Hello. I've occasionally lurked here for about a year and finally decided to register and share my story.
Prologue: "... and I'm here because..."
I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. My father, who had severe emotional and psychological issues, would verbally, physically, and emotionally abuse me starting from when I was 2. In school I was incredibly gifted, testing in the 99.9th percentile and leading all of my classes at an elite preschool-12th prep school. I was never popular with the other kids, and indeed, I rarely had more than a few good friends. My father was always a terrifying constant in my life.
In 7th grade, I drew the ire of the more athletic kids during PE, and I became a target of [more] bullying. This, combined with my father's abuses, made me more and more depressed, and as I became more depressed, my once perfect grades dropped. I became a B student, a C student... By the time I finished 8th grade, I was barely hanging on with mostly Cs and Ds. My academic state of affairs only made my depression worse.
By the start of freshman year, I was staying home from school to sleep on about half of the days. A month in, my parents called the police to report me for being truant. Long story short, the cops forced their way through my door, restrained, drugged, and beat me. It was my 15th birthday, and I had been traumatised horribly. I got home to find my room trashed and destroyed; my psyche ripped up. Thus it was that I became schizoid and agoraphobic.
My mother took some basic pity on me, and gave me a computer and two kittens for company. I slept during the day; the only time I left my room was at night when everybody was asleep to bathe and eat. I lived in the pitch black. Nothing was left of me except a ball of neuroses. This state of affairs went on for ten and a half months.
On that fateful day, Septembre 2nd, 2006, my mother brought two goons into my room. They, of course, pulled me out, handcuffed me, and drove me to North Idaho. I was dragged into NIBH Residential. I'm sure that needs no explanation.
My first two roommates were Anthony, a tall pockmarked half-Cherokee kid who was in for attempted double homicide, and Shane, a schizophrenic with like five counts of assault. Needless to say, I was scared out of my mind. For the first few days, there was absolutely no sleep while those guys were in the room.
NIBH was absolute hell, and it was only worse when I met my therapist and psychiatrist, Dr Gary Stanton, PhD and George J. Ullrich, MD respectively. I assume that everybody here knows at least Ullrich, so I'll only briefly explain Gary. Pompous snake, always had this falsely endearing tone. Tended to lie and make promises he had no intention of keeping.
Although NIBH was dreadful, after a few weeks I had more or less recovered from the agoraphobia. Ullrich and Stanton recommended that I, no surprise, go to Innercept. Oh, and by the way, we just happen to own and operate Innercept, too.
Innercept's kind of like a non-official CEDU spinoff in the Synanon-RTC format. It's outside of Coeur d'Alene in the farmlands. They owned a few houses. Anyway, Innercept was terrible. After getting there, I was hit with the bombshell from one of the other kids that Innercept had - gasp - a minimum three month stay. I was dreaming of freedom; I desired it more than anything else already, and three months sounded like an eternity... But then, a week or two later, Gary told me that I'd have to stay there until I'd completed a semester of public school, which ran until June. It was Novembre.
So right off the bat, despite my good behaviour and compliance, I'm looking at losing eight more months of my life on top of the two I'd already given them. This was not open to discussion at all; nothing there ever was. After fruitlessly trying to discuss it a few times, in one of the year's early snows, I walked out and made it five miles before anyone noticed I was gone. At that point, a staff was driving past, and picked me up. I was taken back, and tried to find a way while being compliant...
Christmas came and my mother and sister visited me. We got a few rooms at the CdA Resort, and I spent Christmas standing on my balcony, wishing that I had the courage to jump and end my misery.
I went to the public school. I got A's on all the assignments, I complied with Innercept. I filed grievance after grievance.
Ever since NIBH, Ullrich had been forcing me to take Geodon. He'd only gotten me to start by threatening to have me restrained and injected with it if I didn't take it voluntarily. I should mention that this was after I recovered from my agoraphobia. The first time I cheeked it and spat it out in my sink, but my roommate at the time, a little jerk named Jesse, narced on me. They always did thorough mouth checks at NIBH from then on.
Darlene, Innercept's program director, cut a deal with me. In return for perfect compliance for two weeks, she would give me a discharge date. At about the same time, Ullrich agreed to take me off of Geodon. He insisted on putting me on Celexa instead, however.
Two weeks passed, still nothing. Darlene evaded giving it to me for two weeks beyond that. She came in one evening with a chart showing 13 criteria ranging from "Spirituality" to "Academics" to "Cleaning" to "Nutrition." No matter what the field, I was ranked near the bottom on everything. I pointed out that the majority were subjective and that, more importantly, things like spirituality shouldn't be discharge criteria, and that in the ones that weren't subjective, such as academics, I was simply given the wrong rating, but Darlene, like all other parts of Innercept, was not open to discussion. Based on the chart, I realised that Innercept was never going to let me go. Treatment lasts forever.
I was terribly depressed. I needed freedom; I needed to feel alive. As my Geodon went down and my Celexa went up, I started to feel emotions again, something Geodon had robbed me off. I was also finally able to stay awake. The Celexa wasn't for me either, however. It gave me manic-depressive mood swings. In my manic states, I wooed a girl, Ani, and we began a relationship. In my depressive states, I couldn't bear how bleak my world was, and I began to have suicidal ideations. So it was that Ullrich sent me to NIBH acute in March of 2007.
While on acute, I was taken off of all meds entirely, and although Ullrich tried to manipulate me back into taking Geodon, I stayed free, and after a week went back to Innercept. I was the only person there who, in my time, was ever med-free.
Right after, they sent Ani to NIBH, and that made me feel awful. I missed her. It was ever clear that Innercept wasn't intending to let me ever leave, so I stopped putting up with their bullshit and was civilly disobedient. Some of the staff would react with punishments as blatantly illegal as refusing to let me eat dinner.
