Fornits
Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => The Troubled Teen Industry => Topic started by: psy on May 23, 2013, 05:32:45 AM
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Link here (http://http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/thousands-of-american-teens-are-trapped-in-abusive-cult-like-treatment-centres?utm_source=vicetwitter).
It mentions Josh Shipp, Aspen Education, Swift River Academy, and others.
Full text here minus videos and photos for posterity (emphasis added):
AMERICAN TEENS ARE BEING TRAPPED IN ABUSIVE 'DRUG REHAB CENTRES'
By Matt Shea
If you like Army Wives, Preachers’ Daughters, Dance Moms or any other TV show attempting to create a taxonomy of women based on the professions of their husbands, fathers and children, then you may well have caught an episode of Teen Trouble. It’s a reality TV show on the US Lifetime network where a guy named Josh Shipp sends “at-risk teens” to "alternative rehab centres", where they’re forced to endure emotional and physical abuse before being allowed to rejoin society.
Shipp is your classic Jerry Springer brand of therapist – no real qualifications, a huge ego and a penchant for money and entertaining TV over science and genuine psychology. “I’m a teen behaviour specialist,” he says in the intro. “My approach is gritty, gutsy and in your face.”
But the show is a lot grittier than you might expect from that typical teleprompter spiel. The unregulated "troubled teen" industry is able to persist despite numerous allegations of physical and sexual abuse, torture and death at various institutions, and Shipp is exploiting that same system for monetary gain. Even when they aren’t abusive and/or deadly, the pseudoscientific practices used at “tough love boarding schools” have often proven to be ineffective and can lead to PTSD, anxiety, depression and drug addiction. Maia Szalavitz, author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, told me about some of the horror stories her own research uncovered.
“The classic list is food deprivation, sleep deprivation, public humiliation, beatings and denial of access to the bathroom to the point where you wet or soil yourself. But I’m also constantly hearing stories of people being forced to re-enact various traumas, like being raped,” she told me.
Szalavitz continued, "At Mount Bachelor Academy,
an Aspen facility
an investigation found bed sheets that had been used during re-enactments, and one of them had, ‘I am the yes girl, spray your cum on my tits,’ written on it. Let’s be real: this is not therapy.”
The methods used at these facilities are arguably traceable to an anti-drug cult in the 60s called the Church of Synanon. Their method was to abduct addicts and then “rehabilitate” them through beatings and humiliation. “I found that virtually all of the programmes that exist today using the harshest tactics were either founded by former Synanon members or sent people to Synanon to learn the treatment,” Szalavitz told me.
Former patients have been airing their stories on Reddit and other websites, so I contacted a few of them to find out more. It soon became clear that today’s residential teen treatment centres still have all the trappings of a cult.
One night, Nick Quinn was roused from sleep at his home and taken to Aspen Education’s Outback programme in Utah (the same programme Josh Shipp sent Jacob to in episode two of Teen Trouble) because his parents caught him smoking weed.
“At 4.30AM, I was woken up by two strangers holding handcuffs. They took my wallet and phone and told me that if I didn’t want to go easily they would make it hard for me. I thought I was being kidnapped. Next thing I know, I’m in a big white truck on my way to the airport,” he told me.
Once he arrived, Nick was given new clothes and survival gear, tied up and shipped into the wilderness, where he would remain for eight weeks. His boots were taken away at night to prevent him from escaping on the freezing cold ground. All of which seems a little aggressive for smoking a bit of weed.
After his ordeal, Nick was sent to another Aspen institute – the Swift River Academy in Massachusetts – where he was kept for seven months. “I was lucky my parents pulled me out. You could just tell they wanted the kids to be there as long as possible. They were milking it; my parents spent around $150,000 (£98,407).”
At Swift River, Nick endured the same kind of “therapy” I’d heard about from every other young victim, and which numerous academics had told me can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to Szalavitz, the goal is to break the child down psychologically and brainwash them: “The reasons these tactics sound similar to enhanced interrogation techniques, AKA torture, is because they're the ways you can break people and leave minimal marks.”
Now, years later, Nick has developed an anxiety disorder, experiences recurring nightmares from his time in “therapy” and still smokes weed. Understandably, his parents regret sending him there as it seems to have caused more damage than it prevented – something that appears to be a recurring theme with victims of troubled teen camps.
"Pretty much all the kids who I’m in touch with [from the camps] have dropped out of school," Nick told me. "Most get re-addicted to drugs. When you get out, you have all this freedom and you don’t know what to do with it. You lose control, you know?”
Aria Leonard, who was sent to the Monarch School in Montana seven years ago, had similar experiences. Aria told me her mother sent her there because she “disliked the friends she was making because they were ‘different’ – black, gay, etc.” After a pricey $2,000 (£1,312) visit to an “educational consultant”, Aria was diagnosed as depressed, as a drug addict and told by her parents she’d be going to “boarding school”.
Aria first realised it was no ordinary boarding school when her belongings were taken and she was strip-searched on entry.
