|
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 |
#
¿
Feb 4, 2018 12:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 07:27 |
|
|
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. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2018 15:04
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2018 16:44
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2018 17:39
|
|
