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A little backstory: For the past 5 years I have been employed at a residential rehabilitation facility. This means that there are various buildings that are basically remodeled houses (A normal house, but with emergency lighting, heavier doors, storm shelter), each having it's own specific designation for the type of client that will stay there. There are houses for drug/alcohol addicts, sex/love addicts, people with mental health or personality disorders, and a house for "co-occurring" clients, usually meaning they have primarily drug/alcohol addiction with a lesser amount of something else. Clients will pay to receive treatment from a team of therapists/doctors while living in a "home-like" environment with a small number of folks who share their background to some extent or another. However, that's how my work is these days. Originally, it was started by a guy, let's call him Dan, that is somewhat of a local celebrity. Dan made an absolute fortune off of inheriting the majority of a large county from his family and using it as cattle land. He used that money to buy more of the county and open up several stores and small restaurants. He then flew off to Peru and India, coming back to ramble about homeopathic medicine, reiki healing, magical crystals, energy stones and the like to anyone that would listen. Dan used this knowledge and his seemingly limitless wealth to start a backwoods "Rehab" that was actually mostly a front for himself and his friends/family to smoke weed in the nude while playing guitar and singing. Occasionally he would wave his hands at people and claim he was curing them of whatever ailment he felt like naming at the time. This was all before my time there, but I've met the guy and he's personally shared stories of exactly the above. At some point he opened the rehab up to the public, which brought in people who actually needed help. This required Dan to hire some doctors, therapists, nurses, administration, etc. Somewhere along the line, those people told Dan that his approach of rubbing people with eggplants to cure their Bipolar Disorder wasn't going to cut it and he was more or less forced out of his own company. Since then, the company I work for has transitioned from a privately owned rehab with strange holistic/homeopathic and nature-focused side treatment, to a corporately owned rehab that is failing deeply due to a lack of competent management and bewildering bad decisions - like opening up a house next to a river that people frequently get drunk and canoe down, as well as being right down the road from what can be only described as a meth compound. We've had to shoo away drug dealers on bicycles, drunk teenagers in boats, and old grizzled bearded rednecks with assault rifles. I say "shoo away" because this area is one of the largest counties around and has a whopping two police officers. That's where I come in. I've been here to see this place transition from it's early days of "Vision Quests," which involved a client being voluntarily left in the woods overnight in a backwoods southern town, to it's current state of having an employee fired for skinny dipping during his break. It's been hard to find good help. Some Background On Me I began as an overnight clinical technician. Basically a glorified babysitter. I hung out in a residence overnight and made sure the clients were okay. I watch a lot of Netflix. From there, I was a day shift clinical technician and worked at nearly every department before ending up specializing in the mental health house. I became the Directing Technician there, which meant I worked with counselling the clients when they were having a rough time and their treatment team wasn't available, managed the staff of the mental health house, worked in treatment planning with the medical and therapy teams, and got the privilege of being the person to call when poo poo really hits the fan. A lot of it was pretty standard. Client has an anxiety attack and there are no therapists available? I step in to help. Client wants to walk down the road and leave, despite being there of their own volition and simply just not wanting to wait to sign a discharge paper? I step in. Client gets caught digging a hole in the yard and then loving it? .....I step in, I guess. What is this thread for? I want to answer questions and share stories about this batshit insane place I've called a job for half a decade. I will be leaving this place soon to work at a (far more standard) treatment facility, as I truly love the industry and being able to help people who are going through the poo poo that I've been through. Feel free to ask general questions about working in the recovery industry. In between these questions I'll be sharing stories like... Toilet Hootch and Chlorine Gas Nude Cow Chasing Aerial poo poo Sock Wards (To Keep Demons Away) "I will suck $28,000 worth of dick while I'm here." (Celebrity Redacted) tangled himself up in the his seat belt again and is stuck in the van... And all the other crazy stuff I've seen over the years in this field. I hope that others can find some humor in one of the most mentally draining, but gratifying careers I could ask to be a part of. I won't be making fun of the countless people who made a legitimate effort to better themselves or people with mental health issues. But those weren't my only clientele. I also had spoiled rich kids sent in by their parents because they were drinking at college, people who couldn't be diagnosed with any mental illness and were, for lack of a better way of putting it, just loving weird. Not to mention celebrities and politicians (Names won't be mentioned) who were there as a PR stunt to get out of trouble. All those are the fun ones. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 03:43
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Toilet Hootch and Chlorine Gas Due to housing anywhere from 8 to 22 clients per house, the house sizes vary but tend to have a handful of bathrooms. Some bathrooms are communal and some clients have their own bathrooms in their room. In my time working in the drug/alcohol addiction house, we had a young guy come in who, during his search at intake, was found to be wearing a camel pack full of vodka. Let's call him Alex. This isn't too uncommon. We used to see people, especially younger clients, try to smuggle things in all the time. This would lead to a pattern for Alex though, who also tried to walk up the road to buy beer at a gas station and was caught trying to make toilet wine. When the clients are in therapy groups or are otherwise preoccupied, we do sweeps of the house to make sure everything is in good order. When we got to Alex's room we were hit by a wall of smell. It was hard to describe. Something along the lines of birthday cake, vinegar and rot. We traced this back to his toilet where we discovered his attempt at making some homemade hootch. Except Alex didn't seem to have the slightest clue on how to do this, or at least not a clear idea. He had stuffed some mashed up banana, what may have been an apple, some strawberries, a bagel, and cake frosting into a sock. Then he tossed the sock into the toilet. Not the toilet tank, like you hear about people in prison doing. The bowl itself. He'd then tied another sock to it that hung over the edge of the toilet, which I assume was to prevent the sock from slipping down the pipes. It also appeared he'd been using the toilet as normal during this time. Without removing the sock. We called our housekeeping department to take care of it while we dealt with Alex. One of our maintenance men was there changing some light bulbs and told us he could take care of it for us and that we didn't need to call housekeeping. Cool - thanks guy. Except he tossed the chunky mess into the trash and grabbed two cleaning products from the housekeeping locker and dumped them in the toilet to deal with the smell. Both bottles were nearly empty, so, "Why not?" Straight Bleach and a toilet bowl cleaner with ammonia. And that's how we had to evacuate the house for most of a day. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 15:40
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Is Alex the guy who tried to
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Jan 28, 2018 21:03
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Nope. The charmer who managed to woo mother Earth was a middle-aged man in the sex and love program. He came to rehab after being diagnosed with "impulse control issues." Other than using the yard as a Fleshlight, he also admitted to systematically taking every drinking glass in the house into the shower with him, where he gave the glass a vigorous rubdown with his testicles, then returning them to the cabinet.
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Jan 28, 2018 23:03
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 Really puts whatever hosed up poo poo I feel guilty about into perspective. was he apologetic in his confession or was he still reveling in his nasty tendencies?