“Right after that I was taken directly to a group session. People were talking about drugs, sex and alcohol, then everyone started screaming and crying. I was really confused and started to wonder if there had been some sort of mistake. I was then asked what drugs I'd done to be put there, and – despite my insistence that I'd never done drugs, was a virgin and wasn’t violent – they didn't believe me.”
Aria was forced to undertake pointless physical labour, like cutting down huge trees and dragging them along the ground for half an hour, as well as being told to sit opposite a wall at night and continuously write stuff like, "I am a slut" and "I'm not good enough".
Like most victims of the troubled teen industry, Aria was forced to divulge “disclosures” – a form of ludicrously invasive confessional. “You had to write about everything bad you'd ever done, with an emphasis on ‘sexual disclosures’. I had very little experience in sexual anything, but they wouldn’t believe me, so in the end I just made it up,” she said.
Aria was also put through the same emotional breaking-down sessions inflicted on Nick. During procedures known as “insights”, teens were denied bathroom access, food and sleep for three to five days. They would also be made to perform role-playing exercises that ended in them acting out their own death – exercises Shia likened to the kind of “therapy” seen in this bizarre video.
Aria remained in the centre for 18 months. Like Nick, she has since been diagnosed with anxiety and depression and continues to have nightmares about her experience.
Liz went to 39 residential treatment centres and describes being abused and raped multiple times. Rape claims are common in the industry, but – as the children are completely under staff's control for years – lawsuits rarely surface.
“The excessive use of punishment and humiliating procedures isn't only unhelpful, but also traumatising for young people," said Professor Robert Friedman, a child psychologist. "As is the practice of having strangers wake them in the middle of the night and transport them far away without any preparation.”
And it’s not just the trauma-inducing methodology that makes the industry questionable; it’s also the diagnosis. "What is a 'troubled teen'?" Szalavitz wonders. “The idea that we put kids with Asperger’s, heroin addictions, depression and extreme anxiety disorders in one programme with a rigid, regimented schedule and expect it to help all of those kids – how could that be?
“Americans have this idea that addiction and drug use is about complete hedonistic abandon, seeking extra pleasure and defying your parents. They missed the fact that the people who really tend to have problems with drugs are people in pain seeking relief. Their idea is that these people don’t have enough pain, so we need to give them more pain to fix them,” she said.
No matter the intention, these forms of therapy aren't only pointless and outdated, but cruel and damaging. Any emotional trauma that teenagers suffer at Aspen Education’s institutes must only be matched by the neglect they feel at being abandoned by their parents for an important part of their formative years.
While these practices might seem abhorrent, the troubled teen industry is huge, powerful and experienced in deflecting allegations. In 2002, Forbes magazine’s Erika Brown estimated its worth at $2 billion, and since then it's only been on the rise. The industry has managed to stick around in some incarnation since the 60s due to its powerful Republican and Christian roots. Many programmes can be traced back to Straight, Incorporated, Nancy Reagan and George Bush Sr's favourite anti-drug programme that was closed due to abuse lawsuits in the early 90s.
Here, I disagree. The influences come from Synanon, est, LifeSpring, and whatever else worked. There are facilities that are Christian and mormon, but in most cases the religious dogma had less to do with practices and more as a cover. Also, few programs today are direct Straight decedents. Most are spawn of CEDU, which in turn is a spawn of Synanon. WWASP is a spawn of LifeSpring and other Utah facilities such as Provo Canyon. Yeah republicans have also been in support of the industry, but I hate it when they bring politics into this. Democrats would just as easily have supported places like CEDU clones. Hell. I'm willing to bet Whooter votes democrat.
Today, funding from Mitt Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital (of which he has resigned as CEO, but continues to profit from) has allowed the industry to thrive. The biggest name in the business, Aspen Education, is owned by CRC Health Group, which was bought by Bain Capital in 2006 and is responsible for many of the institutes used on Shipp’s show. Since the takeover, Aspen has seen six deaths occur in its facilities, mainly due to neglect. Worryingly, the US Department of State advertises Aspen programmes for teens on their website.
Hardly known as a bastion of Republicans.
I confronted Shipp about the issue, but he brushed it aside as an unfortunate change of staffing in a few of the programmes, rather than a powerful nationwide industry that’s rotten to the core. “Treatment facilities can change ownership, management and staffing quite regularly," Shipp told me. "Parents need to proceed with caution with any programme at all and be armed with the right questions to ask.”
Shipp also assured me that, “A family therapist chose the aftercare for each kid based on the situation they were going through.” But if there’s one reason that the industry has managed to survive other than money, it’s that there’s almost no supervision for psychological treatments in the USA, which is kind of at odds with Shipp's claims. As Szalavitz told me, “If I wanted to start a addiction rehab centre tomorrow where treatment just involves standing on your head for extended periods of time, then I could do just that.”
It’s not difficult for the industry to legitimise itself. Professor Friedman told me that “groups like Aspen are now trying to build an empirical case for their programmes by hiring evaluators to conduct supposedly independent studies that validate the effectiveness of the programmes. These studies aren't independent and are more of a marketing effort than a genuine evaluation.”
