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Topics - KIDSofEP

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1
Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / thestraights.com
« on: July 06, 2009, 12:28:10 PM »
I have been a way for a while, but Wes's site says that the account has been suspended??  
Was there no way that we could keep everything online at www.thestraights.com?  
It would be such a shame to lose all of his work.

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Who Made The Newton Flier?
« on: January 16, 2005, 04:37:00 PM »
I don't want to come across upset...I'm not.

I am just curious who made and who circulated the Newton Flier door to door in Miller Newton's neighborhood on 011505?   The flier references my website and includes a blue chair graphic I made that was lifted from my site and incorporated into the flier.  I did not see nor know about the flier prior to distribution and no one asked my feelings on the current saga with Newton and his church.  Of course I am not saying that I disagree with the flier, however I think better communication between some of us would only strengthen our efforts, no matter what they may be.

Curious.

3
Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / KIDS of BC's first black victim
« on: January 09, 2005, 11:01:00 AM »
KIDS of BC's first black victim was it's first victim.  The first teen admitted to the New Jersey KIDS program was a black teen named Lars.
Just a useless piece of trivia I remembered when reading the title of another post.  How is group "group" with one teen anyway?  Curious.

4
Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / National Geographic 01/89
« on: October 30, 2004, 10:49:00 AM »
~~OCR software responsible for all typo's~~

""With AN URGENCY born of emotional turmoil, young people flail their arms in hopes of being called on during a group therapy session in Stoughton, Massachusetts, near Boston. Their stories vary, but the 12 5 mostly middle-class youths share a common element: a chemical dependency that brought them to Straight, Inc., a private, no-nonsense drug rehabilitation program. At group sessions they tell of their anger toward their parents, the urge to run from responsibility, the pain of trying to share their emotions with others, and the difficulty of even admitting to having a drug problem.

Most of the youths were introduced to drugs by schoolmates or other friends, who often remained their chief suppliers. Designed for those in their early teens through early 20's the state-licensed program isolates clients from outside influences during the initial treatment phase. A newcomer is prohibited from receiving mail or phone calls and must live with the family of another youth involved in a later stage of treatment. Some graduates stay on as paid Cc peer staff," assisting the professional staff of psychologists and drug-abuse counselors.

Straight views dependence on alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs as a family, rather than an individual, problem. Separate sessions for parents are held on the theme of chemical dependency as a "family disease." joint meetings between youths and parents often result in emotional reconciliations (left).

Since 1984 the percentage of Straight's clients admitting to cocaine use has risen from about 25 to more than 75 percent. Cocaine is also a major factor in the 111 percent increase in admissions to state-supported treatment facilities in the U. S. during the past two years.

Sharing the pain of a having a troubled child, couples comfort each other at a Stoughton counseling session (below left). Such mutual concern helped create Straight in 1976 when parents in St. Petersburg, Florida, saw a need for a program designed for adolescents. Today the program serves 850 clients in seven cities.

Parents see their children only at Straight headquarters during the first treatment phase, which usually lasts 65 to 75 days. During that period the newcomers must remain free of drugs, behave properly, and demonstrate a positive attitude. They may then resume living at home and, as " oldcomers, " enter the next rehabilitation stage. Treatment usually takes about a year and costs more than $11,000.

To discourage attempts to flee, oldcomers accompany newcomers within the building, often holding on to their belts (above, far left). Staff members and clients restrain a girl who became unruly (above left). Straight's practices have been criticized as overly harsh and authoritarian. In 1983 a 20year-old Virginia youth who insisted he had no drug problem claimed he had been tricked into entering and then prevented from leaving Straight facilities in St. Petersburg and in Springfield, Virginia. He successfully sued Straight for false imprisonment. Since then, Straight says, it has used more caution in custody matters. While clients 18 and older may leave at will, the release of a minor still requires the consent of a parent or legal guardian.

Drug-abuse experts stress that Straight's confrontational, group-oriented approach may be unsuitable for some youths. They urge care in choosing among the many treatment programs available.""

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Texas Monthly 06/90
« on: October 30, 2004, 10:38:00 AM »
~~OCR software responsible for all typo's~~


""Sixteen-year-old Chad Barnes found himself pinned face down on a cold tile floor, his arms and legs stretched out from his body. Four other boys were holding him, pressing so hard that Chad screamed in anger. Just a few moments before, Chad had tried to start a fight in the gymnasium-size meeting room of one of the toughest adolescent drug-treatment programs in the country: Straight, the program chosen by Republican gubernatorial nominee Clayton Williams to cure his own son.

