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HugeGrossBurrito posted:My friend got sent to this school because his parents caught him smoking weed. Before this school he was a really nice chill person who I never heard raise their voice in anger once since kindergarten. By the time his parents finally figured out wtf he came back a straight up psychopath who would scream at everyone and use violence constantly and was expelled almost immediately. Reminds me of my friend who went to a Catholic camp one summer
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Feb 11, 2020 00:26
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| # ¿ May 29, 2024 05:07 |
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1st_Panzer_Div. posted:Uhhh gently caress. I pm'd you the where, not really comfortable posting it. Glad to know it's not a standard practice though. That's what I get for using anecdotal examples. I definitely am not cool sharing more though, sorry. Here's more Elansanity stuff though: I can vouch for this, the mental health place I got sent to for being a shithead as a teenager was the same, except I got thrown into the adult unit because I had just hit 18. No laces, no cellphone, monitored phone calls, completely scheduled activities, (TV, being able to go to the activity room for basketball or ping pong, being able to hang out and socialize in the rec room, when to go to bed, when to wake up, even when you can go outside in the extremely closed in courtyard so smokers there had to wait for scheduled smoke breaks, and on and on), none of your own clothes, the food was poo poo and along with the medication it caused constant painful constipation and stomach aches, the attendants didn't give a single poo poo about anything and were more occupied with how to pass their shifts by doing the bare minimum so they could gently caress around on the computers, the medication wasn't prescribed on any sensible basis and was virtually only given out to sedate the people in the unit, I was asleep for the majority of the time and barely cognizant when I wasn't and I wasn't even a problem patient, they just did it as a loving rule even if the side effects were horrific. Worst of all you could only see your parents or loved ones like maybe once every two weeks, these visits were timed and like a loving prison they made you sit in the cafeteria along with everyone else whose family bothered to show up. They then stand around in the corners of the room observing you. If you told your parents about how poo poo and awful it was or asked them to get you out they would cut the visit short and then force you to stay in your room for the rest of the day. While you slept there were check-ins around two times a night which involved a dickhead, apathetic attendant loudly unlocking and opening the door then shining a flashlight onto you and your roommate, inevitably waking you up and preventing you from ever getting sound sleep. Showers were time, once a day, if you wanted to poo poo outside your room you had to loving ask an attendant to use the ONE main bathroom and of course you'd spend about an hour in there trying to get a rock hard iron turd out of your rear end, so there was a constant wait while everyone clutched at their stomachs in discomfort. Why couldn't you just go poo poo in the bathroom in your room? Because that would remove an attendant from the floor to go babysit the door of the personal bathrooms, and they didn't feel like doing that poo poo in case a resident snapped and had their weekly emotional breakdown from living in a loving prison. I thought it was probably just the adult unit, but when I passed the teen unit one day on the way to the cafeteria and their eyes were just as glazed over as anyone else's and it pissed me off to no end. There was no therapy, all you did was meet with a psychiatrist once a week if you were LUCKY, and these meetings were supposedly what decided whether or not you were able to leave, except it was total bullshit and completely arbitrary. They kept saying I was withholding thoughts of suicide or that I was just putting on a good act but I was literally just a kid who had been acting out for a month or two because of stress and unmedicated ADHD, and got sent there as a decision between that and I can't even remember what the gently caress else. They applied this useless method to presumably everyone there. Everyone was just constantly waiting to get out, sometimes the psych wouldn't see you that week, no reason given, just a useless gently caress who wanted to do as little as possible. These weeks were the ones where you'd always see at least one person lose it. The reason why they were so incredibly stingy with appointments and why the conditions were so miserable was obvious, the longer you stayed in there, the more money they could leach from your parents or family. Their end goal was to keep you in there as long as possible before their detainment became unreasonable in an obvious way. It's ingenious in the most hosed up way. You have no freedom, no ability to entertain yourself adequately, you're put on medication with no real sense to it and inevitably suffer emotional and physical side effects, the attendants are miserable, useless assholes that