Fornits

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An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Behavior Modification Money Trail
by Michelle Chen
       
Government connections enable ?teen help? industry to thwart regulation.

At Some Youth ?Treatment? Facilities, ?Tough Love? Takes Brutal Forms.
      
The controversial world of youth behavior-modification facilities intersects with a web of intricate political connections. And where the treatment industry sees cooperation with government entities, activists warn, these links could cloud the prospects for public oversight of the "teen-help" market.
The influence of the behavior-modification industry is felt on Capitol Hill. Four members of the House of Representatives and one senator serve as honorary board members of Kids Helping Kids, a company with corporate links to a now-defunct behavior-modification program for teen drug users known as Straight Incorporated. The various franchises of that program dissolved in the early 1990s following allegations of child abuse, as well as criticism for using cruel, prisoner-of-war-style brainwashing techniques on adolescents.
Watchdog groups report that Straight Inc. has since morphed into the Drug Free America Foundation, a conservative anti-drug advocacy group. The co-founder, Mel Sembler, is a longtime Republican Party donor and fundraiser who served as ambassador to Italy for the current administration and ambassador to Australia under George H.W. Bush.
The connections are even more direct on the state level. Earlier this year in Montana, a landmark bill to impose regulatory guidelines on adolescent residential treatment facilities was squelched by a powerful lobbying campaign from private service providers. Proposed partially in response to reports of abuse and deaths in some treatment programs, the bill would have authorized the state Department of Health and Human Services to monitor private behavior-modification programs. According to government estimates, Montana contains over two dozen of these institutions, ranging from "wilderness"-based programs to disciplinary boarding academies.
To eclipse the bill, private treatment companies pushed their own legislation, which would effectively place regulatory authority not with the health department but with a five-member board under the Department of Labor. Three of the board?s members are representatives of the teen treatment industry, including state Representative Paul Clark, who directs a local therapeutic wilderness program. The bill, which was recently approved by the legislature, requests no public funding and specifically exempts church-affiliated and "faith-based" programs.
According to state records, Spring Creek Lodge, an affiliate of World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), spent over $50,000 on lobbying activities to help push the bill through the legislature.
In Utah, the WWASPS name is prominently linked to the Republican Party. The Salt Lake City Tribune reported that between 2002 and 2004, WWASPS founder Robert Lichfield, his family, and business associates have contributed a total of more than $1 million to Republican candidates and party organizations ? a financial push that coincided with the killing of a 2004 initiative in the state legislature to regulate teen residential treatment facilities.
Charles Huffine, an adolescent psychiatrist who has joined other mental health professionals in urging stronger oversight of residential treatment facilities, is wary of attempts by industry interests to co-opt the regulatory process. "It?s the fox-guarding-the-chicken-coop kind of thing," he remarked.
But rather than a conflict of interest, some in the teen help industry see a healthy partnership with officials. In interviews with The NewStandard, WWASPS representatives described a good working relationship between their enterprises and the agencies charged with checking up on them, like state departments of education and, at Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, the United States Embassy.
"I?m all for law enforcement," said WWASPS President Ken Kay. "I think all of our schools work closely with law enforcement and would welcome their visit every day."      

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2620

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
--

This looks to me like a window of opportunity to write Katie Couric and ask her to review information about Mel and Betty Sembler.

Write her: [email protected]

Urge them to investigate the Semblers and their Straight, Inc. involvement!

I included links to John Gorenfeld's Alternet article and Mark Levine's Inside Scoop from Washington as well.
_________________
EST (Lifespring) '83
Salesmanship Club '84-'86
Straight, Inc. '86-'88

Shouldn't Utah be a separate country?

PROVO, Utah Nov 3, 2005 ? A small-town judge who has three wives should not be removed from the bench because his private behavior has not tarnished the office he holds, the judge's attorney told the Utah Supreme Court on Wednesday.

More:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1276715

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0688163157/circlofmiamithem' target='_new'> John F. Kennedy

http://www.startingovertalk.com/

Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By  any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.
http://www.masscann.org/quotes.htm' target='_new'>Administrative Law Judge, Francis Young,  DOJ/DEA

None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.
-- John Muir

http://www.bushflash.com/thanks <--- Good music for the background. Good link anyway.

OUT OF THE SIXTIES
By: Lon Woodbury

Those of us old enough to remember the 1960s will recall a decade of tremendous change, creativity and turmoil. It was a turning point decade, a time when many of the old attitudes were cast off and new directions taken. At least one national social critic has asserted that when you look at the things going wrong in this country today, they all came out of the 1960s. On the other hand, many of our most respected contemporary values were products of the 1960s.

In education and personal growth, a tremendous amount of creativity and new thinking began during the 1960s. Traditional public and private education thinking was widely challenged. The traditional interventions for emotional and behavioral problems of juvenile detention or hospitalization were criticized as harmful all too often.

