This article that came out about a year after Desisto broke off from Lake Grove School and went his
own way:
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TIMEBehavior: Getting that DeSisto GlowMonday, Nov. 26, 1979Disturbed kids are straightened out at a Stockbridge schoolTo the casual visitor, it looks like a typical boarding school for the overprivileged—300 acres in Stockbridge, Mass., a mansion, dorms, art studios, a gym, music rehearsal rooms and a barn, and 150 teen-agers so bright-faced and chipper that local residents say they can identify them by the "DeSisto glow."
In fact, DeSisto at Stockbridge is a haven for the walking wounded. Some of the students have been beaten and abused much of their lives. At least half of them were drug users by age twelve. Others had been given up on as hopeless schizophrenics, and some of the girls—and boys —were rape victims and prostitutes.
As new students quickly learn, the school is a therapeutic bootcamp. Each youngster has individual psychological sessions at least once a week, and everyone on campus—faculty and students alike—is subjected to group therapy virtually all the time. The psychology is Gestalt, involving constant confrontation and intense expression of feeling. Discipline and structure are maintained primarily by the students themselves. The use of drugs, alcohol, or any violence or sex results in an instant dorm meeting and, sometimes, a call for a temporary expulsion. The student is sent outside the gates, then allowed back in after agreeing to perform 250 extra work hours for the community. If homework is neglected or a bed left unmade, fines are subtracted from the $10 weekly allowance earned by each student. An honor code requires everyone to report infractions by other students.
Though DeSisto may sound like a work camp dreamed up by Dickens and Freud, it has successfully straightened out disturbed youngsters who had failed to respond to treatment elsewhere. One boy, who is due to graduate next spring, had previously been expelled from a state mental hospital as uncontrollable. A recent graduate, now working on the school staff while he waits to enter college, had a long theft-and-burglary record. Until the school turned him around, he had an unusual career goal: to be a bank robber.
The school is the brainchild of Mike DeSisto, 40, a bearded and pudgy teacher turned therapist. For eleven years, DeSisto was the salaried director of Lake Grove, a Long Island school where he developed his therapeutic program. Fired after he was accused by the Lake Grove trustees of trying to break up the school, the strong-willed DeSisto announced plans to found his own school; and most of the faculty and student body quit to go with him. Parents of the kids were loyal too. DeSisto bought the Stockbridge property with tuition money they paid in advance.
One of DeSisto's basic ideas is not unique to Gestalt psychology: that all youngsters, not just troubled ones, need structure and responsibility to get through adolescence. Says he: "You can't change anybody. All you can do is set up a supportive, warm, natural environment and then a natural process takes over." But all is not sweetness and light. At endless and merciless dorm meetings, rationalizations and excuses are brusquely dismissed as "bullshit," perhaps the most commonly used word on campus.
"I see this as an accepting, caring place," says a girl named Lisa. From across the room comes the commentary of a fellow student: "Do you believe that? I have a hard time believing anything you say." Admits Lisa: "I bullshit a lot." In a therapeutic community, no one is ever offstage, and Lisa's reputation for lying will make every conversation a confrontation until she breaks the habit.
The basic question at DeSisto, in and out of therapy, is "Where are you?" The answer usually comes in Gestalt terms of physical feelings. "My heart is pounding," one girl will say, or "I'm shaking all over. I'm very embarrassed." The student will be urged to "stay with the feeling." There is a lot of gentle mockery, and requests for hugs are granted, but no Esalen-like, nudie-feelie techniques are allowed. Guilt feelings are frowned upon, and youngsters are not allowed to blame themselves for long. One girl whose parents beat her is coached to tell residents of her dorm: "It was their fault, not mine."
DeSisto requires that parents get involved in therapy too, so that they change along with their children. He regularly brings together as many as eight families for week-long sessions of parent-child group therapy. There are also monthly meetings of DeSisto parent groups in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston—nuclei for what DeSisto hopes will some day be a nationwide chain of therapeutic schools. Says he proudly: "I want to make this one a flagship."
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