wear you down, you're constipated and cramping all the time, you can hardly get your fix if you're a smoker (I wasn't, but it's important to their method), you're tired all the time, if you're an addict you're going through bad withdrawal (and they don't give a gently caress about your withdrawal symptoms, so the guy who shat himself with a deluge of diarrhea that got pushed around by the attendants is poo poo out of luck since he just gave them their meal ticket to keep him there for months), and you have no freedom and just want to go home. This led to a cyclical situation where people who had been there for months and months would snap and have huge tantrums or wail on an attendant, and they would obviously use this as an impetus to increase the duration of what is essentially your imprisonment, leaching that sweet, privatized institution money off of you and your loved ones. I was lucky that I managed to keep my cool the whole time, but you go in there expecting to keep your head down and get out early and they do everything in their power to destroy your mental state so you'll act out, which they then use as ammunition to prove you're unhinged and a danger to yourself or others. I can't imagine how many people got sent in there for mild episodes or hoping to save themselves from suicidal ideation and just were psychologically destroyed and all their issues exacerbated by several orders of magnitude, just because they tried to get help. The goal was to institutionalize you, and condition you to be someone that would be a "repeat" customer. The thing that I saw that utterly enraged me was a schizophrenic, older man who basically had no concept of what was going on. They did the same poo poo with him, arbitrary, unfocused medication, hardly helped him with anything, gave him no therapy, and just led him from his bed to the rec room where he would sit on a chair for hours rocking back and forth, doing and saying nothing. I can't imagine how long he stayed there. They did nothing for him, he was quiet, totally non-violent, never acted out, his worst sin was just being non-functional and non-autonomous in his condition. I felt so loving bad for this guy, and the attendants were just cold, and uncaring. I guess you have to be to essentially get paid to be knock off prison guards to take "care" of people who weren't always all there while habitually ignoring the basic needs or feelings of the individuals in your care. I can't imagine how many places like this are out there. The Elan method is a tried and true way to create environments where the very nature of their oppression and deleterious psychological effects retroactively "justify" you being there. If you don't act out, you're hiding something and they're going to keep you there to "find out" what it is (hint, they don't give a gently caress either way), if you do act out, then obviously you belong there and can't leave. When you get out is entirely based on the whims of people who have no desire to let you go if the money comes in. I'm sure the only reason I got out within three months was because my parents took my word for how awful it was during my first visit and perpetually harassed them over the phone several times a day while showing up personally to demand I be let go. Even with that it took months because I was placed there involuntarily without their input after I was initially taken to a hospital. Long rear end post, but the point is that this poo poo is everywhere, it's in mental health, it's in troubled youth centers, it's in your prisons, it's in your nursing homes and it's in your rehab centers. It's privatization controlling institutions meant for rehabilitation and recovery. That dystopian poo poo where profit based care leads to them attempting to enslave you and create institutionalized, habitual relapsers to farm already exists to a degree greater than you can imagine. None of them give a poo poo, all the people involved in these systems become completely innured to the suffering of those under it because even the caretakers they hire will grow to loathe and actively detest the people who "make their jobs so hard" (boo-loving-hoo) even though the behavior of the people in these systems is entirely bred by the inhumanity of them. I've been crusading against this "care" center for YEARS on virtually every platform I can get my hands on. There are no words to fully describe how much I despise that place and how much it utterly conditioned me to be totally uncompromising on heavily regulated universal healthcare. The barebones regulation that allows placed like that and Elan to operate as long as they meet the pathetically lose need for a license (and then as a matter of course maybe hiring one professional for appearances who shows up as infrequently as humanly possible), is despicable. Don't EVER put your kids and loved ones into ANY institution without vetting it to the utmost degree, do not look at positive reviews ever, always the negative, do not listen to parents or caretakers who swear that it's great, all they give a gently caress about half the time is getting an annoying problem off their hands. Listen to the testimony of people who have BEEN in those programs, they are the only honest opinion you will ever get.
