Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

I've been referring parents with mentally ill children to the CABF site for recommendations to RTC's if their child is immediately dangerous and has been through half a dozen or so short term hospitalizations already without being stabilized.

I have to add a warning.  WWASPS has found the site and has begun posing as parents, or sending their program drones over, one or the other, and the rules of the site don't let me rebut the referral there because of the "no flaming" rule, and they are worried about liability.

And I cannot guarantee that other unscrupulous behavior modification facilities will not also find the site and pose as parents to post ads to suck in the unwary.

Therefore my warning is that because there are some good mental health facilities that treat seriously mentally ill children who can't be stabilized with short term hospitalizations, and treat them based on a medical model, not a behavior modification model, I still recommend parents of immediately dangerous mentally ill children check out the site.

BUT I *strongly*, you can't imagine how strongly, caution parents to check Fornits, ISAC, and the teen emancipation site for any RTC they are considering and avoid any RTC that has a number of parents and/or former students/patients claiming that the place is abusive.

There is so much "fire" in this industry, that I don't think it's safe to trust a facility with any "smoke" with your seriously mentally ill child.

I also *strongly* recommend that parents make up a fictitious non-mentally ill juvenile delinquent child and have a friend who is convincing call and pretend to be a parent of the JD looking for a facility.  This is to protect you and your child from the fraud that is rampant in the industry.  There are multiple reports of facilities flat lying to parents of mentally ill children and saying they don't take juvenile delinquents when they definitely do.

National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) has issued a warning that facilities that take both mentally ill children and juvenile delinquents do the mentally ill children more harm than good.

If the facility sounds interested in taking the fictional juvenile delinquent, placing your mentally ill child in that facility is probably not going to be a decision you'll be happy with in the long run.

I still recommend that parents of children with serious mental illnesses who need a placement check the CABF message board on RTCs for suggestions, but I also must unfortunately caution you that you need to check their recommendations out very carefully in case the recommendation is an advertisement instead of a genuine recommendation.

Also, sometimes parents praising a facility don't really know whether the facility is good or bad because they haven't gotten their child back yet.  If you get your child back and your child is further traumatized and was just faking good to avoid punishment and telling you things were alright to avoid punishment, and your child suicides, it was obviously *not* a good placement.

If it's a behavior mod. facility and the child is still in the facility, take glowing recommendations with a large grain of salt.

Buyer Beware.

Timoclea

We need cops.

We can't live without 'em.

But they need to start working for us....

That's no longer an option.

They've pushed it.

They've gone to far.

They've just gone to far.
http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/rb.htm' target='_new'>Tom Crosslin

You're right, Niles.  It was just an opportunity to comment to them about charity---the emotion rather than giving donations of stuff--that I didn't manage to pass up.

It just burns me up that it wasn't enough for these loonies to provide their "help" against her will, now that she's grown they want to stand back and watch, gleefully waiting for her to screw up.  Talk about pressure.  That's just warped, and sick.

T.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000051WYJ/circlofmiamithem' target='_new'> BROOKS ATKINSON (1894-1984), Once Around The Sun, 1951.

On 2005-04-11 06:37:00, Anonymous wrote:

"T.  Remember there are two sides to every story.  You have heard one.  And when they lie to you about simple fact, how can you trust that when they talk to you about opinions and feelings that they are truthful?  I KNOW "VIVA" has no living biological grandmothers and that both her adopted grandmothers stand with her parents.  Whoever you spoke to was not honest about their relationship to the child."

Oh, baloney.  I know the simple facts, I was abbreviating for the sake of not having to drag out a long and involved discussion that has been covered over and over again on Fornits.

You are just as bad as you claim I am in not mentioning that they are Viva's *adoptive* parents, that she was not adopted as a baby, that her dad parented her until he died, and that her biological mother, as far as I remember, is still alive although she's had various difficulties in her life.

The people I spoke to were perfectly honest about the relationship, and in that they didn't gild the hard parts of the truth, pretty darned honest about what they were going through, in my opinion.

I don't *care* what her parents' "side" of the story is unless they can produce a birth certificate proving she is not yet 18 years old.

She is an adult.  What she does is her business, and her problem to deal with.  I don't know any adult who hasn't had both their own trials and triumphs along the way.

I repeat, your habit of rooting for this girl to fail in life disgusts me.  You should be ashamed.