Chad, a wiry boy with eyes the color of coffee, was furious ever the way a veteran in the program, known as an oldcomer, had confronted him. "You're lying to us, Chad!" the older teenager had yelled. "You're not working the program!

You're holding -the rest of us back, Chad!" Chad had shouted an obscenity and shoved another kid next to him, and within seconds, other teenagers had thrown him down. Anyone who rebels at Straight is quickly restrained by oldcomers or by recent graduates working as counselors. Wild-eyed, like a trapped animal, Chad tried to shake loose. A "first phaser" like himself- someone in the first level - couldn't take one step anywhere in the building without an oldcomer holding on to one of his back belt loops. He couldn't even use the bathroom without someone watching him.

At Straight, kids who don't admit to having a drug-oriented lifestyle are yelled at by the other kids until their defenses are broken Nearly 120 young people, ages 12 to 22 and in various stages of treatment, spend almost the entire day in this windowless room in a brick office complex in the Dallas suburb of Irving. For nearly twelve hours each day, they must sit erect in blue plastic chairs, not speaking or standing or making eye contact with another person without permission. Those who misbehave are held back in their chairs or, like Chad, spread-eagled on the floor. The theory at Straight is that kids on drugs are more likely to accept therapy from peers who have been through the program than from adults who have not. A fourteen-year-old program with treatment centers in nine U.S. cities, Straight has been called the best program of its kind in the country. Clayton Williams was so impressed with Straight that he wants the state to spend at least $50 million for adolescent-treatment centers based on Straight principles.

But others are not so impressed. Acting on complaints from parents and teenagers who had been through the program, the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse launched an investigation last year to determine whether Straight abuses kids. The head of a rival treatment program calls Straight "fiercely controlling" and questions its long-range success. "It decides what a kid's identity is going to be and then does all the thinking for him," says Mike Townley of Bedford Meadows psychiatric hospital in Bedford, a dozen miles west of Straight. "By the time a kid gets out of the program, he really has trouble thinking for himself."

The controversy over Straight underscores a dirty little secret: Our vast drug-treatment system, with its armies of therapists, medical conferences, and marketing strategies, don't really know what it's doing. Even though hospitals treatment centers bombard the public with haunting commercials about costly state-of-the-art treatment pro and claim that they have high success rates, one jarring
statistic is always left out: According to the latest indent research, about 80 percent of the adolescents who complete such programs will, within a year, relapse and back to drugs, regardless of the program they attended.  Adolescent drug treatment is portrayed as a science, but in reality, it is a huge psychosocial laboratory, where therapists attempt an array of experiments -from fierce behavior modification techniques to ancient superstitious practices, chemical aversion to spiritual conversion-just to see it takes to keep the laboratory mice, our kids, from wanting to get high. Considering this is where the real war on drugs will eventually be fought-people must learn not to want drugs-the results so far haven't been exactly impressive. There is very little good scientific evidence that any of these programs really work.

By the time Chad Barnes arrived at Straight, he was already a savvy player in the drug-treatment game. Having been to three treatment centers since the age of twelve, Chad knew exactly what to say and how to act in order to make his counselors and his parents believe he was turning his life around. He could talk about life's pressures and family problems. He had mastered all of the Alcoholics Anonymous phrases. For him, like many of his peers, going to a treatment center was a rite of passage. Invariably, however, within days of his release from each facility, Chad would be back with his old friends, happily using a variety of drugs.

But Straight was unlike anything Chad Barnes had ever seen -a modern-day Lord of the Flies, where teenagers control other teenagers. The other boys finally released Chad, only to slam him into his chair, and the group therapy continued. Another boy, Will, was asked to stand up, and an oldcomer began telling him that he wasn't being honest about his drug use. Will seemed to lose it. He leapt over his chair, screaming at the group to leave him alone, and then rushed toward the girls' side of the room, causing two girls to smash backward into one another and start fighting. Suddenly, Chad was up again, his jaws clenched, and he stepped toward another teenager, letting fly a hard right that would have knocked even a grown man off his feet. By then, a small riot was breaking out. Another boy took a swing at someone, and a couple of boys tried to escape out the back door. More counselors and other adults poured into the room, and Chad, gasping, his shirt torn across his chest, was dragged to a time-out room where he would remain for the rest of the day.

Ann Petito, who was Straight's clinical director last October, at the time of the brawl, said that such a large fight was not entirely unexpected. "In treatment like this, we're dealing with little animals," she said. "People forget that these kids are druggies. They cannot maintain any self-control. It's our job to get out their anger and remold their lives."

