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The Troubled Teen Industry / Re: Behrens Study vs. ASTART Debate thread
« on: May 30, 2013, 03:44:36 PM »Quote from: "psy"
I hope y'all don't mind. I split the thread and re-titled it to something neutral. It was either that or bump one of the other old threads and have two competing threads on the same topic going at the same time. Feel free to quote any of the other posts from other threads if you feel something has been cut off or left out. I've been on vacation for the past few days so please excuse my lack of participation in this debate.Quote from: "Whooter"Drug trials are typically funded by private donors, the government or the drug companies themselves.
But pharmaceuticals are much unlike the industry in that the FDA has to verify, with years of research and mountains of evidence, that a particular drug is safe before it is sold to the public. The industry has never been held to any comparable standard. It makes it's own rules and you're darned right that who pays for a study and whether or not it's peer reviewed matters. It's the difference between marketing and science. If a program controls the data and pays for the "research", there is a good chance that it's going to make the program look good. They wouldn't very well pay for it otherwise. Even still, they make mistakes and drugs are recalled. More often than not, programs have to be shut down by the authorities or sued out of existence before they stop doing what they've always done.
Parents should not be trusting their kids with untested techniques regardless of desperation. The miracle cure of today very often turns out to be the quackery of tomorrow. People once lined up, voluntarily, to get "ice-pick" trans-orbital lobotomies. We now consider this barbaric, and those who were subjected to it, victims. The same is true of those who went through the last generation of programs. The Seed turned out to be harmful. Oops. Next one will be better. Straight too. Cedu as well. Can't forget WWASP.
And now we have Aspen and so forth, all derived from the last generation of programs, and doing more or less the exact same things the previous generation used to do (See Aspen Program MBA's LifeSteps, and how they were IDENTICAL to the Propheets at CEDU/Hilltop, and in the CEDU derived program I was in, down to the french maid outfit). Yet we're supposed to believe that they've changed, or that they're safe, or that forcing little girls to sexualize and humiliate themselves in front of an audience is somehow a good thing.
You want to tell me that's beneficial? Well. Perhaps it works. In the same way that a trans-orbital lobotomy worked. They're anxieties and depression -- everything faded away. The results were there, but so were the scars. Hollow people with hollow thoughts and no real feelings -- compliant and docile pet humans. It's for this reason that even if the study is accurate, it mean nothing whatsoever to me. If the consequence of being involuntarily "healed" is the loss of individuality, is the loss of any sort or rebellion, then that cure comes at the cost of the very thing that makes us human.
Brian has never been in a program so he doesn't know what it's like. I do. Data does not matter. Even if. Even if your data was accurate and even if the study was independent and peer reviewed. It would still be ignoring the barbarity of the process. I've seen the hollow people walking around. You look into their eyes and you can tell that the spark of life is gone, and even when they leave the program and inevitably snap out of it, they're never quite the same again. Like a lobotomy or FGM, such a permanent act should never be performed on a person, even a child, without their consent.
I get the ethical dilemma. What do you do if a kid is shooting heroin or smoking meth or whatever. Fine. That's a big problem and maybe in those cases a detox and outpatient therapy are probably appropriate, but most of these kids who are in these programs are there for the "issues" the program targets in the marketing with reads like a laundry list of every behavioral problem known to man -- and they're all treated the same way! I can't imagine that being successful. If it was, wouldn't these techniques have been adopted by mainstream mental health? Is there a conspiracy against the techniques the programs use that legitimate therapists would never dare adopt them? Are programs that far ahead of legitimate science? I'm not buying it, and even if it were true it wouldn't make it right. There are far better ways of treating kids locally, but that's another topic.
Here is the link for an article about Dr.Walter Freeman, AKA "The Showman". http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2 ... -lobotomy/
Excerpt from the article:
"He wanted to find a more efficient way to perform the procedure without drilling into a person’s head like Moniz did. So he created the 10-minute transorbital lobotomy (known as the “ice-pick” lobotomy), which was first performed at his Washington, D.C. office on January 17, 1946.
(Freeman would go on to perform about 2,500 lobotomies. Known as a showman, he once performed 25 lobotomies in one day. To shock his audiences, he also liked to insert picks in both eyes simultaneously.)
According to the NPR article, the procedure went as follows:
“As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient’s eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face.”
Yes, the industry is evolving and thank god but the motives never evolve. Still the same, GREED!! When money is more important than the safety of people, there is a big problem with society.