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An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

The industry takes a strictly capitalist, individualist, parents' rights model of treatment.

Sorry, what there?  Parents' rights I grant you but capitalism is irrelevant and it seems to me a viewpoint that respects the individual would very much be in opposition to the industry.  I'm not trying to jump on you but do keep in mind that bringing politics into an argument unnecessarily alienates half your audience (and likely more than half of those who count in this case).

Lets take Walmart, since you brought it up.  Imagine 100 people buying new televisions from Walmart and 2 of them failed to work after installing them on the wall.  How many phone calls would Walmart receive?  Who would be most likely to post their experience the guy who was happy or the one that got stiffed?

And yet somehow people who are satisfied do post, say, amazon ratings, and not just the unsatisfied ones.  Here.  That's a customer review page for a blender I selected at random.  As you can see, satisfied customers will not just tick a star, but also write walls of text on what they thought of the product.  Most of the reviews are very good while one in particular is very bad, due to the unit failing early, customer support being bad, and it taking a long time to get a replacement.  According to your theory, none of those positive ratings should be there.  Yet they are.   The vast majority of them are.  What I take from this is that the blender is very good, but in the off chance it breaks, i'm SOL.  Even I write reviews, and the vast majority are positive.  I can't even remember the last negative review I wrote.

Why is it that the vast majority of "reviews" here by former participants in programs are negative?  Is there something about programs that make them unique when it comes to "customer" reviews.  I grant you that it's not a valid scientific study (and neither is Behrens), but at the same time I think most who shop online will tell you that customer ratings, averaged, are generally a pretty good indicator of the quality of the product.  Is there something unique to programs that exempts them from this principle that applies to pretty much everything I can think of?  Or is the more plausible explanation that the quality of the product really isn't that great in reality.  Can you explain this?  I mean it's not like i'm removing positive reviews.  After all.  You're still around, despite almost universal insistence I get rid of you.

the programs themselves are not designed to be abusive as you have indicated.

No.  They're often not intended to be.  Malice or greed sometimes enters into the equation but it's not a requirement.  Many of these programs are created by people who are merely following what they were taught.  They experienced something they considered to be positive in the program they were in (as staff, participant, or both), and they decide to carry on that experience to others.  Often they believe they have a solution that is superior to psychology, to psychiatry -- to any sort of science.  They have the one true cure to all varieties of mental/social ills and it's their goal to bring it to all who need it, especially the children who in turn can bring the grand vision to others.

You see it all the time with religion, or with cults.  Evidence is not necessary and when it exists it's only to pander to those who demand it, and only so much as is necessary to obfuscate, to confuse, to keep the grand vision from any interference and provide it with a front of legitimacy to the uninitiated.  To me that's what these studies are.  Nothing more.  Of course you have to wonder what happens to the fundamentalist who is presented with hard evidence that their own methods do not work.

It reminds me of a bunch of Scientologists who once attempted to prove Hubbard's techniques to be scientifically valid using the scientific method.  Needless to say, they were all declared "supressive persons" for their efforts.  Not all of them lost their "faith", however (and ended up in the Free Zone if I recall).  In the industry I have to wonder what a program director who found out his methods didn't work would do.  A fundamentalist loses his faith and is confronted with the question: do I fake it and reap the benefits I've grown accustomed to -- perhaps trying to change things so they do work, do i deny the results of the study in the face of all the evidence, or do I admit defeat and leave?

My feeling is most on top choose the former -- often isolated from the results of what they've done.  Most of the boots on the ground, on the other hand, give up and leave after realizing all their efforts to treat kids and spread the grand vision was for naught, and that it might have actually done more harm than good.  I'd wager this is a good part of why the "grunt" staff turnover in so many programs is so high.  Eventually the facts on the ground that "shit just isn't working" becomes too much to ignore.  In the program I was in I witnessed two separate staff members expressing just this sentiment out loud.  One left.  One who was higher up attempted to change things.

Based on what I saw when returning later to survey the place, I don't think she was able to change much.  Perhaps she realized by changing the structure laid out by the founding fathers of theses systems, the thought reform environment would cease to function.  It's a bit like trying to redesign a car without even a basic understanding of mechanics.  Those who are able to manage, however, by comprehending the totality of the system -- those are the sociopaths.  They exist, but by and large I think most programs are rife with normal, misguided, people who are just trying to do what they can to help kids.  As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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.

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.

And the other side of the argument is here.  I kindly request we drop it here as everything that can be said on the topic likely already has been.

He never denied it and it has been discussed elsewhere in the past.  I told you the place for this sort of thing is in the Offa or perhaps web hosting since it concerns a moderator (and the only if there is an actual issue, not some tired drama that has been done to death).  Consider this your last warning.

Why is AARC not on the list, out of curiosity?

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 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.