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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Somewhere in the world there must be people who can only have sex to loud alarms. Registering the HornHub.com domain right now.... Fake Edit: That probably already exists and I don't want to find out. Especially at work.
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Mar 9, 2018 10:10
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Labes for days posted:I'm impressed and also slightly disappointed that there aren't any stories about that! Kudos to whomever does your hiring. Ohhh, don't congratulate our hiring process just yet. They've hired some baffling dumbasses. See, we had a problem out there. The facility is in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town that is more than just a traffic light and a gas station is 20 minutes away. The nearest city is nearly an hour away. They don't pay quite enough for people in the city to make the commute, leaving a lot of locals (in, honestly, a very poor and poorly educated area of the rural south) to be the majority of applicants. We had... The Man In Black: A tall, rail-thin white kid that was pale as gently caress and wore a black cowboy hat, a black duster coat and black boots WITH SPURS on them. He worked three days before quitting - stealing the office phone charger on his way out. The dick. Baby Huey: A weird neckbeard who got hired because he had family working in HR. During his time there, he was caught sleeping on the job a half dozen times, lost the keys to the transport van in a river, not only let the clients skinny dip in a nearby river but JOINED THEM, and nearly hit client with a van. Also known to disappear on 2+ hour long breaks. He should have been fired after a week, but managed 5 months. Jed: Young country kid. Made it through interview and orientation just fine. Then got fired for saying really offensive poo poo, including randomly telling clients what his girlfriend's vagina tasted like and casually using a homophobic slur around our gay co-worker. Cocaine Dan: Dan didn't do cocaine. He was cocaine. We had him drug tested a couple of times, but he always came back clean. He had more energy than seems naturally possible and would full-on sprint around campus doing whatever he was doing. Was asked to go pick up mail from admissions, 50 yards away? Sprint there. He also panicked one night because he thought we were missing a client. He exploded through my office door, told me a client was missing and ran away before I could say anything. Before I even made it to the building door he was out of the yard, over a fence and running around a cattle field with a flashlight. Just...kind of running around. The clients were all present and accounted for. It took me 20 seconds to verify this. The turnaround rate was huge. People who stayed, stayed a long time and were outstanding. But if you weren't outstanding, you usually were on the opposite end of the spectrum and totally useless. Also, fun story! One of my clients from a few years ago found me on Facebook today. He wanted to let me know he relapsed shorty after treatment, but had since stayed clean (18 months), had made up with his parents, moved to a new state and gotten a good job and had a place of his own. He also wanted the jambalaya recipe I gave him while he was in treatment, cause he'd lost it in the move. 
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Mar 13, 2018 09:05
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Haha, sure, I'll copy it over directly from my Louisianan uncle's Facebook message. It's a bit simplified for a house full of generally young, cooking inexperienced guys in a rehab, so it may not be the ultimate for a Creole purist, but it's pretty drat good. My Uncle posted:half stick butter Adjust simmer time as preferred for thicker/thinner jambalaya. Enjoy!
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Mar 14, 2018 17:15
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Inescapable Duck posted:Rehab clinics turning into/being founded as cult compounds sounds like a grown-up version of how Christian torture camps for children present themselves just the same as regular summer camps. Is that kind of thing common, more on the fringe/woo side of things, or is the bigger problem poorly managed and underfunded rehab clinics? To best honest, I have no idea how prevalent the crazy cult rehabs are these days. Du Hast's stuff is pretty much the most I've heard, though I don't doubt there are plenty around. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say they were more common back when the entire industry was much newer and we still had a pretty shaky grasp on how to rehabilitate people and assist with mental health issues. It's worth noting that some places still thought lobotomies were good ideas in the 1970s - it's a fledgling field that has made a lot of progress in a relatively short amount of time. Still far, far from perfect, though. What I do know is that poorly managed and underfunded rehabs are loving everywhere. Plenty of the latter but TONS of the former. The industry tends to have a strange fixation on hiring from within in an...inadvisable way. Here's the deal - I've struggled with mental health issues in the past. It's why I wanted to help people who are currently where I used to be. Plenty of people with addictions and mental health issues go on to lead productive, normal lives like anyone else and are 100% qualified for a job like anyone else. Buuuuuut....maybe don't start a rehab and hire your entire upper management team based on the fact that they're success stories, but otherwise have no experience in management, financial, employee relations, etc. Because that's what a lot of places tend to do. My facility was run by the middle tier management like myself, period. Our upper management team were people hired 10 years ago because they were success stories and expect them to just pick things up along the way. They were unanimously terrible at their jobs and, while good people, were pretty reviled on a co-worker standpoint for being useless and meddling. They were too far removed from the "boots on the ground" folks working with the clients to actually learn anything about running the place over time and pretty much got in everyone's way when they tried. I don't know how widespread this is, but it's been extremely commonplace in the dozen or so facilities I've been exposed to. Again, hire alumni from addiction and mental health programs. We're no different and just had a struggle at some point in our lives, but we can learn, grow and perform a task like anyone else. I'm an example of that...but I also had a ton of management experience, some medical training, human resource experience AND a background with mental health. A lot of our upper management's resumes kind of ended with, "Is in recovery."