This kind of “therapy” comes from an older America: one which believes that society is subject to moral decay and that the solution is to force outliers to conform to Republican and Christian ideals of abstinence and hard work. It’s an America that puts its faith in the ecstatic emotional climaxes of TV evangelism and “tough love” over the tried scientific methods of modern psychology.
Again. Unnecessary and polarizing. Christian dogma has nothing whatsoever to do with, for example, the human potential leanings of many program's workshops. There is nothing in the Bible that even speaks to drug or alcohol0 prohibition at all. According to the Bible, Jesus drank, and not just for ceremonial purposes. His first miracle was to convert water to wine so people at a party could get drunker than they already were. I'm not a fan of Christianity (or Islam, or any religion for that matter), but I hate it when journalists blame it for a paranoid, reactionary, prohibitionist culture that developed independently and only as of this past century worked it's way into mainstream Christianity, and only by blatantly ignoring things like Jesus's fondness for wine.
All this does is to convince Christians reading the article that it's just written by some atheist leftist with an unfair grudge against all things moral. It undermines the core arguments which should otherwise be important to everybody regardless of faith or political persuasion. Articles like this will only keep kids of OWS Democrats out of programs.
Where we see experimentation and the pushing of boundaries, it sees sin and societal corruption that must be violently scared out of people. Normal teenagers are being told that they are wrong and worthless, then broken and abused with the goal of making them “born again” as upstanding adults. And all the while, their parents’ bank accounts are being emptied straight into the coffers of America’s richest men. (The recession has dampened the industry’s growth, but CRC Health lists the net revenue per child in outdoor programmes as $438.96 per day, and in residential programmes as $257.87 per day.)
And yet, while minor investigations have forced individual rehab centres to change staff, the industry continues to thrive. That's because these institutions use the same methods, have the same roots and are funded by the same people. Which begs the question: Why has there been no attempt at state regulation of treatment centres? Until there is, American kids are destined to continue suffering in these abusive institutions.
Follow Matt on Twitter: @Matt_A_Shea
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Mind control and thought reform are hardly new ideas, I can agree that the father of the real ratbag programs like SEED and CEDU (and all their kooky offspring) were crapped out of Synonan and friends, but I'd be very cautious about giving them too much credit for old warped ideas. To do so ignores an entire history of mind control, thought reform, cults, and other nutbag people and organizations.
A history that is as rich in lunacy as it is long in spanning.
As for Josh shipp?
He can go !@#$ himself.
I'm frankly getting tired of hearing about his sorry behind.
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Matt Shea stated:
Maia Szalavitz, author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, told me about some of the horror stories her own research uncovered.
Oh Boy, If Matt Shea had spoken to Dave Marcus (http://http://www.davemarcus.com/content/what-it-takes-pull-me-through-about-book) instead of Maia he would have written a very much different and a more accurate article. Unlike Maia, Dave Marcus, spent 14 months in the “Belly of the Beast” as many of you refer to the industry as and reported his findings in a book called “What it takes to pull me through”.
Maia performed what journalists refer to as “Drive-by” reporting. She never bothered to spend any time inside a program gathering facts. She interviewed a few kids who had attended these schools and report only the most horrific stories and painted the whole industry based on her findings. This is similar to interviewing kids from public school who have been abused, raped by their teacher or attended Columbine high school and reported that there is a good chance your child can be killed or raped if you allow them to attend public school.
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She never bothered to spend any time inside a program gathering facts.
Because they would have totally let her do that.
What it takes to pull me through
Wasn't this thoroughly debunked as regurgitated nonsense? Because I distinctly remember exactly that. In fact, I distinctly remember you being banned. Multiple times, IIRC. Looks like everything's being resurrected, except WWASPS, Aspen, and all the kids in this list, of course.
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Hi PODK, its good to see you back again. I remember the discussion a few years ago also. There were many posters here on fornits who did not like the report/book because Dave Marcus found The Academy at Swift river to be helpful to most children. He lived and taught there and followed a peer group for 14 months. He reported on the good as well as the bad aspects of the industry. Many here on fornits prefer to discuss only the negative side of the industry and therefore the book was not a favorite here.
Maia never had the visibility nor experienced the inside of any program and merely interviewed and reported on only the negative aspects of the industry. Her book was accepted here largely because of its negative spin towards the industry, in my opinion.
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Whooter wrotre;
Maia never had the visibility nor experienced the inside of any program and merely interviewed and reported on only the negative aspects of the industry. Her book was accepted here largely because of its negative spin towards the industry, in my opinion.
One does not have to ingest arsenic,to put a negative spin on poison.
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Ms. Szalavits' book was accepted here, and elsewhere, largely based on it's reception by professionals as well as survivors spanning a broad spectrum of experience.
From her page, just a sampling of some of the reviews....
"In this riveting and deeply troubling book, Maia Szalavitz shows that we don't have to go to Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo to find examples of harsh violations of human rights: frighteningly similar abuses are inflicted on American teenagers today, in programs ostensibly established to help them. Help At Any Cost vividly illuminates the human costs of these 'treatment' programs, and the urgency of challenging their misleading claims before more of our children are irreparably harmed" -- Elliott Currie, Ph.D., Professor Criminology, Law and Society, University of California-Irvine.