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Jan 28, 2018 23:31
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:
He spent two months in treatment vigorously ball-washing every drinking glass in the house and announced it to the staff and other clients as he was about half an hour away from discharge. He was super proud. And, technically, there's really nothing we could do about it. I was glad I always brought my own drinks to work and never used house dishes. Edit: That's the thing about residential rehab. It's a building block, not a cure for addiction or mental health. It helps shorten the long, long road to recovery and give people some tools to help cope. If you want to put on a show while you're there and not take it seriously...oh well. We will have our suspicions, of course, but people fake their way through it for all sorts of reasons. Like ball cup guy. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Jan 29, 2018 |
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Jan 29, 2018 00:36
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Strange that I'm the only one to currantly respond to the the thread. lets have the 28,000$ worth of dick sucking (Mr Trebek) .
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Jan 29, 2018 09:44
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Strange that I'm the only one to currantly respond to the the thread. Yeah, I'll keep it up for a little while in hopes it picks up some steam. We'll see! "I will suck $28,000 worth of dick while I'm here." Our sex/love addiction program is an interesting beast. The public image of sex/love addiction is usually people who can't keep it in their pants or that sex addiction isn't a thing at all. In reality, most of the folks we worked with had relationship issues - trouble relating/interacting to/with other people, lasting trauma due to sexual abuse, or severe self-esteem issues. That being said, we definitely had people who ranked their sexual conquests in the thousands and their promiscuity has had a negative effect on their life. This client, let's call her Anne, was one of those. She checked into our facility at the age of 74. Around that age, most clients who check in are here for alcoholism or occasionally trauma/grief. Anne, however, was here for our sex/love program. She was a blunt old lady - the stereotypical crabby grandma type who criticized or nagged everyone she came into contact with. During her intake interview, Anne sat in a room with two therapists, a nurse, a financial adviser, and two doctors. She was informed that her insurance would not be covering her stay and that self-pay was her only option. Her response? "Well hell, I better get my money's worth or I will suck $28,000 worth of dick while I'm in here. From what I understand, she wasn't taken very seriously and the conversation moved swiftly on. And male staff, despite being horrified, generally just soldiered on when she would would take her teeth out and waggle her tongue at them as she passed them on campus. The female technicians assigned to work with her were constantly seen chasing her around and trying to keep her behaving appropriately. I'm not sure what happened to Anne, as our campus is segregated and we generally keep male and female clients apart. The last time I saw her, she was chasing one of our maintenance men across campus, completely nude, with female technicians desperately trying to get control over this elderly woman. And when I say chasing, I mean this old gal could move. Her crazy old lady shouting still echoes in my mind. C'mere, you poo poo! I'm gonna get that dick!"
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Jan 30, 2018 18:36
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Well that was even worse then I imagined. I'm not going to ask for a story, lets wait for the lurkers to choose.
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Jan 30, 2018 19:07
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Oh my god. I’m not sure I could handle a naked old lady chasing me down like she’s a lioness and my dick is a wounded gazelle. I hope that dude escaped. Tell us another!
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Jan 30, 2018 20:11
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Please do go on.
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Jan 31, 2018 02:57
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Just checking in to out myself as a lurker... While the stories sound great (and I can't wait to hear more) can you also tell us more about what it is you are doing, how a typical day for a client might be and so on?
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Jan 31, 2018 13:50
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Weatherwax posted:Just checking in to out myself as a lurker... Of course! Depending on the house and current census, an average day involves 10 to 26 clients. Smaller houses, like the mental health program, have fewer clients due to high risk. Houses where people are less likely to enter psychosis or mania, such as sex and love, have much higher numbers of clients. In the morning they gather and have breakfast, as well as letting technician staff know of any maintenance issues or ancillary programs they wish to be signed up for (acupuncture, massage, and a few others). After that, they spent most of their day in 1x1 therapy sessions with their assigned therapists or in group therapy sessions. There are several varieties of groups that happen each day that are mandatory unless you have an assigned 1x1 session with a therapist, nutritionist, doctor, etc. They do this from about 8am to 5pm. The evenings vary depending on the day - it could be empty and the guys can work on treatment homework or watch some television, it could be an on campus event like an alumni lecturer, or it could be an off campus meeting to a local AA/NA Meeting. That last part, transporting clients, will be important in my upcoming story. At the end of the night, the clients sit down for a brief mental/physical health check-in as a group and call it a night. It all sounds pretty easy on paper, right? But when you have 10+ guys who need to be at 10+ places at any given time, and one of them is having insurance issues, one is having suicidal thoughts and needs to be assessed by a doctor, three are having breakdowns after intense therapy sessions, and you have two technicians to deal with all of this and make it all happen, well...it gets chaotic. On an easy day, I do very little. On a hard day I feel like I ran marathon, physically and mentally. Some days are easy, some days are so insane that it's hard to even be shocked anymore. For example... (Celebrity Redacted) tangled himself up in the his seat belt again and is stuck in the van... We do a lot of transporting of clients. Whether it's around campus or to local towns for AA/NA Meetings. We have a transport department, but they usually only do the driving for clients who have appointments at outside hospitals or need to go to/from the airport. When we do the transport, we utilize a fleet of 15 passenger vans. Part of our training involves learning these vehicles, being properly insured and following similar safety protocols that buses or taxis have. One of these requirements is that we don't move until all the clients have buckled their seat belts. Most are fine with this and we don't even have to say anything. Until we got Hank. Now, due to HIPAA, I can't tell you Hank's real name. What I can tell you is that he is a celebrity, and if you know much about professional wrestling, you definitely know who Hank is. He is also an rear end in a top hat and one of the single dumbest human beings I've ever interacted with. During his stay he threatened staff, threatened peers, punched a hole in the wall because we told him he couldn't use the living room furniture as a weight set, and got caught jerking off behind the house using butter as lube. Hank also didn't know what seat belts were. The first time we all piled into the van to go to a group, we asked him to put his seat belt on. He informed us he'd never used "one of those things" and never would. We let him know our policy and that we couldn't leave until he complied. He argued for a while before finally getting frustrated and declaring, "Okay, fine, how do you use this loving thing? It took a minute for us to parse that he was serious. He really didn't know how. We told him it was easy, "Pull it, buckle it into that part there..." But the seat belt had locked because Hank wouldn't stop yanking on it and was getting more and more frustrated. Finally, the other technician got out of the van, walked around to the back door, opened it, and buckled up this behemoth of a man. When we arrived at our destination, everyone unloaded. Except Hank. We stuck our head back in the van to see what was going on and found Hank flexing his muscles out, pulling against the seat belt, grunting, and trying to Hulk his way out of the belt. No attempt was made to simply...unbuckle the loving thing. You know that pose Shia LeBeouf does in that "Just do it!" video? Imagine that, but sitting down, and it's a wrestler grunting about seat belts. We release him and he is bitter and pissy about it all day. A couple of hours later, he punches a hole in the wall again and gets administratively discharged for violence. I later learned that, during his trip from the house to administration to be discharged, this process repeated. He'd gotten stuck in the van again because he couldn't figure out how to work his seat belt. Great. Kind of a lackluster ending to his time with us, but I will never forget that a wrestling superstar didn't know how to use a seat belt. Like a nude elderly woman chasing a maintenance guy across campus, nothing shocks me anymore. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Feb 1, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 01:41
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I guess all those headbutts and steroids over the years just add up to a giant rear end in a top hat baby of a man.