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Feb 11, 2020 23:15
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Inzombiac posted:Thank you for posting this. Surely it can't be easy to talk about but know that it is really appreciated. It used to be hard to talk about it, but a lot of people eventually reach a point where it's no longer an uncomfortable subject because whatever residual shame you feel for having been put through that crap and being powerless is totally and utterly overcome by the pure anger you feel over them continuing to do this poo poo to other people. Telling people the truth about it means one more person learning to detest that place a fraction as much as I do and possibly prevents someone else from going there or being sent there, which makes me happy. These places profit and operate off of people staying quiet so part of their MO is cowing you into submission and refusing that is part of the way it helped me get over it. At this point the total injustice of the fact that the place is still open and still taking in kids and adults at their most vulnerable and needy means I have no qualms talking about it. I don't feel ashamed about having been committed anymore, they want you to feel like you're in that institution for being a gently caress up or acting like a mentally ill lunatic so your guilt will overcome your desire to act out or spread word about how poo poo they are. That's really how it fucks with you the most after you leave. They punish you whenever you do anything that bothers them so even once you're out you've spent months being taught that standing up to authority or that emoting with anger when you're ignored or disregarded with virtually any "reasonable" emotion or expression is inevitably your fault for being disagreeable or demonstrating aspects of your mental illness. That can result in you constantly grappling with and distrusting virtually anyone meant to help you, so goodbye being honest to your therapist or psych, they've hosed you into completely distrusting anyone who purports to practice mental healthcare. They've literally mindfucked you into being unable to benefit from real, honest care. Either that are you become so submissive and quiet that you never challenge anyone or anything and constantly blame yourself for everything, even when your anger towards someone else is totally justified you might blame yourself for it. No one is there to teach the people with anger problems how to cope, hell, there's no one there teaching coping methods period. You're presumably in there to overcome whatever episode or action put you in there, but without therapy you can't possibly ever do that, not that you would even be able to benefit from it if you did, since the anxiety/depression/apathy the heavy dosages of medication will conflict with any reasonable care and mask the issues that put you in there in the first place. They will effect your ability to function normally for years, if not a lifetime. It took me years to fix my extreme distrust of healthcare to get actual, decent treatment. Now I have proper medication and therapy and I accomplished more in the past few years than the five years after I left that shithole. I can't imagine how much more I would have been able to do, how much lovely emotion I could have avoided with my severe ADHD and anxiety if it hadn't been for that place essentially destroying my ability to benefit from healthcare for so long. And I can't even imagine how much people who spent years in programs like Elan have had taken from them. How many normal happy relationships it might have ruined because of the hosed up socialization within the program. How many lives its taken both through robbing kids of potential and condemning them to a lifetime of dealing with trauma or outright taking their own lives. How many people basically were conditioned to be sociopaths and end up using the Elan attitude to abuse others. The guy writing the comic also had to contend with Elan's nationwide influence which sounds nightmarish. I obviously never had to worry about anyone trying to shut me up. Some people want to put it behind them, and that's more than fine, they've had their share of suffering and abuse and deserve and have more than readily earned the right to leave it in their past, but other people refuse to let it go because it's still happening across the entire country.