"A piercing, incisive look at an out of control industry that puts profits ahead of children and wreaks havoc on families. The violence of the Tough Love credo that has dominated youth rehabilitation for decades will shock you to rage and tears. A must read for anyone concerned with the welfare of our children today." -- Stephen Elliott, former ward of the state and author of Happy Baby and A Life Without Consequences.
"How much of the industry that provides residential drug treatment for teenagers consists of institutionalized child abuse? I don't know, but Maia Szalavitz makes a strong case that the answer is 'too much of it,' and that no system is now in place to detect and remedy those abuses." -- Mark Kleiman, Director, Drug Policy Analysis Program, University of California-Los Angeles
"In this long awaited study of the booming 'teen help' industry, Szalavitz bravely takes on an important issue impacting teens more today than ever before. In this thorough and riveting example, she calls for parents, educators and mentors of teens to take a closer look at the "help" their teens are receiving. In fact, the lives of many teens depend on it!"-- Lynn Ponton, MD, author ofThe Romance of Risk: Why Teens do the Things They Do,Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco.
"Help at Any Cost is the fascinating, disturbing story of an AmericanAbu Ghraib that preys on troubled teens and their unwitting parents.Maia Szalavitz's meticulously researched account lays bare one of themost under-reported injustices occurring in America today. It is achilling portrait of the dehumanizing effects of the war on drugs andof lives wasted by a teen help industry run amuck." -- Evan Wright, best-selling author of Generation Kill and PEN award recipient.
"Maia Szalavitz has written a brave and independent book. In an era when we believe children are regularly dying due to drugs, sex, suicide, and crime, parents are ready to try any solution to "save" their children. Szalavitz has discovered that the tough-love programs many parents resort to do more harm than good, and she writes with facility about research while presenting on-the- ground reportage that puts flesh on the often-horrifying stories of children caught in the maws of tough love therapy. Finally, she presents parents with tools with which to evaluate these programs and to otherwise make sound decisions to help their troubled children." -- Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., author of 7 Tools to Beat Addiction.
"This powerful book describes with sensitivity and clarity how fear, ignorance, greed and inhumanity converge to create a 'therapy' industry that humiliates, degrades, deprives and tortures our own children sometimes to death. This amazing, sad, hopeful book is a clarion call to all who value children: every parent and every professional working with adolescents should read this book. And then give it to any policy maker, legislator, clinician, educator or caregiver you know." -- Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Fellow, The ChildTrauma Academy, former chief of psychiatry, Texas Children's Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine.
"As a survivor of a teen boot camp, I was stunned by Szalavitz's brilliant expose of the "teen help" industry. A book-length investigation into the dark side of this booming business was long overdue, and Szalavitz nailed it on the head. It's a landmark study of a business that frequently hurts -- and sometimes kills --teenagers. This book deserves a wide audience." -- Julia Scheeres, author, Jesusland, attended Escuela Caribe, located in the Dominican Republic.
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http://www.heal-online.org/swiftriver.htm (http://www.heal-online.org/swiftriver.htm)
While not the best writing, I did find it interesting reading. The cultic influences at work within ASR definitely need to be investigated quite carefully. The anxiety felt by the young lady in the article would be consistent with the same type of anxiety felt by those recovering from a cult.
Be interesting to know more about what she has to say.
We all have to remember the stench of ASR goes right back to CEDU and that very much is one of the aborted spawn of the anti-christ itself. I guess that makes ASR the bowel movement of the aborted spawn of the etc?
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Her book did get good reviews, I think we all agreed to that several years ago. But she never had the opportunity to witness and experience the day to day operations of a program which was unfortunate. She was limited to just second hand information. I am not saying it was all inaccurate it just wasn't the complete story. Many refer to it as drive-by journalism now a days and is why today many reports are entrenched with the troops in Afghanistan , for example, so that they can report information which they know is accurate.
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Hi PODK, its good to see you back again. I remember the discussion a few years ago also. There were many posters here on fornits who did not like the report/book because Dave Marcus found The Academy at Swift river to be helpful to most children. He lived and taught there and followed a peer group for 14 months. He reported on the good as well as the bad aspects of the industry.
He lived and taught what he was permitted to see and teach. I remember clearly how the program I was in would clean up and outright lie to visitors. They presented a false front when it was convenient. Even if Dave Marcus did witness an sanitized version of the program, after being there 14 months i'm not at all convinced he wouldn't have "gone native". The bizarre starts to seem normal after a while. Let me quote an amazon review of the book:
What would have been a less harsh and equally effectvie solution for jerome, the boy who had never touched an illicit drug and who only needed greater attention academically to thrive? Why was his mother not encouraged to look at the alternative school that he ended up at first? Is there a potential danger in putting a naive and socially struggling kid from the suburbs in a place with world weary drug taking sophisticates? Would it be culturally appropriate for a hispanic girl with devout catholic beliefs to have to confess her sexual sins publically?
This book also presents the kids relapses as an unfortunate accident without extensively delving into why. It strikes me that Trevor, the witty and easygoing Englishman never really learnt how to survive outside of the highly artificial world of ASR. Perhaps this was because it did not give him the self worth to refuse to engage in behaviours extreme enough to be lifethreatening or the practical tools to say no to a very real and strong temptation.
