet.

Peter Burbach, a professor of molecular neuroscience at University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, was surprised some of the genetic defects found for ADHD were identical to ones for autism and schizophrenia. He was not connected to the Lancet research.

"There's a great chance the environment is modifying these genes," Burbach said, adding the genes could lead to several brain disorders, depending on things like the child's upbringing and other genetic factors.

He also thought scientists might eventually be able to reverse ADHD.

"This is not a structural abnormality in the brain, it's just the last phase of development that's gone wrong," he said. "It could be the brain just needs to be fine-tuned."

Philip Asherson, a professor of molecular psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, said the study only dealt with a subset of people with ADHD and said the environment should still be considered a cause. In the case of some Romanian orphans, Asherson said there was proof that severe deprivation at an early age can lead to ADHD or other neurological problems.

Asherson said the medical world was still years away from being able to correct ADHD.

"The study doesn't tell us a lot about what's going on in the brains of people with ADHD," he said. "If we can find out more about these genes and how they affect brain development, that may give us inroads, but it's hard to say when that will be."

____

Online:

http://www.lancet.com

What I would like to discuss is the parents exclusively, there involvement leading up to the placement day. The relationship between the parents and the child, what went on, what is going on and overall how did the decision come about.
So there are probably several topics to choose from, I did this on purpose so hopefully this thread will not be easily de-railed. Especially when posting becomes contentious.
Examples of topics;
1. Parents being neglectful- abandoning their child
2. Parents being overwhelmed- feeling of hopeless, scared, not knowing what to do
3. Parents being tired of being parents- drug addictions/alcohol, divorce, boyfriends and girlfriends
4. Parents being manipulated by programs- gullible or tricked
5. Parents being incapable of being parents- emotional/mental issues, physical issues, financial issues
6. Parents not being able to control child-  Child with severe emotional/ mental handi-caps, ei; severe bi-polar, ADHD, autism, violent personality disorder, rebellion issues, severe drug and alcohol use, truancy....ect.

Why are so many parents placing there kids in various programs. I believe some of the reasons are above, if not what say you.

Comments in bold burgundy are mine.


http://www.peele.net/lib/vaillant.html

Foreword (1996) - Stanton's review of George Vaillant's "The Natural History of Alcoholism" revealed that the emperor was naked, and that the book was intellectually dishonest.

Vaillant systematically created summaries that disputed his own data,

while citing cases selectively to try to support what he perceived to be the safe positions to take. As a result of Stanton's review,

Dr. Vaillant has for over a dozen years systematically attacked Stanton in speeches and workshops he gives around the nation, trying to square the circle by compulsively reinterpreting his (Vaillant's) data to show that alcoholics never resume controlled drinking.[/u]

Well it is nice to see the professionals squabble too.

New York Times Book Review, June 26, 1983, p. 10

Disease or Defense?
Review of the Natural History of Alcoholism, by George E. Vaillant

Stanton Peele

 
Review

Disputes about alcoholism reflect disputes in other areas of behavioral sciences but in an exaggerated way that leaves little middle ground between opposing positions. The dominant contemporary American view of alcoholism is that it is a disease. This position holds that alcoholism is innate and genetic, that its course is progressive and irreversible, that abstinence is the only solution to drinking problems and that Alcoholics Anonymous is the best — perhaps the only — means for an alcoholic to achieve sobriety.

George E. Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, endorses the disease model in "The Natural History of Alcoholism," but he also reaches for the middle ground by taking into account the research-based, social-psychological perspective that opposes the disease theory.

The natural history of the title refers to the course of drinking habits over an individual's lifetime. The book is based on a 40-year study of about 600 men from two research populations — an upper middle class college group and an inner city group. In addition, Dr. Vaillant reports on the results of treatment over eight years of 100 men and women at a Cambridge, Mass. clinic of which he is the codirector. Dr. Vaillant used the natural history approach before with good success in "Adaptation to Life" (1977).

Unfortunately, in contrast to that earlier book, his analysis here is dense, contradictory and weighed down by issues that he has not fully resolved in his own mind.

Alcoholics/Drug addicts are a phenomenon.