But does treatment really remold their lives? Or are these programs ultimately better at teaching kids to remain sick rather than teaching them to be well? For nearly six months I followed Chad Barnes through Straight, and I also visited ten other adolescent-treatment centers. I watched a kind of contemporary morality play unfold, one in which hundreds of young people were asked to transform their lives and save  themselves. The play itself, however, was often dwarfed by  it's own dark setting: a treatment industry that seems to be driven more by economics than by clinical research, that knows how to turn parents' deepest into profit margins, and that always has simplistic solutions for our kids solutions that, when analyzed, lead only more questions.
In Texas the Age of Treatment dawned in 1985, when state lawmakers, under pressure from the medical community, eliminated a legal requirement that an unserved demand for a particular health service had to be proved before a hospital could be built or expanded. Insurance companies had started covering problems like substance abuse, creating a huge cash cow in insurance reimbursements for physicians and treatment advocates. Psychiatric hospitals and chemical-dependency centers quickly moved in, and traditional hospitals added substance-abuse units. In just a few short years, the number of treatment and psychiatric centers increased dramatically. Of the state's 441 centers and 84 psychiatric hospitals, about half of them have opened since 1986.

Since most insurance policies were geared toward inpatient care rather than office visits, many parents found it less expensive to stick their kids in a hospital.  Thus, all a treatment center had to do was figure out how much it could get from insurance and then build a program around it at amount. Thirty days became the standard length of a hospital stay, for instance because insurance policies were written to that limit -not because that was the time needed to "cure" a kid's drug problem.

In many ways, the Dallas-Fort Worth area  perfectly reflects the changes in adolescent drug treatment. In 1984 the metroplex had only 5 programs for kids with drug problems; today there are 52. The treatment centers, mostly on the outskirts of the two cities, often have soothing nature titles (the Cedars, Willow reek, Bowling Green), and some even look like country clubs, complete with lakes, tennis courts, and cabins. The centers regularly promote themselves in slick television commercials that suggest that any outhful unhappiness is somehow related to drugs and that every kid needs help more than his parents realize. One commercial simply lists a series of words: Family, parents, brothers, sisters, acceptance, rejection, love, hate, loneliness, isolation." Then a deep male voice pronounces, "Just a few reasons kids may turn to drugs or alcohol." Using such seductive tactics, these programs have helped create a new kind of treatment program, where hospitals are seen as the last refuge in a world of screaming teenage disorder.

Despite all the hoopla~ no one can get into a treatment program unless he has health insurance or a lot money. Eight out of ten families who call the Dallas Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse looking for treatment cannot afford the available programs. Inpatient costs at a psychiatric hospital can start at $500 a day, but with therapy and various fees, the bill can quickly double. Chemicaldependency treatment centers, which don't have staff psychiatrists, charge at least $400 a day. A few public and nonprofit facilities charge $150 a day or less -but there are only a few, and the waiting lists are long. Dallas County, for instance, has only one 16-bed unit for boys and no such unit for girls. Even state aid is marginal: The State of Texas spends only $9 million a year for adolescent treatment-dead last among the states.

Admission to a program is no guarantee of cure, of course. The problems start with the diagnosis. Frequently, kids are labeled as having two problems: chemical dependency and serious emotional disorders. Although experts rarely dispute the idea that hard-core drug abusers have other problems, many teenagers with less severe maladies end up being hospitalized. One psychologist who studied adolescent treatment centers found kids being diagnosed with "adjustment reactions and behavior disorders." When he asked what that meant, he was told, "The kid fidgeted." What many treatment programs  ignores is that adolescence itself is like a developmental disorder. This is the time when teenagers experiment with attitudes and lifestyles- including drugs. By their senior year in high school, more than 90 percent of our nation's youths have tried alcohol, and 57 percent have tried an illegal drug. A fact of life in this society is that teens are going to try drugs.

There needs to be a way to treat truly sick teenagers. But how sick are most kids in treatment programs? Sorry, no one is sure. "The  sixty-four-dollar question is trying to figure out which kids need treatment," says Elizabeth Rahdert a psychologist with the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "And when you figure that out, then what kind of treatment do you give them? No one knows.""

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Dallas STRAIGHT teens
« on: October 29, 2004, 01:44:00 PM »
I thought I would ask again since many more ex-Dallas STRAIGHT people have come across the site since the last time I posted...
 