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Feb 1, 2018 05:01
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I'm not expecting any comment and I don't want to turn this into the big Guess Hank free-for-all but I'm definitely picturing Scott Steiner.
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Feb 1, 2018 18:53
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More stories! I also worked in a place extremely similar to this. Have you ever heard of the following places: Hanbleceya Synanon Amity Foundation Bridges to Recovery (in Los Angeles) ? edit: and Daytop Village I worked at a place that was based on the teachings of a cult, specifically the cult was Synanon. It sounds a lot like this place you're talking about. I won't hijack your thread but I love hearing about this poo poo. Also fun quick history of Synanon, which the place I worked at was literally built on (some of same materials, etc). It was started by an alcoholic who created this giant charity / commune in LA for people with drug problems - they'd get you to kick and put you to work, and do group therapy. The leader, Deidrich, married a black lady which was pretty taboo/shocking in the 1960s, even in Los Angeles. They bought more and more locations in southern California. They managed to bribe a state senator to add a rider to a bill in the legislature that let the place practice medicine without a license (you generally need a doctor around / monitoring to deal with severe alcohol withdrawal; they just gave you a candy bar and a blanket). The wife died and he started drinking again; the place started setting off a lot of red flags because they were buying an extreme amount of guns. There was a journalist who got wind of all this and started writing negative things about the cult. So one of the leader's henchmen cut off a rattlesnake's tail and put it in the guy's mailbox, who got bit and is now in a wheelchair. Things pretty much collapsed at that point. du -hast fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Feb 4, 2018 |
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Feb 4, 2018 12:47
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 You might want to start a thread of your own, it seems that you have enough material.
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Feb 4, 2018 14:26
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Sorry for the lack of replies, everyone! I've been down with the flu for few days and haven't felt like thinking, much like sitting up and writing. I'll post a couple of more stories tomorrow! In the meantime, du -hast, I haven't heard of those places, except maybe vaguely of Bridges to Recovery. Sounds wild, though, and almost Jim Jones-ish. I'd love to hear more stories if you're willing to share! Edit: Another story! Nude Cow Chasing My facility is located in a fairly rural area. This is in an effort to be more calm and scenic, while also service as an artificial privacy wall for the clients. Less people, less attention. Our facility is bordered and, at times, cut through by large amounts of cattle land. This has never been any sort of issue and the worst anyone can say about it is occasionally a breeze kicks up and the area smells like a barnyard. Most clients are not local and find it novel that there's any sort of wildlife at all. One day, a client sees a cow laying down in a neighboring field. Apparently he'd never seen a cow in real life before and was under the belief that they didn't do anything at all but stand there. He got it in his head that the cow must be going through some awful experience and has to be suffering, near-death, and miserable. This was in the very early days of the facility, before such modern thoughts such as "doctors," "medication," and "common sense." The kitchen was fully stocked - knives and all. This client decided to take a knife and head out into the field to put this poor cow out of it's apparent misery. He decided that the cow would not trust him - being a human and all - so he decided to become more cow-like. How does he do this? Get naked. How does this help? I don't know, but off he went. He ran into the field, brandishing a (dull, lovely) chef's knife, screaming like a madman at this cow. He makes it within about 20 yards of the cow and is met with a large problem. A bull. A mad bull. The bull didn't really charge him so much as trot aggressively in his general direction, but the kid dropped the knife and ran back towards the safety of campus. In doing so, he had to leap a barbed fence that he had previously crawled under. (The fences were wooden at our property line, but a second set further in was barbed) Leaping a barbed-wire fence in the nude is not wise. You could do awful things, like cut your legs, or your hands, or shred your genitals. He did that last one. I'll give the staff back then credit - this all happened in a combined total of like 4 minutes, so it was all pretty quick. That being said, I'm bewildered that no one caught any of this until this client let out the blood-curdling scream of a man with his junk caught on a wire fence post. Also, we now have clients check out knives from staff, what time they were out, what they have, what they were doing with it, and where they are, on a clipboard. It's all monitored. Like it always should have been. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Feb 8, 2018 |
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Feb 7, 2018 00:41
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That cow was probably happier than he was.
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Feb 8, 2018 15:00
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Are all the houses near one another, or are they scattered across the countryside? Does each one get its own doctor, kitchen, meals etc?
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Feb 12, 2018 07:29
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Wow, this is pretty drat amazing. Thanks for sharing, OP! I hope there's more to come soon!
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Feb 20, 2018 14:52
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OP if you dont return to this thread I'm gonna hijack it and post the Synanon stuff / my history of being in a cult-hippy-commune-rehab, etc. 
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Feb 20, 2018 15:04
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du -hast posted:OP if you dont return to this thread I'm gonna hijack it and post the Synanon stuff / my history of being in a cult-hippy-commune-rehab, etc. Hijack away! I'd love to hear some of your stories. I'll drop a few more stories myself. I'll post one later this evening when I'm free. Khazar-khum posted:Are all the houses near one another, or are they scattered across the countryside? Does each one get its own doctor, kitchen, meals etc? The houses vary in distance. The closest two are only 100 yards or so apart, but the farthest one away is about a 20 minute drive or so. I have no idea why the place was set up this way though. My guess is opportunistic land purchasing instead of actually planning a cohesive campus. Each place has it's own kitchen and is stocked weekly with groceries. The clients prepare their own food, which leads to a lot of cooking disasters. I'll get into that in my next story. There are a few doctors on campus but clients are transported to the medical building to see them. Each house has a nurse there for a couple of hours each morning. If a client requests a medical appointment, they're taken to the med building. The house nurse doesn't do much with the clients outside of auditing their medications and making sure they're stocked. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 17:06
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du -hast posted:More stories! I know about syanon and daytop lol, didn't expect to hear those names when I clicked this thread. Back in the day when I was a teenager went through a place that had some connection to those programs (albeit slightly watered down, but still completely loving insane). For anyone wondering wtf those things he's listing are, they're a super-extreme type of residential therapeutic addiction program that was generally addicts treating addicts through extremely harsh confrontation and insane over the top 'therapeutic consequences' and poo poo like that. Like imagine people getting screamed at in waves for hours at a time by every other person in the program about how they're a fuckup who is going to die in a gutter and people being forced to wear 3' by 6' signs saying 'i'm a whore for male attention' The Elan school which is its own massive handful of insanity also came out of that tradition and famously featured problem kids getting the poo poo kicked out of them in school sanctioned 'boxing match' beat downs. If the kid could fight, they'd just put him up against a progression of bigger, older kids until he got the poo poo kicked out of him. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Feb 21, 2018 |
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Feb 21, 2018 11:16
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du -hast, either I've seen you mention this elsewhere on the forums or another synanon goon exists and has told a story or two. Regardless this sounds fascinating. I hope your experiences weren't bad ones; sympathies if they were. Several Goblins, what's your take on your clinic's transition from hippie commune to corporate clinic? It sounds like it was never supposed to be a clinic-- was this a buyout situation or did this happen over time? Can you talk about the circumstances of this conversion? It seems puzzling to me that it made such an ideological reversal. Maybe I just don't understand the starting point very well.