After a few weeks of that, Ani came back, and I started toning down my disobedience and being compliant again. That very night, however, Alan the night staff walked into my room with Duane the Northern States Security guard, and he hauled me off to Ascent. How terrifying it was...
Ascent was COMPLETE AND UTTER FUCKING BULLSHIT HELL. I was an AI for two and a half weeks. My days were filled suddenly with the hardest of labour. I couldn't even speak with anybody who had anything to do with getting me out of there until the very end. My therapist, Dan, was completely useless. After the two and a half weeks, Ullrich, Ascent's medical director, of course, showed up. He told me that if I didn't agree to all of these conditions he'd make me stay for the full Ascent program and then have to do them anyway. Chief among them was doing a semester of summer school, then getting a GED, then doing a semester of community college at NIC. This was the start of May and suddenly I was going to be at Innercept until, at the earliest, the end of Decembre. Having massive pieces ripped off of your life is the worst feeling I've known.
So I agreed. What choice did I have? When I got back to Innercept, I was completely whipped. I was so afraid of doing anything wrong because I knew how horribly they would punish me. Even so, after a week, Chris[tine] the Nurse, the program's real day to day head, walked into the house and handed me a typed up threat. If I violated any of these 7 things, it said, I'd be sent back to Ascent immediately for the full program.
Here are the ones that I remember:
1) I had to make allowance, every week. Nobody ever did that, and I had a harder time that most because of my "nutrition." You see, I couldn't eat vegetables such as Innercept's iceberg lettuce, which was on the menu every single night. If you didn't eat a single thing on the menu, you got one point off, and if you lost more than seven, you lost allowance. Staff would also take points off for the most ridiculous crap imaginable, I'm sure everybody has some idea of what I mean. If anybody else didn't get allowance, they didn't get allowance. There was nothing further attached to it.
2) "Maintain a positive attitude at all times." Aside from being subjective, how could you expect that from me when you're treating me like this and threatening me?
3) "Participate in all groups." Again, subjectivity. If they didn't like HOW you participated in a group, you weren't participating.
4) "Complete summer school." Later replaced by "complete semester at NIC." This was honestly the only non subjective thing on the list.
5) "Stay 10 feet away from Ani at all times." I loved her, but I tried anyway. PROBLEM: She was fucking BORDERLINE and could get me sent away if she so chose by coming near me!
There were a 6 and 7 but I cannot recall them. It was a long time ago.
I couldn't sleep at night. I was so terrified they'd try to send me there again, I stayed up and looked out the window whenever I heard a noise on the gravel road, afraid that it would be Duane again. Still, I tried to be compliant, but Ullrich was always threatening to send me to Ascent for being "defiant" or "negative;" always unspecific terms like that and never backed up by examples. In Innercept's staff culture, gossiping about the kids was the order of the day, and a few staff, some more than others, passed on the most malicious things about me.
I completed summer school with an A+ (like 103% from extra credit) and Ani turned 18 and went to Innercept's adult program. I got my GED, scoring in the 99th percentile in all fields. I was meticulous about staying on the good side of the staff. I had perfect points, always. I had more vouchers than everybody else combined. While everybody else was doing pretty outrageous stuff (sneaking out and getting caught at night, physical assault, whatever) I stayed well behaved, alone amongst all, but still I was treated worst of all. Because I got my GED after the registration deadline for fall classes, I had to enroll in a late start class, running from the end of Octobre to Decembre. One day at the end of Septembre, I found the staffing notes just sitting unattended on the counter and stole them. What I read was absolutely disgusting.
I'll ignore what was written about my co-residents, although most of that was awful as well. My staffing notes revealed that although I "thought" I was getting out in Decembre, "...Karl is resistant to progress... and requires longer treatment," effectively saying that they were already planning to hold me even longer. I confronted Gary, and said, and I quote exactly, "you are a disease, spreading hatred and discontent. All bets are off for when you're going home; you'll be here until every single staff likes you." Gary berated me for an entire session; I was crying and having a panic attack, but still he went on.
A week later, it was my 17th birthday. My mother and Ani's father were in town at the same time (orgranised by the two of them), and we were both staying at the CdA resort. She went back a day before I did, but ran away that night and came to my hotel room. I let her in, and my mom got a call from Ullrich saying she'd run away. My mother saw Ani in my room and called Ullrich; he said that if we brought her back in the morning there would be no punishments. We did, and my mother and I had a session with Gary. He promised that I'd be leaving in Decembre; that I had nothing to worry about; that they wouldn't send me to wilderness. My mother had told me while we were at the resort that she saw absolutely no reason to send me to wilderness and that she thought I was ready to be out.
So what happened three days later?
I got a call from my father. "They want us to send you to another one of those mountain things." WHAT?
I called my mother. "It's not set in stone..." But of course it was. Duane hauled me off to Innercept's security duplex, where Ullrich visited me that night. He had his customary evil smirk and said I was being sent off for "harboring a runaway," ie Ani. He said I'd go back to Innercept after wilderness, and that I'd be there until I completed a semester of NIC (I wasn't going to be able to do the fall semester, of course, because I was being sent to wilderness in the first place). In my last true act of defiance before the fire was burnt out from me entirely, I flipped Ullrich off, and said, "In case I won't see you again, fuck you, and burn in hell." His response? "Oh, you'll see me again." I never did.
A few days later, Duane drove me to Bend, Oregon. I was going to Second Nature. The good thing was that this was the first program I'd been in where I wasn't under Ullrich's control. My therapist there was understanding and told my parents not to send me back to Innercept, and that I was ready for freedom. So, after seven weeks, the minimum stay, I was off to LA, where I found exactly that.