She's an adult.  Whatever she may or may not have done as a child or teenager is a moot point now.  Her parents could claim she's a former gang member who worked for a chop shop stealing cars and I'd shrug.  She is responsible for her behavior *now*---and there's just not enough time since she turned eighteen for her to have developed a track record, and what there is of the track record is entirely understandable based on her having been stuck in ALA.

I repeat, your leaping forward to judge Viva and your clear rooting for her to fail in life and go crawling back to people you in your Godlike exalted and perfect judgement approve of is absolutely disgusting.

Ask me a year and a half from now what I think of Viva and I'll give you my preliminary thoughts, presuming she stays in touch, as I hope she does.  I also wish her only the best---unlike you.

I think people do much better in life, in general, when we assume they're going to be good people and hope for the best for them.

It's called "charity"---you should try it some time.

Timoclea

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.
--Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father and inventor

Yeah.  This is about par for the course.

The programs' specific attack on teen fundamental sense of self is on a child's fundamental "anchor" for seeing themselves as a Good Person:  "My mommy loves me.  My daddy loves me.  I know I'm a good person because mommy and daddy love me."

By attacking the teen's sense of being loved by the parents before the teen has really grown up enough to replace their self-anchor with some more rational and solid base, they destabilize the teen's entire sense of self.  The letter about what a great time the parents are having without the teen is a way of getting a statement that *feels like* "we don't love you when you don't measure up" to the teen without the parents necessarily understanding what function the letter serves in the mechanics of the program.  Then the teen is willing to do anything to become a person mommy and daddy will love again---and the program presents the "program self" superimposed over the teen's authentic self as the person mommy and daddy will love---then delivers that "love" in carefully orchestrated visits--but only so long as the teen maintains the program self superimposed over the authentic self for the arbitrarily assigned period of time.

Okay, I get now exactly how they're doing it (the thought reform and superimposition of an implanted personality over the teen's real personality) in addition to the initial induction of Stockholm Syndrome.

Thank you very much for this article.  It will help me a *lot* in the article I'm writing to help teens pro-actively program-proof themselves in case they happen to get sent off.

I'd already come up ways of dealing with most of the stuff the programs do, but this fundamental destabilization of the self---now that I see exactly how it's done, I see how to teach teens (and teach them just in a simple article) how to protect themselves in advance from the program's methodology, so that they can "fake good" without actually having their sense of self destabilized.

The "deliberate false confessions" technique mentioned by many Fornits participants is a good one.

Another good one is consciously replacing the "I'm a good person because mommy and daddy love me" or "I'm a good person because God loves me" with another purely internal anchor that the thought-reform techniques can't take away.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that the kind of anchor is very similar to the sorts of anchors described in Victor Frankel's _Man's Search for Meaning_ (Frankel was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and was a famous psychologist).

I'm not trying to be mysterious---it's going to take a little while for me to write up instructions for how to build a solid, meaningful anchor for the self that's flexible enough for the teen to be able to grow and change, but solid enough to be an effective bulwark against a thought-reform program.

I know how to do it, but I'm going to want to kick it around to try to find the best way to explain it.

The basic replacement anchor is:

"I'm a good person because I have a Code that I followed before and will follow again when I am no longer in a totally coercive situation.  I will not change my code while I am in a coercive environment, because if the change the people in control of me wanted was a rational one, they wouldn't have to coerce me to try to make it.  If their change were good and they were coercing me instead of explaining, that would make them stupid--which means their change is likely stupid even if they think it's good.  If their change is bad, changing my code for theirs will not make me a better person.  I may have to do things that are against my code here, or refrain from doing things my code requires.  I held to my code, however imperfectly, before I got here, and I will hold to it after I leave.  This is a situation of total coercion.  Actions made in situations of total coercion by others are the moral fault of the controllers, not the controlled.  I may change my code as a result of learning or reason or insights gained while I am free and not in a coercive situation.  I will not make the horrible mistake of changing my code while I am in a situation of total coercion.  I will not change my code at all until I am free again and have shaken off these coercions.  My code may not be perfect, but I am a good person because I *have* a code, and when I am free I do and will follow my code.  And when I am free, I may find ways to improve my code, but I will not change my code here.  Changing my code in a coercive situation is like sailing on the high seas with no compass, no stars, and no rudder.  I am a good person because I have a code."