And what of the staff? Only one line was devoted to the fact that the enthusiastic English teacher left claiming the only thing she loved about the place was the kids. Why was this so?
And whhat is the effect of such a high turnover of staff on vulnerable troubled young people? DJ the ADD adoptee began a down hill slide when his favourite PE teacher Big Mike abruptly left.
Finally it does not question at all the morality of the programme. Actively punishing harrdworking kids such as Jerome for not turning in their friends when they confide in each other does not teach loyalty or strengthen friendship. It comes across as meanspirited and unjust. Does any school have the moral right to tell a mother what she should or should not put in a letter to her child?
Apparently, none of these things seemed to shock Dave Marcus in the least -- certainly not in retrospect. Anyway, wasn't he And even if what he saw and reported was completely accurate, it's still anecdote. There is no proof whatsoever that a single kid was ever saved by a program. There are plenty who think they were, but then again, there are plenty who swear by homeopathy, or Scientology, or foul smelling exotic fruits.
Speaking of exotic fruits, the Noni fruit, which Whooter is so fond of is not allowed to be sold in Europe as a health product. It's permitted to be sold as a food, but it's not permissible to sell it with any claims about health benefits. Why? Because there is no real evidence there are any. Why then is it OK to send kids to a programs that makes claims about "saving" kids when there is no evidence that has ever happened and there is considerable evidence the methods often employed are harmful? Should parents be able to subject their kids, as their property, to any untested treatment whatsoever?
That's really the core issue here. Desperate parents are willing to try anything when they feel like their kids are spiraling out of control and programs are more than willing to sell them a solution. The viability or efficacy of the solution doesn't matter. What matters is that it makes the parents feel good and as far as i'm concerned, that's the number one goal of many of these programs -- not helping the kids. Whooter would argue that by helping the kids, the parents are pleased. I would counter that programs need not actually help the kids. All they have to do is get the kids to believe, and openly profess, that they were helped. If they explode later -- well. It's anybody's fault but the program.
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Her book did get good reviews, I think we all agreed to that several years ago. But she never had the opportunity to witness and experience the day to day operations of a program which was unfortunate.
Like none-ya said. You don't have to drink poison to know it's bad for you. You don't have to have had cancer to know how to treat it. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that if you have 1000 kids saying they had a horrible experience in program and only 100 saying they were saved, there might very well be a problem. Maia does not go so far as to say that all programs across the board are bad. What she says is that because it's impossible to tell a good program from a bad one, effectively all programs are unsafe. Straight was once thought to be the cat's meow. CEDU as well. WWASP had it's day, and the lists goes on. The programs of today will no doubt fall into disrepute and the ones that come after will no doubt claim to be "better". To have "learned from the mistakes". And so it all repeats and nothing really changes but the names. CEDU becomes Aspen. "Propheets" become workshops of "LifeSteps". "Raps" become "group". "Bans" becomes "non-com". If the programs really worked, Whooter -- f they really have changed -- why is it that there has never been a single peer reviewed study -- not a single one -- that has shown that programs are effective in the long term and cause no lasing harm?
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Her book did get good reviews, I think we all agreed to that several years ago. But she never had the opportunity to witness and experience the day to day operations of a program which was unfortunate.
Like none-ya said. You don't have to drink poison to know it's bad for you. You don't have to have had cancer to know how to treat it. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that if you have 1000 kids saying they had a horrible experience in program and only 100 saying they were saved, there might very well be a problem. Maia does not go so far as to say that all programs across the board are bad. What she says is that because it's impossible to tell a good program from a bad one, effectively all programs are unsafe. Straight was once thought to be the cat's meow. CEDU as well. WWASP had it's day, and the lists goes on. The programs of today will no doubt fall into disrepute and the ones that come after will no doubt claim to be "better". To have "learned from the mistakes". And so it all repeats and nothing really changes but the names. CEDU becomes Aspen. "Propheets" become workshops of "LifeSteps". "Raps" become "group". "Bans" becomes "non-com". If the programs really worked, Whooter -- f they really have changed -- why is it that there has never been a single peer reviewed study -- not a single one -- that has shown that programs are effective in the long term and cause no lasing harm?
Psy, if you feel so strongly, I don't understand the need to give the opposition a voice. Unless of course you could recommend a good program.
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Psy, if you feel so strongly, I don't understand the need to give the opposition a voice.
Because I want to understand how industry representatives think and argue. I want others to see it too. It also provides a catalyst for discussion.
Unless of course you could recommend a good program.
Even if thought I knew of a good program, I would not. I could never be sure. Moreover, why should parents trust me? Becuase of my experiences? What about parents like Sue Scheff or students like Kevin August or some others who I can think of who have had experiences and yet still refer (and not to good places either)? This is a discussion that has been had many times on Fornits. If there is one message i'd like parents to hear is that they should trust nobody.
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Here we go again. Delete my posts?
What's the problem now?
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Far be it for me to appear as if I were siding with none-ya, perish the thought, but I'm having a hard time seeing how comparing exotic fruit and other equally bizarre analogies has much of anything to do with the article.