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Feb 21, 2018 12:45
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Lysistrata posted:Several Goblins, what's your take on your clinic's transition from hippie commune to corporate clinic? It sounds like it was never supposed to be a clinic-- was this a buyout situation or did this happen over time? Can you talk about the circumstances of this conversion? It seems puzzling to me that it made such an ideological reversal. Maybe I just don't understand the starting point very well. This was mostly hearsay and me seeing the remnants of it, as the change happened around 12 or 15 years before I signed on to work there. I'll see if I can set up a bit of a timeline, but there will be some gaps that even I seem to not really understand. -Local cattle magnate/hippie sets up a "spiritual facility" for himself and his friends and family. The idea is "spiritual recovery," technically a rehab, but mostly just functions as a place for aging hippies to sit in song circles, weave wicker baskets and appropriate Eastern and Native American culture. -At some point, he decides to allow people into the commune from local communities. These are people looking to recover from drug and alcohol addiction who are being sold on this dude's ideas of spiritual healing. At some point, the law gets involved, requiring him to provide actual medical/therapeutic services. I'm not sure where the line got blurred here that required him to go legit though. My understanding is he began "treating" people in such a way that it strayed from waving hands at people and more into things that required an actual license. I wish I had more details. -A short while later, he used his near-bottomless bank account to go completely legit. Or at least what a redneck hippie from the middle of nowhere who loves pot and LSD might think is legit. He built a medical facility, hired nurses and doctors, hired LCSWs and LADAC folks and formed an administration team. Then he apparently just let go of control and expected it to run flawlessly while he continued to play guitar in the woods and rub healing crystals on people. My theory is he was trying to start something of a cult commune, but in an effort to make front for it, accidentally made it a legitimate (sort of) business. That sounds ridiculous and I have no way to back that up, but it sure as hell sounds that way and I have no other explanation. People from around then that I've talked to don't seem to understand it any better. -Here's where it gets bizarre. At some point, the collective administration he's hired says they need to make a move to dissipate all the spiritual healing stuff and focus on more therapists, medications, new houses for residential treatment (There are only 1 or 2 houses at this point, maybe 25 total clients.) and develop a more coherent treatment plan. The founder, at this point, apparently threw a giant hissy fit and decided to take his ball and go home. And I'm being serious - people from that era say he threw a childlike tantrum in a board room. He basically went off into the county-side and chilled in his cabin with some friends, silently putting the place up for sale in the meantime. -The facility is bought out by a new private owner, later to be purchased by a corporate entity. The original founder, during this time, became incredibly petty and crazy. He bought a gas station close to the facility that was used daily to fuel the transport vans. He the banned the facility from getting gas there. Just to make them drive an extra 10 minutes to the next gas station. He also retained control of the land a couple of the facility buildings were on and refused to sell them - only rent them. Clients were in these buildings, so the facility had to comply for a while and just put up with it. He also snatched some land from underneath the facility that they had been looking at for expansion, just to be a dick about it. That's my understanding of how the transfer happened. It sounds confusing and bizarre, but from my understanding...it was. And everyone involved was baffled that this guy managed to establish this place then literally run off into the woods to be a nudist with a soul patch and a bongo drum. I actually started at a new facility last week, which is amazing and truly an example of how a recovery facility should operate. I'm sorry I've slacked on updates, I've just been busy with all the new stuff going on. I'll let a couple of people post and I'll get back with the Aerial poo poo Sock Wards (To Keep Demons Away) story! Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Feb 22, 2018 |
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Feb 22, 2018 06:10
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This all seems strangely combative and dickish for a hippie but I'm guessing he was never really into the love thy fellows bit as much as he was into the drugs bit.
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Feb 22, 2018 11:59
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Almost nothing in that industry is ever actually about helping people. When it is, it often is utterly, completely misguided. He probably legitimately believed that feeding troubled people psychedelics and some appropriated spirituality was a valid treatment. The corporatization of treatment programs made the whole industry a lot more soulless, but likely a lot more effective, too. And it definitely helped cut back on wild abuses that were just part of the industry.Several Goblins posted:This was mostly hearsay and me seeing the remnants of it, as the change happened around 12 or 15 years before I signed on to work there. I'll see if I can set up a bit of a timeline, but there will be some gaps that even I seem to not really understand. In the end of the 90s and early 2000s there was a major push to shutdown or transition the 5,000,000 different 'joe's rehab and treatment shack' places that were running and I'm guessing that's part of what was going on here. A lot of it was motivated by insurance companies who were giving huge cuts in insurance rates for every college grad on the payroll (which was probably partly to drive out as many of the old-school addicts treating addicts places as possible). That and a couple major corporations buying up every facility they could get their hands on changed the industry substantially. For all their failings, Joe's Rehab Shacks often hired actually decent people in their communities who frequently had many, many years of experience. Instead they got replaced with (typically) fresh college grads who were going to be worked so hard that they'd quit in a year anyways. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Feb 22, 2018 |
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Feb 22, 2018 18:40
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Almost nothing in that industry is ever actually about helping people. When it is, it often is utterly, completely misguided. He probably legitimately believed that feeding troubled people psychedelics and some appropriated spirituality was a valid treatment. The corporatization of treatment programs made the whole industry a lot more soulless, but likely a lot more effective, too. And it definitely helped cut back on wild abuses that were just part of the industry. This is interesting. I don't know a lot about the history of the industry in general and this would certainly explain why the shift could have been made. Along with the corporate buyout that happened shortly after. Also, story time! Aerial poo poo Sock Wards (To Keep Demons Away) With the facility being pretty rural and mostly surrounded by forest and farmland, it was fairly common to see all manner of wildlife passing through. Deer, possum, raccoons, and a huge amount of skunks. Every single house had an issue with skunks at some point or another. It got so problematic that, at one point, the facility even hired people from a local animal wildlife preserve to catch and relocate a bunch of the critters. This helped for about a month. At one point, a client who we will call Rick, decided that it was up to him to become the scourge of the skunk menace. He would attempt to hide outside the house in the evening to chase of any skunks that wandered up. He had to stop him from doing this a half dozen times up until the point that he tried to chase a skunk out from underneath the porch and got sprayed. You'd think this would serve as a good reason to quit doing this ridiculous thing and leave the animals alone. Instead, it turned him into the Toxic Avenger. He started referring to the skunks as demons. This prompted a psyche evaluation with a doctor and his therapist to determine if he was seeing these skunks as something more than just animals, as he had no history of delusional behavior. Nope. He just really hated skunks. And he had a plan to beat them at their own game. That evening, Rick had a stealth mission to undertake. That night, he gathered up all of his socks and set to work. Over the next few days, he took about a dozen socks...and poopsocked. He poo poo in his socks, opened his bedroom window, and placed them on the ground outside the window. This window faced the woods behind the house and, generally, nobody ever went back there. So staff and other clients never noticed this. After doing this for a few days, he concluded his plan by sneaking out before lights out and quickly hanging these poopsocks from trees, a clothesline and fence posts around the house. The next morning when staff discovered this, Rick popped up with a confession that seemed more like a scooby doo villain who'd just been unmasked. "Yes, it was me! And I would have gotten away with it! If it weren't for those meddling skunks!" He then informed us that he determined that the only way to repel these skunks was to out-stink them, so he'd placed "demon wards," to deter them. Maintenance cobbled together the best makeshift hazmat gear and cleaned up the area while ol' Rick was taken in for another psyche evaluation and, eventually, transferred to another facility. I never got to hear what the final verdict was on his diagnosis, but I assume they decided he needed care where he could be monitored more closely. You know...we didn't see skunks for a while after that though.