What I need to do is take that and distill it down to a creed that an at-risk teen can memorize, but even if they don't memorize it perfectly, it should help.

Then I can list some codes different people have found good and appropriate.  

It doesn't really matter *which* code a teen picks.  It just matters that they pick one they can live with that makes moral sense to them, that it's a *simple* code that is unambiguous and that they can have memorized, that they never admit what it is to parents or to anyone in the program facility at all---NOBODY.  Never write it in a diary where parents can see it.  The code must be a complete secret until the teen's 18th birthday (or, if he doesn't get loose until after his 18th,  until he is out the door and free).

It can be anything from the ten commandments to the four pillars to the golden rule to Galt's creed to *anything*---any of the basic, simple codes of honor or behavior that large numbers of humans have managed to live by honorably throughout human history.  It can't be something as large and nebulous as the Koran or the Bible---it has to be small and simple but contain the seeds of the big ideas.  And part of why it will work is because this anchor system admits that the code may be replaced by some other, better code---but that better code can only be chosen in an uncoerced place and time.

The true anchor is: "I am a good person because I have a Code."

Nobody can take that away from you if they don't know what your code is.

I can fit that in with other survival tips.

But I'm going to have to edit it down and cut out the excess verbiage.

Thank you.  I think I can use what I learned from this article to help people.

Hopefully, anyway.

Timoclea

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
--Dan Barker, author and former evangelist

On 2005-04-08 23:56:00, Barton wrote:

"  

  Dear Readers,



       I recently had a niece put in this academy.She is now into her next facilitated program.She is involved in Drugs,sex and Rebelion against her Mother and Father.They are very conservative Christian people. Fire and brimstone for the sinners of the world.



   After giving you people a little background check,can any one tell me any thing about this place she was in? The things she told me troubled me.The things I have read on this Forum about that place trouble me more than ever!



   I have made a few calls and inquired concerning the facilaty.I have recieved a few E-mails stating that they have terminated several of the scholls in mexico.Is this true? I have allso been talking with a young girl named AKA "viva" a past student.I would appriciate it if anyone could give me a heads up on what she is saying to be true!!

Thank you,

Barton  "

Barton--I can't give you the lowdown on ALA except to tell you to look at its advocates and how bizarre they are.  *My* parents are very conservative Christians.  Church of Christ basically believes they aren't a denomination, they're "The Church"--the whole thing---and that pretty much everybody else is going to Hell.

But while my parents are very sincerely faithful people, they don't go around praying out loud in public like Pharisees--which is basically how the ALA types come across to me.  There's a difference between letting your light shine and making a big show of your faith to be seen by men.

Now that I think about it, the Pharisees are the perfect metaphor for the ALA people.  They're real big on telling you what *other* people are doing wrong, they're very ostentatious about how pious they are, they're very proud of being "not like that publican over there," they're very interested in what's in their neighbor's eye while being awfully quiet about what's in their own.  Somehow, I don't think Jesus would have liked the ALA people very much.

Can you picture the lady with all the quotes sitting in her bedroom quietly praying, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."  Can you picture that?  And picture her meaning it? Because I sure can't.

Every real Christian I know wouldn't mouth pious platitudes about Viva, but would say, "Well, she's grown now, and I can't know her heart.  I hope she winds up okay." and would let it go.

The term "whited sepulchre" comes to mind.

Timoclea

I swear by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
http://laissezfairebooks.com/product.cfm?op=view&pid=AR5564&aid=10247' target='_new'>* - ~ Galt's Creed ~ - *

On 2005-04-08 23:56:00, Barton wrote:

"  

  Dear Readers,



       I recently had a niece put in this academy.She is now into her next facilitated program.She is involved in Drugs,sex and Rebelion against her Mother and Father.They are very conservative Christian people. Fire and brimstone for the sinners of the world.



   After giving you people a little background check,can any one tell me any thing about this place she was in? The things she told me troubled me.The things I have read on this Forum about that place trouble me more than ever!



   I have made a few calls and inquired concerning the facilaty.I have recieved a few E-mails stating that they have terminated several of the scholls in mexico.Is this true? I have allso been talking with a young girl named AKA "viva" a past student.I would appriciate it if anyone could give me a heads up on what she is saying to be true!!

Thank you,

Barton  "

Viva is being slandered by the other poster.  This "runaway" is 18 years old and has simply moved out, rented her own place, gotten a job, and is pursuing school.