The results of this research do not provide ready support for the disease theory of alcoholism. Dr. Vaillant finds that more than half of the alcoholics in the inner city group evolved out of their drinking problems, generally without the assistance of treatment. He finds strong evidence in the inner city group for sociocultural causality in alcoholism. For example, Irish American subjects were seven times more likely to manifest alcohol dependence than subjects of Mediterranean descent. Dr. Vaillant also finds alcoholism running in families, which he uses as evidence of genetic causality, although he concedes that he cannot separate environmental and genetic factors in family similarities. Indeed, he specifically rebuts the idea that those with alcoholic relatives manifest drinking problems at an earlier age, as genetic theories have predicted, saying, "At the present time, a conservative view of the role of genetic factors in alcoholism seems appropriate." However, since Dr. Vaillant reports twice at other points that "genetic factors play a significant role in alcoholism,

" he creates an impression that is at odds with his own research.

I can understand.

Dr. Vaillant can be quoted to good effect on both sides of other issues in alcoholism, including the inflammatory question of controlled drinking. He says, "There appeared to be a point of no return beyond which efforts to return to social drinking became analogous to driving a car without a spare tire. Disaster was simply a matter of time." Yet he uncovers a substantial minority of alcohol abusers who returned to moderate drinking. (Dr. Vaillant actually reports two somewhat different figures for a return to moderate drinking among the inner city group and never gives a figure for the college population.)

Alcohol abuse is not the same thing as alcoholism;

Dr. Vaillant makes clear that only some alcohol abusers are alcoholics, but he also demonstrates that shadings between these categories are gradual and not well defined.[/b] Even so, one-fifth of the returned-to-moderate drinkers Dr. Vaillant finds in his study had been categorized as alcoholic according to psychiatric definitions.

Alcoholism is a beast of its own nature.

The combination of contradiction and a good bit of redundancy makes this book hard to read even for those familiar with data tables and reference citations.

Once again my point, alcoholism can not be simply explained.

"The Natural History of Alcoholism" contains less case description than "Adaptation to Life." But the cases the Dr. Vaillant does include work against the results of his data analysis.

The cases belie the complexity of his research by emphasizing with monotonous regularity the need for an alcoholic to acknowledge he has an uncontrollable disease and to seek redemptive treatment for it.

When Dr. Vaillant reports that some alcohol abusers and alcoholics do return to moderate drinking, he notes that his subjects did so for period averaging more than a decade. Dr. Vaillant argues that this duration means that these results must be taken seriously but then illustrates his point with the paradoxical example of a man who claimed to have moderated his drinking but instead collapsed and died.

The case reported most extensively is that of "James O'Neill," a model student and gifted individual who was a compulsive philanderer and totally irresponsible when he drank. Dr. Vaillant uses "O'Neill" to support his contention that alcoholism is not a response to personality problems but rather causes such problems independently. An alternate position — one that places the biology of alcohol's effects in a context of personal needs — is that alcoholism represents an attempt by the individual to palliate internal conflicts. This is the approach to behavior that Dr. Vaillant took in "Adaptation to Life," where he discussed the alcoholism of "Robert Hood" as an illustration of the "less adaptive aspects of acting out" to mask "inner pain" and "unhappiness."

Being irresponsible when you drink and being a alcoholic is two different animals. So I do agree with his analysis of James O'Neill.
Being emotionally handicapped as in Robert Hood does not necessarily always go along with Alcoholism.

Such contextual analysis is completely absent from "The Natural History of Alcoholism," although "Robert Hood" is a member of the same college population studied in both books.

[/u]

Interesting.

Dr. Vaillant's attitudes have changed since the previous study, because he has been immersed since then in the thinking that dominates alcoholism treatment. The purpose of this book, nonetheless, is to discover how well prevailing notions actually work.  His resolutionIn this regard, Dr. Vaillant reports that 95 percent of the patients treated at his clinic, where A.A. attendance was compulsory, relapsed following treatment. After two and eight years, they showed no greater progress than comparable groups of untreated alcoholics. In acknowledging this, Dr. Vaillant confronts the dilemma of how to justify his faith in the efficacy of therapy. is to encourage the therapist not to interfere with the natural healing process.

In alcoholism research, where one side regularly parades a new study and the other then vilifies it, Dr. Vaillant's work can be cited approvingly by both. This is due in part to his admirable balance, fairness and honesty and in part to his willingness to accept contradiction and to defy his own research findings.

[/b]

Interesting comments made concerning Dr. Vaillant.

Quote from: "Maximilian"

I find it somewhat ironic that suddenly personal responsibility is so important when talking about addiction. But when talking about why we ended up in programs, it's suddenly somebody else's fault.

If you can't see the difference between an adult being responsible for their own actions and a child being forced into a "rehab", I can't help you.

Quote

Suddenly we are on an uncontrollable destiny, not of our own choosing.