I mean really.. aren't his comments about the whooter just as relevant in a topic thrown this far out of whack?
Unless of course you are trying to illustrate the absurd lengths programs go to make their already absurd case. If that's the case then sorry None-ya, I agree with Psy.
Personally though, I'm wondering if you've been taking a bit of your vino therapy too seriously or some such thing.
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He's just mad because I got him to admit that he doesn't trust whooter.
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Errr... I hate to break it to you, Psy has never trusted the whooter.. ever.
I remember when a certain someone changed the whooter's user title to Proud Member of Nambla (national associatio of man boy love or something like that). Psy laughed his butt off as much as the rest of us.
Psy likes these sort of long winded discussions.
I personally find them annoying.
As for the article.
I wonder, where have I heard of this Monarch school before? Isn't it a CEDU clone? I seem to remember reading about it in the context of it being a 2nd Generation of CEDU. Meaning some of the founders and employees came directly from the IDAHO CEDU crime family.
And I see to have made a mistake when I posted about ASR, it was a young man mentioned in the article, not young woman who went to ASR.
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When I started writing all of this I didn't see Psy's response with the quote from the Marcus review. The thing about the TTI and therapeutic communities in general - is that the level of intervention is the community. The "treatment" effect is the imposition of community norms and community expectations.
I don't want to lump every single program in one bucket - but as I'm sure has been noted here many times, programs have more in common with religious rites of passage than traditional mental health treatment. And as everyone here should know, converts make the strongest believers.
To the extent that rites of passage fit within the context of ones culture, and ones expectation of behavior the harm will be less, and the benefit more (stealing this all from Marcus). Lon Woodbury's daughter probably was actually helped by her experience - she grew up in the industry culture. While Kat, same program, same intervention was harmed, because of how bizarre and culturally inappropriate the intervention was. Lon's daughter talks to her parents and her parent's friends about her experience and they're as familiar with the intervention strategy as the liturgy on Sunday. For Kat, if she talked to most people in her community circle about it, they would treat her like an alien.
As to the way the industry measures these things, and not the human rights advocates, there are some circumstances that should fairly predict whether or not a program will be helpful to an individual youth. If I practice heart surgery on someone who has a heart condition, that's treatment, if I practice heart surgery on someone who has a kidney infection that's malpractice. Likewise, a positive peer culture might make sense for a bored and spoiled youth who is getting into trouble with the law, it should be considered child abuse for a rape victim who is acting out because of their trauma.
Obviously there are interventions that are universally harmful. Whooter, I'd be interested to know exactly what you consider to never be an acceptable intervention.
But most of the harm that those in this community have experienced are context specific. I think we have to admit that there are some interventions that may have harmed us, that have actually helped others - and that the help and impact are real (leaving aside the question of whether they could have been helped in another way). But on the flipside, there should be some recognition by those who work in the industry, that there are interventions that they use that are likely to cause harm should they be used on the wrong person. Given the difficulty that even child protection specialists have with discerning the truth when a parent says one thing and a child says another, it's hard to believe that even in the best of circumstances that a parent will always be a reliable communicator of a child's needs and situation.
That's really the core issue here. Desperate parents are willing to try anything when they feel like their kids are spiraling out of control and programs are more than willing to sell them a solution. The viability or efficacy of the solution doesn't matter. What matters is that it makes the parents feel good and as far as i'm concerned, that's the number one goal of many of these programs -- not helping the kids. Whooter would argue that by helping the kids, the parents are pleased. I would counter that programs need not actually help the kids. All they have to do is get the kids to believe, and openly profess, that they were helped. If they explode later -- well. It's anybody's fault but the program.
The parents are the customers, there's no doubt about that. But what if there is full transparency about what the parents were getting for their money, I don't think it would make much of a difference. The parents who are willing to spend the 100,000 or so, I think they would be satisfied with the dismal long-term outcomes. Even if we could make the argument that the program doesn't help over the long-term, they might take the trade-off of their kids long-term emotional harm for what a program does provide.
Then again... I can't find this research paper anywhere except for on the conference agenda where it was presented:
But Does it Really Last? Confronting Hard Questions About Transition
Home and the Sustainability of Change. Lessons from 200 Interviews
with Families Years After Youth Residential Treatment
In our recent study of 125 families years after a youth’s residential treatment, we
observed ?ve external barriers to long-term, sustainable change: 1) A college
party atmosphere glorifying drugs and alcohol, 2) The destructive impact of some
boyfriends, 3) An un-changed home atmosphere of parent habits and overall family
patterns, 4) A relapse into severe depression or anxiety & 5) Instability associated with
changing medication effects over time. This presentation summarizes and elaborates
our subsequent efforts as an agency to better equip youth to face these challenges by
ensuring personal (and family) change goes deeper than behavioral shifts.
Presenters: Jacob Hess, Ph.D., Research Director, Utah Youth Village; Eric Bjorklund,
J.D., Executive Director, Utah Youth Village
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Apparently, none of these things seemed to shock Dave Marcus in the least -- certainly not in retrospect. Anyway, wasn't he And even if what he saw and reported was completely accurate, it's still anecdote. There is no proof whatsoever that a single kid was ever saved by a program. There are plenty who think they were, but then again, there are plenty who swear by homeopathy, or Scientology, or foul smelling exotic fruits.