Does anyone know of any specific KIDS (El Paso, North Jersey, and/or Greater Salt Lake City) teens that were admitted to the Dallas STRAIGHT program after the KIDS facilities closed?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Yorba Linda
« on: January 28, 2004, 04:55:00 PM »
I was wondering if anyone from STRAIGHT Yorba Linda knew any of the below listed teens as
California teens were rooted in the El Paso KIDS
program before they were relocated via chartered jet to pilot the opening of the KIDS program in Yorba Linda.

Many came and left prior to KIDS transitioning to STRAIGHT and I am curious of those that were in KIDS of El Paso, how many and whom remained in the program when KIDS of SoCal became STRAIGHT. Some of the people that I was wondering about include:

Cla*ss**n, Janelle
C*st*, Trina
Cr*mpt*n, Henry
D*r**gh, Brett
D*r**gh, Marcie
G*rc**, Cynthia
G*rc**, Raquel
G*m*z, Andy
J*ns*n, Jens
J*ns*n, Steve
J*ns*n, Tava
J*n*s, Stephanie
K*nn*dy, Carl
M*ck*y, Julie
McK*nn*y, Tracy
M**l*, Tara
M*ll*r, Eric
M*rchl*nd, Joanne
N*ch*ls, Gary
Osb**rn, Rick
P*rk*r, Lisa
P*nd*rs*n, Tracy
P*t*rs*n, Theresa
R**d, Craig
R**d, John
R**z, Bob
R**z, Sam
V*ld*s, Aaron
V*ld*s, Richard

Thanks again in advance for any info.
 ::nod::

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Carmel
« on: January 15, 2004, 12:05:00 PM »
You said:
""There was a boy in our program who had actually been in the El Paso KIDS program for three or so years before coming to Dallas, the he was there for close to another two years. he had been in treatment for most of his adolescent life.""


Do you remember this kid's name?
Thanks much in advance!
the http://www.kidsofelpaso.com guy

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / L*ss* S*w*ll
« on: September 08, 2003, 06:27:00 PM »
Please if you read this send me an email.  My address can be found as the webmaster email address over at http://www.kidsofelpaso.com or as the administrator email address at the bottom of the page at http://www.thekidsbbs.com.

I have some news that you may want to hear.

10
Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Blackout stories?
« on: August 16, 2003, 09:32:00 AM »
Anyone in Jersey affected by the blackout?  Of course if you still don't have juice, you won't be reading this...but I'm curious as to how everything went.  Thanks in advance.

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Nicoleesther
« on: August 08, 2003, 02:30:00 PM »
Hello, Nicole.  I saw that you mentioned in another thread about helping to shut down STRAIGHT in SoCal.  In my few years of frequenting these boards, I have yet to see anyone that comes to mind from STRAIGHT Southern California.  I have legal documentation regarding the closure of that STRAIGHT and questions regarding the KIDS of Southern California facility that occupied the building prior to STRAIGHT.  I was wondering if when you have a minute, if you could shoot me an email at webmaster@kidsofelpaso.com
Thanks!

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Missing Puzzle Pieces
« on: June 30, 2003, 05:09:00 PM »
Was anyone in KIDS of NJ when it closed??  
Does anyone know if some of the phasers were subsequentially placed in other facilities such as AARC?  

Specifically, I am curious to know if the "Bish*ff,Jean" named individual on the KNJ
names list was later relocated to AARC.  I believe her father may have been a clinical staff trainee in Jersey and the family was formerly involved with KIDS of EP from '86 or early '87.

Thanks in advance for any information at all on this matter.
Todd

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News Items / Missing Puzzle Pieces
« on: June 30, 2003, 05:00:00 PM »
Hello, this is Todd from kidsofelpaso.com.  
I recently copied the following snippet of information from documentation I was reading:

""Evelyn Bish*ff who is listed as AARC alumni committee and phone coordinator, had a child in KIDS of North Jersey and her husband was on the clinical staff for KIDS of North Jersey. We are currently looking into whether or not her husband currently holds a position with AARC""

The information mentioned an "Evelyn Bish*ff" as alumni committee and phone coordinator and possibly her husband as clinical staff.  I am very interested in this couple as I believe that they are the parents of a child admitted originally to KIDS of El Paso in late 1986/early 1987 and subsequently relocated to New Jersey after the El Paso KIDS facility closed in 1989.

I am posting as I would be interested to know if their daughter, Gene (Jean) was admitted to AARC after KIDS of North Jersey was closed and also if the Bish*ff's are still associated with the program.  If so it would be one of the longest program association that I am aware of.  
17 years is a long time...

Names have been partially masked.
Any information is much appreciated.

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Kathy M.
« on: June 13, 2003, 06:05:00 PM »
Is she still out there somewhere?  I haven't seen her name in quite sometime.

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