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Feb 24, 2018 02:52
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I guess the blame in on you guys for sending away your best skunk exorcist 
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Feb 24, 2018 15:32
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I just noticed your AV text Tias, who got butthurt over the poor corporations?
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Feb 24, 2018 15:37
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:I just noticed your AV text Tias, who got butthurt over the poor corporations? D&D'ers in the thread about fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline back when that was a thing.
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Feb 24, 2018 15:41
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 Anyway OP can you speculate on the recovery/improvement rates?
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Feb 24, 2018 15:43
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Herstory Begins Now posted:I know about syanon and daytop lol, didn't expect to hear those names when I clicked this thread. Back in the day when I was a teenager went through a place that had some connection to those programs (albeit slightly watered down, but still completely loving insane). I really wish you had PMs because I'm guessing I know the place you were at. What city was it in, if you don't mind sharing? Ok I guess I'll do it this way: from roughly age 19 - 27 I spent a lot of time in these residential treatment places. I probably shouldn't have shared the names as if you hunt through my post history it would probably be pretty easy to figure out who I am if you were connected with these places. Anyway I'll go through like this - - Synanon history - Amity one - only Hanbleceya things I am going to mention: a) has severely mentally ill clients sleep outside if they fail to, say, make their bed or show up to group on time - usually for 3 days. as in people who are so mentally ill they are incapable of living with themselves, but sorry bud, hit the park because you didn't make the bed. Half of the time the people were so disabled they didn't understand why they weren't allowed back inside; one got pretty sick outside because he didn't understand that it's cold and you need a blanket b) told two clients, who had been sexually assaulted in different times (when kicked outside for whatever infraction) that they "deserved it - if you had just done X this would not have happened. I cannot believe we have to tell your parents / guardian / etc what a terrible person you are, who went out and hosed some guy in an alleyway and claimed rape" c) has a long history of "retaliation" against people who speak out against the illegal and immoral activities that occur there, including physical, legal, and general harassment d) has a history of altering medical records from the place - after I *literally* escaped from the place, I requested medical records from them that were altered (as I had the original of some of the documents). A few years later I tried to get records from them again but they claimed that I no longer owned my medical records; I finally got them and they had been altered for a third time. I wish I still had them e) uses the mental hospital system as a type of jail as well; if you accidentally schedule an appointment that corresponds with group time, you get a week in the mental ward to think about it. sleep with another patient? let's try a couple weeks in the mental hospital to see if that sets you straight f) even having left this place many years ago, I am honestly scared of even discussing it due to the possibility that they may retaliate against me in some way, either physical or frivolous lawsuits. i have seen what they do to people; never before or since have i seen one human being treat another like the staff members treat the patients there g) it brings me too much pain really to even think about it - my heart is racing right now; i was also one of the people in item b, and yes for many years my parents thought that i had intentionally gotten gang raped on several occasions in an alleyway and that i was lying about it. i suffered some medical issues from this that i was barred from going to the hospital for, so to this day i still need surgery to repair it; every time i go to the bathroom is agony and generally involves a fair amount of blood. things like this were not uncommon there and were universally blamed on the patient h) if I could have one wish - anything in the world, a billion dollars, to look like arnold schwarzenegger, anything, it would be to close that terrible place and stop the awful things that happen therein; i would give anything to rescue the poor people that are there thinking that it is ok for someone in a position of power to treat you like they tend to do. i started crying a bit just writing this part. So I'll focus on the Synanon/Amity/offshoots I suppose instead, which actually I found really helpful. The 6 hour yelling sessions are definitely at thing and the similar punishment, though it's been watered down in recent years. They saved my life anyway. Next post is gonna be a general rundown of Synanon since that's what the other place(s) were based on.
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Feb 24, 2018 16:44
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du -hast posted:Words Jesus Christ. My place did some really dumb poo poo, both on a competence level and on an ethical level, but nothing even close to this. I'm so sorry you had to go through all that. gently caress that place. Thank you for sharing. I'll definitely read anything else you want to post, but I'd totally understand if you didn't want to dredge up more thoughts about that kind of experience. Feel free to PM me if you ever want to talk. Horrible Lurkbeast posted:
I can certainly speculate, but I'd guess that the statistics are all over the place and range from "okay" to "depressingly low" if you look at the industry as a whole. For every really good treatment center, there are 10 awful ones that skew statistics. I live in the middle of nowhere and there are still like 15 rehabs within a half-hour drive. All but two have pretty bad reputations. Outpatient treatment works, but has a high rate of people who drop out and don't complete treatment. Inpatient has a higher success rate long-term, but relapse rates are still high. I've seen hundreds of clients leave treatment, relapse, THEN stay sober. Or return for a second/third/etc round of residential treatment and then continue on to successful sobriety. Despite all the dumb poo poo I'm talking about the facility I worked out, the program (at least in the later years once it was more established) was really good and people genuinely cared. Though I can't find any particular stats to back it up, I've been told by certain clinical people in the field that our facility had one of the higher success rates in the U.S. All that being said, take my word on legit rates with a grain of salt. I like to think that I was very good at what I did/do and I try to approach my career with a genuine compassion and professionalism, but I am by no means an expert or licensed medical professional. Most of my knowledge is anecdotal and reserved to the facility I worked at and second-hand knowledge gained from other industry professionals and local facilities. The mental health side is a bit different, because it was mostly about improving quality of life. There's no "cure" or "endgame" necessarily. We provide an outlet to discuss your issues, assist in providing tools and exercises that can help mitigate your issues, prescribe medications to balance brain chemistry, and sometimes work with family to help create a support network for you. Generally this is fairly successful, but all it takes is someone deciding not to take their medications to create a brand new spiral that leads them back to treatment, or worse. When working with addiction clients, my worst fear was client overdose after leaving. With mental health clients, it was suicide. Both were heartbreaking to hear about, but you have to adapt a bit of a reluctant, "Can't save them all," mentality in the field. I'm grateful for the hundreds still doing well in comparison to the relatively few clients I've had that passed away after treatment. Now, if you want some interesting anecdotal statistics, I'll talk more in my next post about age, gender, and a few other things that cause interesting stereotypes in recovery. People are different, problems tend to be very samey across all of us. Many of the veteran staff could see a new client and know which house he would be assigned to, what his issues were, if he'd be a problem or a chill client, and a dozen other little details just from a quick chat. It's like the weirdest sixth sense ever and we were very rarely ever wrong. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 17:20