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Mar 24, 2018 16:17
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DrNewton posted:Do you have any clients you actually like? Not in "oh gosh they are so crazy hahaha" way. In a "these people had some good in them, and I rooted for them?" Of course! Tons of them, actually. They're just not as "wacky internet story" interesting as others. However, I'll tell you one of my favorites. When I first started worked at my original facility, an 18 year old admitted. On the day he turned 18, in fact. Lets call him Ben. Ben was an extremely shy kid from a very, very wealthy upbringing and had lead a very sheltered life. The guy never had to do a single thing for himself - literally. Nothing. He didn't know how to boil water. But I'll get to that shortly. He also never saw any of his family. His parents dumped money and serving staff on him and disappeared on cruises and vacations without him, leaving him alone in a mansion, home-schooled,with nothing but serving staff and a tutor (no friends) for 18 years. They found out that he'd finally met a couple of other kids to hang out with and immediately shipped him off to rehab under the SUSPICION that he was using drugs.He claimed to have never done so, and I believe him. However, when parents sign their kids into our facility, we can't just go "there's nothing wrong with your kid," unless the kid himself wants to check out. He didn't, because he didn't want to upset his parents. So we've got an 18 year old, with no life experiences, crippling social anxiety, and no notable mental issues or addictions. We have to treat him, so where do we start? Well, the therapists worked on unfucking what 18 years of familial neglect will do while the residential staff, like myself, worked on life skills. One day I'm having a sandwich in the work kitchen. Ben comes in and starts to make himself lunch. He starts with two pieces of white bread. Then he searches through the fridge for a while before pulling out a kielbasa. He put that on the white bread and topped it with shredded sharp cheddar cheese and some canned kidney beans, which he did not drain first. Then he microwaved it. For five minutes. He was trying to make a chili dog. He just didn't know what a chili dog was. Cooking is a hobby and passion of mine, so I asked him if he wanted me to help teach him how to cook a few things for himself. I quickly learned that he didn't know how to cook a frozen pizza, nor did he know how to boil water. Like, he knew that heat + water = boiling water, but he didn't know how to operate a stove. He was also under the impression you could cram a metal pan full of water into a microwave and boil it that way. I spent the two months he was there teaching him every basic of cooking I could think of - eventually having him prepare a simple dinner for the household before he left. During this time I also taught him how to do a few things to work on vehicles, how to deal with basic around-the-house problems like a backed up toilet, and how to clean. Ben was a good kid, listened to us and seemed to generally be a brighter, happier human being by the time he left. Two years later, we have an alumni event where past clients come and give speeches to current clients. Ben showed up! He had moved out of his parents house, moved to another state with two clients he'd made friends with while at my facility, and they were splitting a three-bedroom house. He had taken jobs in restaurants while taking cooking classes and had eventually worked his way up to sous chef at a small place. He spent his off-time doing charity work at a local halfway house and he'd severed himself financially from his parents. He was living on his own, had made some friends, found a passion and turned it into a career. While I know that he didn't have the longest road to travel - as in, he didn't have a litany of mental health issues or severe addictions, he genuinely made me proud as something I taught him had made a genuine impact on his life and set him on a path he continued to take for years after I parted ways with him.
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Mar 31, 2018 04:08
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DrNewton posted:Awww what a sweet story. Go Ben. It's super easy to miss parts or even huge chunks of the incidental knowledge we're supposed to pick-up when we're young. The facility I'm at now has a wonderful program and is vastly better run/managed, but it has chefs and housekeeping for the clients. If I miss anything about my old facility, it's that the clients were expected to cook and clean for themselves as a community-building and responsibility learning tool. We had them write meal plans and fill out extensive grocery order lists. While we had to help out a lot and nag them about their chores like surrogate parents, I think a lot of the (especially younger) clients ended up getting a lot out of that small detail of their treatment.
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Apr 1, 2018 01:55
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Sounds like you've definitely seen the good and bad that come from various places. I'd definitely like to hear your thoughts on going through the programs if you'd like to share. Also, keep up the hard work, man. Places like that last one can put a serious damper on things. Hope it didn't hurt your recovery as a whole.
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Apr 1, 2018 02:08
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