That's right.  I didn't choose to go to Straight and I certainly didn't choose to be abused there.  However, how I choose to deal with it now is up to me.

Well, there are a lot of folks who would disagree with you Anne, they would say from listening to your story that you absolutely are responsible for ending up at Straight and if you had not acted out while there you would never had been treated so harshly.
Your decisions laid out your path.
I am not saying I am one of those folks but just showing you the other side as you do with AA.

Quote

AA works for a lot of people, I have a hard time understanding why people are so offended by this truth, on fornits.

Because there's no proof, other than anecdotal, that "it" does work and AA's own Dr. George Vaillant's study concluded that it was actually harmful to the alcoholic because it taught them that if they 'relapsed' (even having one drink) or rejected AA's teaching, then they were "certainly signing their own death warrant" (see 12 & 12).  The poor souls believed it and went binge drinking.

George Vaillant, sat on the Board of Directors, he had his opinions but if you really had read up, you would know that he never stopped encouraging folks to come to AA. George wanted AA to become better. He never went against AA.
AA will continue to put emphasis on anecdotal testimonies, they are of great value to us. Sorry you want more but as usual live doesn't always give us more.
There is no proof, Anne your communicating with two folks associated with AA, right now. There is some proof.


http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html

One mans opinion. Good for him.

n spite of the scarcity of good, properly run randomized longitudinal controlled studies of the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous, there are still several good tests and studies which were done properly, and give us a good idea of what is happening.

Jeesh, this is why millions are so happy AA does not get caught up in these exaggerated  studies done by folks who have absolutely "nada" when it comes to experience. AA is not a corporation it is a bunch of independent groups that are anonymous. Anne, beating on AA is not going to change what you went through in Straight.
That was not AA.
There will never be any studies because they respect the rights of the individuals in AA nor would we want to get caught up in such politics.
This may be hard for the average bear to understand but folks in AA could care less what you think.


There is experimental evidence that the A.A. doctrine of powerlessness leads to binge drinking. In a sophisticated controlled study of A.A.'s effectiveness (Brandsma et. al.), court-mandated offenders who had been sent to Alcoholics Anonymous for several months were engaging in FIVE TIMES as much binge drinking as another group of alcoholics who got no treatment at all, and the A.A. group was doing NINE TIMES as much binge drinking as another group of alcoholics who got rational behavior therapy.

Experimental evidence, AA doctrine of powerlessness, WOW!!!!! It would be nice if you could correctly articulate what that word means (powerlessness) for people in AA. Now I know you have mentioned you were at one time associated with AA, though I have always had a hard time accepting this. Powerlessness is explained as a existence of no power. Yes, there was a time in my life I felt I had no power to make any changes to stop my self destructiveness. My god, family, friends, good counseling and AA help to bring back the power within myself to make good decisions. This is what "powerlessness" has meant to me.

Those results are almost unbelievable, but are easy to understand — when you are drunk, it's easy to rationalize drinking some more by saying,

    "Oh well, A.A. says that I'm powerless over alcohol. I can't control it, so there is no sense in trying. I'm doomed, because I already took a drink. One drink, one drunk. I'm screwed, because I already lost all of my sober time. Might as well just relax and enjoy it now. Pass that bottle over here, buddy."

It's also easy to rationalize taking the first drink with,

    "I'm powerless. I can't help it. The Big Book says that I have no defense against those strange mental blank spots when I'll drink again. Bottoms up!"

Yep, you are right Max, she really doesn't have a clue. Anne you are intelligent there is no doubt about that but for some reason you have this ability to just look the other way and simplify addictions and alcoholism.

Dr. Jeffrey Brandsma and his associates Dr. Maxie Maultsby (co-inventor of Rational Behavior Therapy) and Dr. Richard J. Welsh did a study where they took some alcoholics who had been arrested for public drunkenness, and randomly divided them into three groups, which got one of:

   1. A.A. treatment
   2. Lay RBT (non-professional Rational Behavior Therapy, something invented by Dr. Maxie Maultsby and Dr. Albert Ellis, something very similar to SMART)
   3. No treatment at all. This was the control group.

And the results were:

    The variables that showed significant differences at outcome could be organized into three categories: treatment holding power, legal difficulties, and drinking behavior. Treatment holding power was indicated by the percentage of dropouts between intake and outcome (p = 0.05), the mean number of treatment sessions attended (p = 0.05), and the mean number of days in treatment. Less than one-third (31.6%) of the clients assigned to the AA group qualified for outcome measures in contrast to almost 60% for the lay-RBT group, and this occurred with equivalent attempts by our social work staff to keep the men in treatment, whatever type it was. Table 32 highlights these differences. See table at link above.