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Synanon Here's a brief history of Synanon. The dates, etc may be a bit funky (there's a Wikipedia article that explains it / is more accurate from a historical standpoint). So I guess this is a combined history of what we were taught about Synanon and then the personal experiences of people who had actually been there when it was running. During the 1950s drug addiction was viewed as a moral failure (as opposed to alcoholism, which had been somewhat accepted at that time as an addiction and was viewed more as a disease). At the time it was considered that alcohol was an entirely different intoxicant to any drugs, and this is still something that has caused a lot of people to get off the crack / meth / heroin and descend into alcoholism (myself included). In the 1950s, a guy named Chuck Dederich, who was well known on the AA circuit, got fed up with the strictness of AA when discussing drugs. He thought, correctly, that drug addiction was, from a medical and psychological perspective, the same as alcoholism; at the time, Alcoholics Anonymous was extremely strict about the discussion of drugs as at the time they problem was equated to prostitution / homosexuality - an immoral activity that could just be stopped and was not acceptable to talk about when discussing recovery from alcoholism. So Chuck got the money together and founded a place called Synanon in Los Angeles, CA. He bought a warehouse and would take people addicted to drugs or alcohol and try to help them out. Another uncommon feature at the time is that he would take women, as well as homosexuals, black people, people with records of prostitution or who were known prostitutes, etc - the kind of people that were even more marginalized in the 1950s than today. He'd grab people off the streets. Everyone had to pay to be there a portion of their earnings - for a homeless man off the street, however, that might have been just $.02 per month - to stay there. Rich folks ended up there and paid more; poor folks paid less; and if you worked then you generally did not pay at all (since the profits from the businesses they started went back to Synanon). The deal was you would come in, you'd kick (if it was heroin, you got a candy bar, a blanket, and someone to talk to until you were able to function in a normal way. I cannot imagine kicking heroin like this but it was the deal.) Then you'd get put to work at what you were good at. If you were a plumber, you fixed the plumbing, etc, etc. They eventually bought a series of gas stations in the Los Angeles area that were staffed by "volunteers" from the place and brought in a sizable amount of money for the organization. But the big invention, and the thing that makes Synanon so special (and in my opinion, effective) was the Synanon Game. The Game was what the poster above is talking about with the six hour yelling sessions. It's essentially a brutal type of group therapy; during this period it was also apparently almost like a communist re-education situation where you would come up with something that was wrong with you / bad / you had done or wanted to do ("I want to gently caress the other patient, Billy") and they'd talk to you, yell at you, scream at you, etc until you go the message (or not). Things like the sign did happen; it was forbidden to gently caress other patients for obvious reasons (though this would change quite a bit) and so you'd get a sign around your neck "I hosed Billy and I'm sorry," "I hosed Susan and I'm sorry" for a few days. It was a revolutionary psychological idea that essentially everyone knew everything about everyone else (not the day to day but their history, their past, the way they thought) - after all you were spending hours and hours a day in the Games talking about anything and everything. I'm not sure how to describe them but they're basically group therapy on steroids. However, a bizarre thing happened: the drug addicts who ended up at this place manged to get clean and stay clean - the relapse rate was pretty low, and they'd take you back if you hosed up but repented well enough. So essentially that's how the beginning of Synanon worked - they'd take anyone, get them clean, do the Game daily with them, put them to work, and were pretty good at it. At this point you could also leave the program voluntarily (which would change later). For these two decades the place functioned remarkably well. During this time, Chuck married an ex-prostitute who was black named Betty. As stated, at the time in the 1950s interracial marriage was illegal in a large part of the country, and even in Los Angeles was widely frowned upon and shocking; the fact that Dederich (who was at the time widely respected for having helped these previously unhelpable cases) married a black, ex prostitute, ex heroin addict was mindblowing to everyone basically. Apparently they really loved each other and all was well. Phase two of Synanon takes a decidedly different turn. Eventually Chuck decided that people with these addictions were essentially and entirely uncurable permanently - they were only "cured" when they were in the program itself. This has a simple logic to it - you spend all your time with sober people and in the Game trying to get your poo poo straight, and work with these people, eat, sleep, etc with them then the likelihood of you relapsing is far far lower than if you leave, get an apartment, and then try to keep sober on your own. It was at this point also that the program had expanded to several thousand people in several locations, and was bringing in tens of millions of dollars a year. Here's where it starts to get more and more cult like. Since addicts can never be entirely cured, the new thinking went, then the people who wanted to stay sober had to stay there. It then followed that perhaps it was time to allow dating / marriage in this group of people, and to try to found a sort of parallel society of love, compassion, etc. It starts to get weird right around here. So they allowed marriages, also built childcare centers / dorms for the kids in the program (of which I knew several) and began more and more restricting access to the outside world, especially for people who had only been there a year or two. Things went well still (addicts now sober and working actual jobs, getting actual pay, and doing the Game). It was at this point that outsiders were allowed in also to visit - the public could participate in the Games, and there were a number of semi-famous people at the time that were involved; it still had sort of a peace and love type attitude; the patients were in bands, etc. But we move now onto phase three, where it became much more restrictive and began to collapse. Betty, Chuck's wife, died sometime around 1970(?). Chuck did not take this well, at all. The place became more and more restrictive, and became a serious cult. No longer could people leave - or if they could it was extremely difficult. Outside activities and friendships began to become extremely restricted. Chuck, who had cult like status among the members of the group, became more and more authoritarian. He also declared that people with a certain amount of time sober from drugs were now allowed to drink again, in "moderation" (note Chuck was an alcoholic who was known in AA for years before Synanon), which started to lead to all sorts of problems. At this point it becomes more and more corrupt, and some of it more secretive. They started purchasing property out in the boonies, where they would send people who were new or deemed to be at risk of leaving. Instead of the previous come and go type deal, it was now barbed wire. You now had to snitch on other people in order to survive more and more often. At some point, Chuck's drinking reached a pretty good pace and he instituted some of the stranger reforms, which would eventually lead to the downfall. Keep in mind there are a few thousand people who work / are in treatment at this organization, most of whom had been there for years, and viewed Chuck with a sort of deity-like status; he was the wise man in the clouds and what he said was what was going to happen. a) Everyone who was married had to change partners. The partners were selected by Synanon. So if you came to the place 11 years ago with your wife, you were now assigned another man's wife, and another man your own. The kids were removed from parent-child roles and now communally raised. There was also a period here were all the women had to have their heads shaved, to show solidarity or some other nonsense with the program. I met a couple people who ended up in the later program who were at Synanon during this period; one even who had his wife swapped. They viewed it as something that they had to do - the RIGHT thing to do - because Dederich said it. b) They managed to get a rider attached to a state senate bill that allowed them to practice medicine without a license. This eventually led to a bribery case as there was money exchanged between Synanon and the state senator that wrote the bill. This