Storefront schools and other experimental and experiential forms of education flourished, as they tried to break away from the traditional model of education founded on the concept of the factory in the early years of the 20th century. In personal growth, we saw est, lifespring, synanon, a variety of eastern mystic ideas brought to this country, and a host of other movements with new visions of how to increase human potential. In addition, the concept of individual therapy provided by credentialed therapists, rooted in at least the trappings of science and credentials, finally became accepted legally and culturally. This was marked by the legal acceptance of alcoholism as a disease in 1962, rather than the old view of it being only a moral problem. The 1960s was a cornucopia of new ideas and experimentation, starting a process of developing, interacting, and evolving to find better ways to educate and help young people.

The network of emotional growth/therapeutic schools and programs this newsletter focuses on evolved directly out of the experimentation going on in the 1960s. Part of this experimentation was to establish schools for at-risk adolescents as private alternatives, with parental choice driving enrollment decisions. These influences are still evident, it is these roots in the experimentation of the sixties that make this network unique from other education and mental health associations and networks. Many of the people and schools who started working with struggling teens during the creativity of the 1960s, are still around.

Larry Dean Olson, founder of Anasazi Foundation, discovered that students at Brigham Young University did better academically after going on one of his wilderness experiences in the late sixties, and Larry Wells, Founder of Wilderness Quest, found that taking young Idaho prisoners into the wilderness in the early 1970s reduced recidivism rates drastically. In addition, many of the programs in Montana were founded by people who had worked at, or been inspired by, Spring Creek Community School, a backwoods alternative school founded by Steve Cawdry in the late sixties or early 70s. Cawdry closed the school down several years ago, but its influence remains.

The late Mel Wasserman founded the CEDU School in 1967, and CEDU probably had the most widespread influence on this network. Originally, Wasserman saw how many of the young people he met around his hometown of Palm Springs, California in the mid-sixties were living in total chaos. They had real problems with drugs, relationships and parents, and from the standard institutions and interventions of the time, there was nothing available to effectively help them. He decided to go into the school business. He founded CEDU specifically as an alternative school, designed to provide what these confused young people desperately needed. His genius was in selecting from the currents of experimentation floating around the sixties, those elements that created a whole child education system by addressing their physical, mental and emotional growth. The term Emotional Growth education came out of the CEDU approach. CEDU became extremely successful in helping young people as an alternative to therapeutic institutions. CEDU expanded to establish several north Idaho schools by the 1990s and added the two schools currently in California. More importantly, many people who worked at CEDU left to establish their own schools, or took key positions in other schools, adding their own personal ideas to what they had learned at CEDU. A significant number of the schools in the Emotional Growth/Therapeutic schools and programs network were developed or strongly influenced by people who were originally inspired by their CEDU experience.

Another early school was Elan, in Poland Springs, Maine. Established in 1970, Elan was strongly influenced by the behavioral concepts prevalent at the time, developing into an extremely tightly structured behavioral modification school. Although Elan itself has not grown to beyond the one school, I have met several people elsewhere in the Northeast who had once worked at Elan. It seems Elan?s approach differed from the norm, and it opened people up to the idea that there were ways beyond the traditional to construct a school or program for struggling teens, and they proceeded to act on that insight.

Provo Canyon School, in Provo Utah, was founded in 1971. Although a secure treatment center, they employed several new ideas, including thinking of themselves as a school, and referring to their residents as students instead of patients. Today, there are many schools and programs in Utah that were either founded by people who had once worked for Provo Canyon School, or learned the business from an ex-employee of Provo Canyon School.

Other important influences were Campbell Loughmiller, and his book Wilderness Road, published 1965, from his work with the Salesmanship Club near Dallas. This book, and the Salesmanship Club, found a kid?s behavior gets better after camping out. Primarily influential in the Southeast, this concept of long term camping inspired the Three Springs programs and the Eckerd Programs, along with a number of other smaller programs.

So, what's my point? First, if you start tracing the history of influences on many of the schools in the network of Emotional Growth/ Therapeutic schools and programs, you usually wind up back to just a handful of early founders. Also, much of what is most successful and creative in the schools and programs in this network came directly out of the creative thinking and experimenting that occurred in the 1960s.

http://www.strugglingteens.com/archives ... s0404.html

So, let's see... I've been through EST training, The Salemanship Club, and Straight Inc. No wonder at the age of 18 when I did regression 'therapy' at a 12 step lock down facility after Straight, I went temporarily completely self-detached. I literally had a (not fun) outer body experience. I utterly disconnected, but I still remember it, I just didn't recognize my own reflection in the mirror, and it scared the hell out of me. It took them an hour or so to snap me out of it.