Hey, if folks can sober up without AA's help that is great, we do not have the "corner market on helping Alcoholics".
Here is a thought for ya, show me where AA has ever criticized another organization that was helping folks to get sober. Never!!!! We are not about this type of malicious behavior, AA understands folks are dying from alcohol and drugs, we are just trying to do are part in helping.



http://cbtrecovery.org/AAefficacyrates.htm

Some information about AA's success rate comes from its own membership surveys. In particular, the rather famous 'Comments on AA's Triennial Surveys' document cited by Charles Bufe in Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure is AA's ID # 5M/12-90/TC, which was produced for internal purposes. It is also summarized in Vince Fox's Addiction, Change, and Choice (1993). The document is not listed in AA's 'Conference Approved Literature' but Fox was able to obtain a copy from AA.

This was a internal survey done almost 20 years ago, AA was doing this often until politics interfered and folks like yourselves here started to take private answers from folks and twist them.

AA's own analysis was that 50% of all those who try AA leave within 90 days, which they describe as cause for 'concern'. Their own data shows that is actually optimistic. In the 12-year period shown, 19% remain after 30 days, 10% remain after 90 days, and 5% remain after a year.
The retention rate of AA is 5% after one year.

So out of one survey twenty years ago, you base your opinions on. Anne, please come on.

So do we define the success rate as the retention rate? You'd have to tell me if you believe that success in AA is measured by whether people are still attending meetings.

Anne, there is no studying or definition. It is one person helping another, one day at a time. Keep it simple. AA is not Straight.

Other observations:

60% of those surveyed were getting outside professional help. This means that any success (or failure) rate, however it is defined, can't be attributed entirely to AA.

Ok, so what, it this supposed to be bad, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob encouraged this. AA does not take the place of counseling, psychiatric care, detox, residential care, ect....
The steps are a design for living.

One way to measure the success of AA would be by comparing 12-step based treatment with other treatments. A 1997 study found that 93% of American drug and alcohol treatment programs follow the 12-step model. So it would be pretty easy to tell, at least, whether 12-step programs work.

Well that would be great if AA was a treatment center but it is not, so why would we do this comparison. This is not Straight.

An extensive study (Hester and Miller, Handbook of alcoholism treatment approaches) shows that peer-based 12-step alcohol treatment programs do NOT have a higher success rate than no treatment at all. Facilitated 12-step treatment (trained facilitators guiding subjects through the twelve-step process) were marginally better. "The two tests of AA found it inferior to other treatments or even no treatment but were not sufficient to rank AA reliably."

OK, it has worked great for me, Max and millions of others. I suppose it can not work for everybody.

Brief, non-confrontational interventions and motivational interviewing were found most effective.

If you define success as reduced drinking, absence of alcohol dependence, or a reduction in problem drinking, then you see different results. Success in AA is presumed to be total abstinence. But followup to many treatment programs finds people have done some drinking, or drink moderately (defined by the researcher, not the patient!). They would be considered failures in AA--but the behavior has changed. So if one wants to improve the statistical success rates of 12-step treatment, just broaden the definition of 'success' to include moderate drinking!

AA does not have failures, why would you say such a thing. Many folks have gone on to realize they could drink responsibly, still smoke pot ect....then there are folks like myself who realized that I could never drink again.
No problem, more beer for y'all.




http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/add ... le-disease

George Vaillant is a world renown alcoholism expert who identified this truth, then became a spokesperson for Alcoholics Anonymous and the disease theory. When he determined that his 12-step treatment program did no good, Vaillant intoned, "the best that can be said for our exciting treatment effort at Cambridge Hospital is that we were certainly not interfering with the normal recovery process." Chew on that!  But, even this ridiculously modest claim is wrong.......

Well I believe the same was said about Straight. AA is self help it can not be forced. Once again George Vaillant, sat on the AA BODs and still encouraged folks to attend AA meetings.


............In a separate non-clinical sample he studied, Vaillant found that the substantial majority achieved remission without entering AA. Yet Vaillant failed to cite a single case of natural recovery in his book! Every single case is of an AA success, or else of failures like "Tom Reardon," who foolishly "never learned to pick up the telephone" to call AA. The discrepancy between his data and his case studies is not very reassuring about Dr. Vaillant's mission.

Oh well.