also led to people dying from DTs (alcohol withdrawal can be very very dangerous and absolutely needs a doctor, it can be fatal). Also during this point, they had mandatory vasectomies. I never quite figured out who was required to have one, but I did know someone who did. They were not generally performed by a real doctor. I was unable to determine a lot about this as this part was kept quiet, but essentially a ton of men had to have vasectomies during this period. I know it is true from multiple sources but I never got the reason why or who got selected. c) Leaving was no longer a viable option. You could no longer just pack your poo poo and get out. In order to enforce this discipline, an internal security force called, and an I am not joking with this, the Imperial Marines were to keep and maintain order, including ensuring nobody left. Those who left or attempted to were called "Splitees". From two people I heard first hand accounts of a man who tried to leave. They took him into a classroom, took all the kids and sat them in the room, and beat him nearly to death. Both witnesses describe the arcs and splatter of the blood hitting the walls behind them, and the gargling, and the pools of blood with teeth mixed in. They never found out what happened to that guy, by the way. So it became certainly a cult by now. Imagine the Imperial Marines as sort of an SS-like force that could use physical punishment to ensure order. d) They started buying a LOT of guns and applying for licenses for explosives, fully automatic, etc. They began fortifying the various compounds (remember this a place making tens of millions of dollars a year from gas stations, a nonprofit (so a ton of stuff was donated), and had property all over California). Places like Shasta county started having more and more calls to the sheriff about what was going on. They purchased SO MANY GUNS THAT THE ATF AND FBI BEGAN TO INVESTIGATE - in the 1970s! Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, etc. So now we are in phase four, the finale: The state started to investigate as well, and so did journalists. During this time they managed to lose their tax-exempt status for various instances of corruption, and people began looking into what was going on here at the place. Chuck, at this point entirely embroiled in alcoholism, became more and more erratic; he eventually started calling it the Church of Synanon and managed to get another tax-exempt license for this (like Scientology). NBC and other media outlets started covering the place and some of the things happening there. More and more stories of the Imperial Marines bashing the poo poo out of Splitees started to surface. It was full on cult by now, and becoming a very heavily armed one. Every time someone got on the news and talked about it, they would receive hundreds of death threats and calls of support for Synanon from its members. It became a quasi-military or quasi-governmental organization, sort of like Scientology, and they began to be willing to use violence or the threat thereof OUTSIDE the organization, which leads to the collapse and grand finale. The FBI, local law enforcement, and tons of media outlets are now involved and investigating. They lose their tax-exempt status again, which is a big problem given that during this period revenue had dropped significantly and people were beginning to escape. Most news organizations backed off (given that the reporters got death threats, drivebys, the whole deal) but weirdly the Point Reyes Light which was in Marin county (north of San Francisco) kept at it, with articles being written by a guy named Morantz, who was not deterred by the threats. One day Chuck, in a recorded conversation, said something along the lines of "can someone take care of this guy, something has to be done about him." So his henchmen got the idea to take a rattlesnake, cut off its tail, and put it in his mailbox. He went out to check his mail the next day, got bitten, and ended up in a wheelchair from the bite. That was the final straw and it all came crashing down; the FBI and state shut down the business and ended the whole ordeal (sorta paraphrasing on the ending here). Chuck managed to get off, however, with a plea deal that he would never be associated with Synanon or anything like it again. He eventually drank himself to death. The funny thing is that most of the people I knew who went through the place at various times and stages of its existence all say one thing - that the Game saved their life and that it was all worth it. For almost three years, I would end up at a place that was the offspring of Synanon and was extremely helpful - they took the good parts (and a few of the questionable ones) - and managed to make a therapeutic community with their own form of Game. There are still quite a few offshoots and descendants of Synanon in existence today, as, at the time it was a revolutionary and effective way to get drug addicts sober. Next post will be about that tomorrow after work. e: since I'm hijacking: Horrible Lurkbeast posted:
Extremely low. A 12-Step based rehab will have perhaps 10-15% sober still within a year, and that's a really good one. The places I mentioned are long term - ie, like 3-4 years stay inpatient - and allegedly had about a 40% success rate after 3 years. Defining success like this though is difficult - exposure to the program instills more will to get sober, etc. So many people will leave the program, relapse for a few months, go back to AA/NA, and sober up for good (and not be counted in this 10%). So it's very hard to measure. I would say no more than 33% of addicts who attempt to quit a serious drug addiction ever end up completely sober for an extended period of time. Of the remaining 66%, I'd say around a quarter to half will die in some sort of incident directly related to drugs (OD, shooting, cirrhosis, etc). No matter how you define it, the odds are absolutely stacked against you. du -hast fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 17:39
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Yeah success rates from all types of drug/addiction programs are ridiculously low. The lineage of programs du hast is talking about had supposedly higher rates of success mostly because they drove away a major fraction of all the people who walked through the door so the people sticking around long enough to become part of their success statistics were the ones who took to the program more than most. Interestingly, the efficacy of such programs was completely in spite of their therapeutic approach (I mean calling it that gives it too much credit). Pretty much every serious study done on combative confrontational psychotherapy showed that it basically just makes people better at blending in and pretending to be normal, any therapeutic progress was in spite of the so-called therapeutic methods, not because of it. Granted for some people that was in a way success, certainly a lot of prominent families that had children that were troubled just wanted them to appear normal without really giving a gently caress how they actually turned out. The other caveat to the success rate is that it neglects the significant casualty rate of the programs. From suicide attempts (which are shockingly common at that style of program) to people who ended up traumatized by the entire experience (which, when you consider a lot of the confrontational places were facing 30-75% drop out rates, that was effectively the majority experience). It's also really hard to over-emphasize the extent to which that style of program taught people to act like everything was alright simply as a survival method. Sleep deprivation, deprivation of food, excessive or total deprivation of human contact was something 100% of people involved were put through at semi regular intervals. Those places were literally so torturous that people regularly chose to go to prison over staying. btw du hast you can email me at herstorybeginsnow at gmail if you want to chat. I know less about the adult side of these places so no clue if I even know of where you went, but I def understand a bit of the experience and the shock of reintegrating back into the world. Aside from occasionally talking to people who work as activists against abusive residential programs, I've had zero contact with anyone in those worlds in like 15 years. I always felt like I got lucky because I ended up at a place that was terrible, but no where near as bad as a lot of the other comparable places. I had friends who had been to Elan, Tranquility Bay, desisto (google any of those if you want to read crazy stories) and a bunch of other places that got shut down for insane bullshit, but even the somewhat tamer form was completely loving batshit. Several Goblins posted:Jesus Christ. My place did some really dumb poo poo, both on a competence level and on an ethical level, but nothing even close to this. I'm so sorry you had to go through all that. gently caress that place. Thank you for sharing. I'll definitely