The guy is a Pulitzer prized writer and spent 14 or 16 months inside of a program and wrote about his findings. You cant get much more accurate than that. He interviewed kids, wrote what he experienced and saw first-hand.
Speaking of exotic fruits, the Noni fruit, which Whooter is so fond of is not allowed to be sold in Europe as a health product. It's permitted to be sold as a food, but it's not permissible to sell it with any claims about health benefits. Why? Because there is no real evidence there are any. Why then is it OK to send kids to a programs that makes claims about "saving" kids when there is no evidence that has ever happened and there is considerable evidence the methods often employed are harmful? Should parents be able to subject their kids, as their property, to any untested treatment whatsoever?
I dont think they can claim it here either. It is not approved by the FDA to cure anything, its a fruit juice. It has not been evaluated yet, but preliminary evidence is leaning toward it being very helpful for ones health. I dont think many people really want to wait another 10 to 20 years for the studies to come out. There are dozens of herbs and berries way ahead in line to be tested and evaluated.
That's really the core issue here. Desperate parents are willing to try anything when they feel like their kids are spiraling out of control and programs are more than willing to sell them a solution. The viability or efficacy of the solution doesn't matter. What matters is that it makes the parents feel good and as far as i'm concerned, that's the number one goal of many of these programs -- not helping the kids. Whooter would argue that by helping the kids, the parents are pleased. I would counter that programs need not actually help the kids. All they have to do is get the kids to believe, and openly profess, that they were helped. If they explode later -- well. It's anybody's fault but the program.
I disagree, psy, there is evidence that these programs are extremely helpful. Of just the ones I have heard of there was a limited independent study done by a PhD graduate student and a few of the programs have conducted studies of their own and paid independent agencies to conduct studies. I believe the findings were in the area of 80% of the reported kids did better after completing the program.
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There are residential programs that can't even get the child to make gains between admission and discharge. So the pre-post gains are something. But... without those gains being compared to a control group who didn't have the intervention, or a different intervention, it's hard to make a comparison.
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Then again... I can't find this research paper anywhere except for on the conference agenda where it was presented:
[...]
1) A college party atmosphere glorifying drugs and alcohol
C'mon. You know it's not a serious research paper when they start spewing stuff like this. It's like reading an astronomy paper that mentions the angels that push the heavenly spheres. Whether or not there was any research at all or it was pure make-believe is an open question, but either way, it never passed peer review or any serious scrutiny.
Presenters: Jacob Hess, Ph.D., Research Director, Utah Youth Village; Eric Bjorklund,
J.D., Executive Director, Utah Youth Village
Really curious which collegiate Cracker Jack box these guys got those degrees out of. Some joke of a college or a straight-up diploma mill?
Some of them are finally starting to realize "this really isn't working" when they look beyond the echo chamber. So they try with their limited faculties to determine what's gone wrong. However, the whole foundation on which they do "science" is complete bullshit, so they can't get real answers and wouldn't recognize them if they did.
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There are residential programs that can't even get the child to make gains between admission and discharge. So the pre-post gains are something. But... without those gains being compared to a control group who didn't have the intervention, or a different intervention, it's hard to make a comparison.
I agree, if they could some how develop a controlled group of kids who are similar, sending half to a program and the other half allow to move forward the best they can on local services or status quo and then follow them a few years past graduation to say age 22 I think that would reveal a lot about the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the program. Because many here on fornits feel some of these kids will outgrow their problems naturally (mature) over time without such a dramatic intervention as 16 months in a program.
Still reading your previous post....
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Dr. Jacob Hess, (PhD), who received his doctorate in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
After watching him present, and also observing what his research interests are, and the fact that he has published other peer-reviewed articles, I don't doubt his sincerity or skill as a researcher.
As for this study, it was a qualitative research study that followed-up with families I believe 2 years post discharge, and the long-term outcomes weren't that great. But it did establish some patterns as to which of the young women were successful after discharge and what were some of the contributing factors.
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Errr... I hate to break it to you, Psy has never trusted the whooter.. ever.
I remember when a certain someone changed the whooter's user title to Proud Member of Nambla (national associatio of man boy love or something like that). Psy laughed his butt off as much as the rest of us.
A guy from China who was partying too much named TSW if I remember correctly. I thought it was funny too until I needed to explain to my wife why all of a sudden I started receiving NAMBLA membership pamplets in the mail and Thailand getaway vacation packages. You think having your identity stolen is hard to clean up.
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After watching him present, and also observing what his research interests are, and the fact that he has published other peer-reviewed articles, I don't doubt his sincerity or skill as a researcher.