If she's a bit wild, it's an understandable rebound after what she went through, which would unsettle anyone.

She's 18.  If she wants to cut loose for a bit, it ain't nobody's business if she does.

If *I* had been through what she's been through *I* certainly would be using my newfound majority to thumb my nose at the idiots who had had me shipped to Mexico and incarcerated me in a private prison run by jesus freaks.

Genuine people of faith get a tremendous amount of my respect, no matter the religion or sect.  The people at ALA are, in my opinion, more than a bit over the edge from "sincere" into downright weird.

I base this on the rantings posted on Fornits by Craig of ALA, who was the head honcho running the place.  You can't diagnose over the internet, and I'm not saying he necessarily *is*---but he *sounded* way past eccentric and flat out into delusional city.  Not in the 'burbs of the metro area, but right downtown across from city hall.

Maybe he isn't.  Maybe he lost it and wasn't being himself.  Maybe his rantings weren't representative of who he really is.  I don't know if you can search Fornits on the screen name "Word of Wisdom," but that was him.

His apparent loopiness is why I believe Viva.  I've also talked to Viva's grandmother.  Viva may not be a perfect little angel, but she's not a lot more screwed up than I was at 18, and I turned out a responsible, married for ten years, been living in our own house--same one--for six years, mom of a 9 year old daughter, published author, middle-aged suburban "soccer mom" housewife.

I'm not perfect, and I've got my problems, but I get by in life.

I don't think it's quite fair to judge an 18 year old who's had as much turmoil in her life as Viva has (a fair bit of the story has come out on Fornits now and again) by the standards of those of us who are in our thirties or forties and have settled in as frumpy, stodgy, happy, old marrieds.

If I wasn't as discombobulated as Viva at 18--and in many ways I was more confused and wild and dangerous, I was just good at hiding it---I *also* hadn't been uprooted out of high school and shipped out of the country and spent way too long among some people who seem to me to be really, really bizarre, and then had to be rescued by my grandmother.

Yes, she left her grandmother's house and moved out slightly before--coupla months--her 18th birthday.  Big fat hairy deal.

Viva is a nice young lady who is recovering from a very bad experience in an entirely normal and typical way.  When she gets a little more time between her and what happened to her, she's probably going to be fine.

But the jesus freaks will never admit she's fine because she won't be a jesus freak clone of them.  They'll always see her as a "rebellious runaway" no matter how old she gets because that's how they are.  Or at least, that's my perception from what I've seen of them---and we have, unfortunately, seen the various anti-Viva jesus freaks posting quite a lot over the time since she got sent away.

Timoclea

...it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored."

http://laissezfairebooks.com/index.cfm?eid=103&aid=10247' target='_new'>Milton Friedman

Oh, and the parents on here that had their kids in WWASPS schools are were unhappy with how their kids were treated, if you could get them to send you their testimonials/complaints, that could help.

Also, you might want to print out ISAC's list of warning signs of an abusive RTC, because if you have a traditional boarding school lined up to compare with you can point out how with the school you've selected, the red flags *aren't* there but with WWASPS they are.  It could help to be able to compare point by point.

I didn't understand if you were going to have to go through mediation before or after you pulled your daughter out.  The following is just in case you have to go through mediation first.

If your child is over 14, usually judges give a lot of weight to where the child wants to live or who the child wants to go with.  Usually what child advocacy groups (like ISAC) recommend is that you use the law to get the child produced in person to say who she wants to go with.

The history of that is that if the child is asked while in the program facility, they're afraid to say they want to leave because they're (rightly) afraid it might be a trick to get an excuse to punish them some more without any real chance of them getting out.

If the child is produced in person, in front of a judge, with both parents and one parent wants to take the kid out of the facility, usually the kid will say they want to go with the parent who's going to pull them out and that's that.

I'm not a lawyer, those are just some suggestions.

Timoclea

Were the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an article of food. Government is just as infallible,[sic] too, when it fixes systems in physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere.... It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
http://laissezfairebooks.com/product.cfm?op=view&pid=FF7485&aid=10247' target='_new'>Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

http://www.ripoffreport.com/default.asp#

Just found this site.  If you're a parent and were ripped off by a bad RTC, you can file a report (free, but you have to register on the site) so other people will know to avoid them.

Timoclea

The most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of
knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness.

--Thomas Jefferson