read anything else you want to post, but I'd totally understand if you didn't want to dredge up more thoughts about that kind of experience. Feel free to PM me if you ever want to talk. One thing that was true across both the good and lovely programs was that people often experienced a relatively stable environment for literally the first time in their life. Not stable as most people would think of it, but consistent. Even eating at consistent times, getting some amount of physical activity regularly, having to regularly process their thoughts and feelings and actions etc. contributed some real insight and def was something that even people who resisted everything else often took away. It's really similar to the experience of prison (or being in the military for that matter) where people often come away with somewhat better habits almost inadvertently ingrained. It doesn't fix anything of course, but all that stuff makes a meaningful difference. TBH good and bad programs both have absolutely garbage success rates. I mean success is generally defined as 'sobriety after x months' which I personally think is a pretty poo poo measure and the very best places in the country have ridiculously low rates of sobriety after 12,36, or 72 months. Ironically, I think the better run places are a lot more successful than simply looking at sobriety rates imply and that most people in a bad enough spot to end up in a residential program are absolutely going to have the quality of their life improved by the experience of some consistency and therapy. Personally I like the idea that people should try to get away from addictions, but addictions are so random and functionally irrational that who knows what is really an optimal outcome. Most of the people I've known who struggled with addictions to hard drugs eventually either got incarcerated, overdosed, randomly gave it up for no apparent reason, or just became potheads or social drinkers. People who succesfully worked AA or NA steps are a pretty tiny minority. Obviously #3 is ideal, but as far as I can tell a not insignificant amount of people are just going to do drugs every day of their life and all you can really do is hope they steer away from the harder, life destroying poo poo. If a couple joints a night keep someone from feeling like they need heroin or meth, tbh I'd tell them wholeheartedly to smoke a fuckton of joints. That view is why I could never work in that field. I think the all or nothing view of sobriety is idealistic and impractical, albeit it's also true that most people don't end up more mentally healthy by regularly getting hosed up. Peculiarly, of all things, eating disorders seemed to have the most totally intractable grip on people. Statistically the long term prognosis on eating disorders is insanely grim (mortality rate is like 6% annually) and average duration of eating disorders is 30+ years. That poo poo is terrifying. quote:Now, if you want some interesting anecdotal statistics, I'll talk more in my next post about age, gender, and a few other things that cause interesting stereotypes in recovery. People are different, problems tend to be very samey across all of us. Many of the veteran staff could see a new client and know which house he would be assigned to, what his issues were, if he'd be a problem or a chill client, and a dozen other little details just from a quick chat. It's like the weirdest sixth sense ever and we were very rarely ever wrong. The extent to which this develops is really peculiar. Addicts are really distinct, even down to the classes of drugs, people who's poo poo was some kind of out of control, poorly/untreated depression or chronic anxiety are extremely distinct, bipolar is visible from like 10 miles away. sex offenders, or people with some kinda sexual conduct bullshit are often apparent because they don't immediately, obviously fall into one of the other categories (unless they have wildly bad boundaries, but most of those people get straight up incarcerated). People who have been through various kinds of abuse absolutely have their own vibe and you can can completely see how it is something predatory shitbags learn to pick up on. For a long time it was kinda depressing to be able to see that stuff, but I now mentor high risk people getting out of prison so it's been useful to be able to draw on that perspective. Honestly people are probably more similar in how and what they struggle with than just about any other aspect of life. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 10:01
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The hippie "rehab" stories are kind of funny (reminds me of the ubiquitous TCC "have u tried LSD" advice) but Jesus Christ Syanon sounds like some hideous hosed-up poo poo. I was going to ask if it was yet another Scientology front like Narconon but apparently not. OP can you please tell us more about the sex rehab? Have staff ever gotten let go for sleeping with the clients? As a professional in a related field it's always mystifying to me how often that happens.
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Mar 4, 2018 16:17
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Basically everything Herstory Begins Now and du hast said about recovery success rates it true. The facility I worked at had what the industry considers a pretty good success rate, and the rates were still extremely low on the addiction side. That's one reason I mentioned repeat clients and relapses, as they are what makes the initial success rate so hard to measure. The rate of people who attend a rehab and are fine for the rest of their lives without relapse is tiiiiiiny - barely even existant. While I don't know the mental health stats across the country, the mental health program that I worked in seemed to have leaps and bounds higher success rates than the addiction side. Of course, those are entirely different beasts approached in entirely different ways. Du -hast, I hadn't heard much of Synanon before your posts, and I've since been reading stuff online. I'm blown away at how insane, hosed up and culty this place is. I look forward to reading anything else you can share. I found a couple of documentaries on them that I added to my watch list to check out. Labes for days posted:The hippie "rehab" stories are kind of funny (reminds me of the ubiquitous TCC "have u tried LSD" advice) but Jesus Christ Syanon sounds like some hideous hosed-up poo poo. I was going to ask if it was yet another Scientology front like Narconon but apparently not. Okay, this is a weird topic, because the answer isn't as weird as you might think (at least not at my facility). In the 20ish year history of my facility, I've heard of one single person getting fired for sleeping with a client. And this was at the addiction house. The sex/love program never had an issue whatsoever. We did have clients sleep with one another, but even that happened surprisingly infrequently. We were pretty strict and vigilant though. Now, another local facility has a horrific track record and has lost like 10 employees over the past few years for sleeping with clients. I'm sure this varies wildly from facility to facility. Also, I have another story that I can't believe I forgot and relates to this topic. I'll edit it in here shortly once my clients are all in bed for the night. Edit: So this isn't a big story or anything, just something I found funny. We had an alumni event on our campus that attracted about 50 alumni of the facility, along with their families. Some of the alumni spoke at dinner and all clients from all houses attended. This meant that the female side and male side were integrated into a huge crowd of strangers and about 25 residential staff were wandering around trying to keep tabs on everything. This was...difficult. It also happened at night, meaning that there were huge swaths of our campus that were pitch black if a client or two wanted to sneak off into the darkness. This would actually be super easy and would have been difficult for us to catch. Clients could sneak off and have sex and be back before we even knew there was anything up. However, this wasn't what happened. Instead, two clients decided they wanted to sneak off to a shed to have sex. What they didn't know was that this little out-building contained medical supplies for the nurse's building it was attached to. So, in their attempt to get some sneaky sexy times going on, they managed to set off a deafening campus-wide alarm that cut on a floodlight and turned the heads of around 120 people to look directly at them the second they opened the door. Several Goblins fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Mar 9, 2018 |
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Mar 9, 2018 05:06
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Somewhere in the world there must be people who can only have sex to loud alarms.
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Mar 9, 2018 09:37
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