Okay- I'll take your word for it. He's still missing the forest for the trees here, simply by the way he phrased it: "we observed ?ve external barriers to long-term, sustainable change"
Drugs and alcohol are always going to be widely available. These kids' fucked-up families are always going to be fucked up. Some men are always going to look for ways to take advantage of young women, untreated chemical mental illness requires medication, and medication issues need the attention of experienced psychopharmacologists. If any "treatment program" doesn't prepare the people it's "treating" for these influences, then it's fixed precisely nothing. For him to call these "external barriers" instead of the things that actual treatment would have taught them to deal with is simply intellectually dishonest. If "long-term, sustainable change" doesn't survive contact with the real world, it was neither long-term nor sustainable to begin with.
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Unless of course you are trying to illustrate the absurd lengths programs go to make their already absurd case. If that's the case then sorry None-ya, I agree with Psy.
Personally though, I'm wondering if you've been taking a bit of your vino therapy too seriously or some such thing.
It's an analogy from the other thread (http://http://www.fornits.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=43741&start=15#p426138) I carried over. As to the pseudo-interrogation related to whether I trust Whooter -- the posts just went on for too long and had nothing to do with the thread and so I moved them. No. I don't trust him, and parents should trust nobody.
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If "long-term, sustainable change" doesn't survive contact with the real world, it was neither long-term nor sustainable to begin with.
Any change that relies on thought reform cannot survive outside the milieu of the program -- at least without a support structure of some kind to provide the converts with somewhere they can worship.
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Errr... I hate to break it to you, Psy has never trusted the whooter.. ever.
I remember when a certain someone changed the whooter's user title to Proud Member of Nambla (national associatio of man boy love or something like that). Psy laughed his butt off as much as the rest of us.
A guy from China who was partying too much named TSW if I remember correctly. I thought it was funny too until I needed to explain to my wife why all of a sudden I started receiving NAMBLA membership pamplets in the mail and Thailand getaway vacation packages. You think having your identity stolen is hard to clean up.
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So you go by the handle of Whooter in real life also?
[Emoticon redacted by Psy]
I'm surprised the industry hasn't tried to buy and pay for more studies given the Miller hearing in which MIller verbally slapped around the NATSAP flunkie Jan Moss on CSPAN. She just sort of sat there and looked silly while not really being able to respond.
I recall them having that horridly flawed Beherens study that was funded by Aspen, no compromised ethics there of course.. pbbbtt.. lol.
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Errr... I hate to break it to you, Psy has never trusted the whooter.. ever.
I remember when a certain someone changed the whooter's user title to Proud Member of Nambla (national associatio of man boy love or something like that). Psy laughed his butt off as much as the rest of us.
Psy likes these sort of long winded discussions.
I personally find them annoying.
As for the article.
I wonder, where have I heard of this Monarch school before? Isn't it a CEDU clone? I seem to remember reading about it in the context of it being a 2nd Generation of CEDU. Meaning some of the founders and employees came directly from the IDAHO CEDU crime family.
And I see to have made a mistake when I posted about ASR, it was a young man mentioned in the article, not young woman who went to ASR.
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2005/0 ... -does.html (http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2005/01/behavior-modification-schools-what-does.html)
"The founder of Monarch, Patrick McKenna, is a graduate of Rocky Mountain Academy, which is a CEDU program; Monarch's Admissions Director, Ranel Hanson, worked for Rocky Mountain Academy for six years and then joined SUWS. (Info pertaining to CEDU & SUWS are at the very end.)"
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I need to update my ceduwatch thread.
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I'm surprised the industry hasn't tried to buy and pay for more studies given the Miller hearing in which MIller verbally slapped around the NATSAP flunkie Jan Moss on CSPAN. She just sort of sat there and looked silly while not really being able to respond.
I recall them having that horridly flawed Beherens study that was funded by Aspen, no compromised ethics there of course.. pbbbtt.. lol.
NATSAP really doesnt have any power over the industry. The Aspen study was solid as I remember. It was overseen by a third party and showed about an 80% success rate in some areas.
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Overseen by a third party? Paid for by Aspen, you mean. There are plenty of problems with that "study". So many, in fact, that I thought you had long ago given up on defending it. Here's a detailed thread (http://http://www.fornits.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=38312&p=409707#p409508) on the topic (of which there are many). Let's keep discussion of the Behrens study to that thread, if we can, as it's closer to the topic than this thread. Far too many threads have been derailed talking about that study.
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But most of the harm that those in this community have experienced are context specific. I think we have to admit that there are some interventions that may have harmed us, that have actually helped others - and that the help and impact are real (leaving aside the question of whether they could have been helped in another way). But on the flipside, there should be some recognition by those who work in the industry, that there are interventions that they use that are likely to cause harm should they be used on the wrong person. Given the difficulty that even child protection specialists have with discerning the truth when a parent says one thing and a child says another, it's hard to believe that even in the best of circumstances that a parent will always be a reliable communicator of a child's needs and situation.
Good point, Blombrowski,Personally I maintain that many of these programs should only be used as a last resort. A time when all other local options have been exhausted. I agree that many kids do not do well in these programs because they are not suited for them. I think the programs have evolved over time to better recognize which kids will most likely be successful and which will probably not. I know for certain that there were many kids who were rejected by ASR because they were not a good fit.. too aggressive, running away etc. If the programs would submit to a 3rd party sign off I think this would further screen out kids who should not be there.
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