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Feb 12, 2020 00:31
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Julius CSAR posted:Hey I was a bit flippant earlier about my experiences in mental health facilities and I now understand that my experience is probably different from most people since apparently the whole mental health industry is rotten to the loving core and I"m really sorry about that. That's fine. In cases like mine these places exist because the infrastructure for mental healthcare is obscenely poor in my local area. This is a state and city that has a large inner city, poor, and black population and as usual that means it receives little to no attention, care, or proper facilities. The institutions here for the most part only exist to hold the mentally ill and control them within that environment because any sort of appreciable care is beyond the possible scope of anything beyond a dedicated and well staffed residential system, which obviously is never going to be funded here. As such they only operate to produce enough money to perpetuate themselves and stay in business which would be undercut and rendered more difficult with competent staff or helpful treatment programs from professionals. They do the bare minimum to subsist. As little staff as possible, as few professionals as possible while still meeting the legally required minimum standard of care (which is an obscenely low standard). Most people are sent to the hospital and discharged after a day or two of observation, anyone else is sent to one of a small handful of programs if they are deemed sufficiently compromised (which of course, is completely arbitrary due to how poor and cursory these assessments are under a strained mental health system). Naturally you are forced to use an ambulance since they want to keep track of you (huge chunk of money) and then billed for the duration of your stay at the facility. If you're lucky and you know exactly how to act to play down their suspicions you can convince them you'll be fine with outpatient programs, which you can then promptly never show up to because at that point they have no interest in you if they can't hold you. Places like Elan don't function necessarily the same, since the tuition is so high, but they also prey on a lack of appropriate treatment for troubled individuals in a similar fashion. It's easy to be overwhelmed by actual, effective care because that involves individualized treatment that occurs over a long, long period of time. A kid going to therapy for acting out still lives with his parents and will still likely display problematic behavior over the course of his care. It's a slow painful process that requires inordinate amounts of patience and faith in the system. The appeal of Elan is that you wash your hands of your troublesome kid, don't have to deal with him anymore, and rather than the anomalous, personalized care of a therapist or psychiatrist, they are placed in a regimented, highly generalized program that asserts it will mold them into a productive and agreeable person without any of that waffling around or having to deal with bullshit, and since many people willing to do this to their kids are highly about forcing a kid into the status quo and conformity, they see hyper regimented and disciplined environments as a way to beat their kids into shape, rather than the stifling, trauma inducing factories they are. It's similar to threatening your kid about sending them to military school. Getting thrown in a lovely mental health institution is much the same because of the completely warped public perspective. Much like prison people think you walk in there, do whatever it is you do in there, and walk out better and less troublesome. It's an easy attitude to adopt because it's not complicated and it allows you to believe there is an easy solution to disruptive individuals which merely amounts to controlling them and "setting them straight" by placing them in extraordinarily strict circumstances with no freedoms. One of the ways they get away with this poo poo is by shrouding the reality of it to the public, so being ignorant that some places just plain are this bad compared to other, reasonable and humane programs is a struggle, especially because the people they target are socially perceived to be troublesome and deceitful.
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Feb 12, 2020 01:46
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Mappo posted:I think the kind of parents who would believe their kid that this kind of school was a cult would be the kind of parent who wouldn't have sent them there in the first place. They likely don't know what it really is but these places are sold using that image, that it's going to make your kid tough, dependable and disciplined through regimen and an environment where priveleges are earned through responsibility, and where they learn to shed over individualistic "phases" like wearing piercings or listening to loud metal or other nonsense overly conservative parents take as bad signs. On paper that's really no different than what military schools or the Boy Scouts or any number of other "We'll make your boy a man"-esque programs offer. On some level they all use programming to various degrees but obviously not nearly to such an insane degree. Our culture already normalizes it to the point that parents won't find a program like that suspicious, private boarding schools also have you sending your kid off for a period of time. So it's easy for these to seem normal when they're a thousand times worse.
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Feb 12, 2020 02:17
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Liquid Communism posted:Programs like these are sold as a package solution to parents who have given up on parenting a difficult child. Even if that difficulty is just 'I don't believe in your religion' or 'I'm gay/bi/trans/ace'. That's basically what I was getting at with the public idea that institutions are uniform programs of addressing social and mental health issues (or in the case of gay conversion, complete horseshit that isn't even a problem that needs addressing) that can cure any problem behavior as a whole. It's easy money because for ignorant people it's an easy solution.
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Feb 12, 2020 04:36
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| # ¿ May 29, 2024 05:07 |
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TheAardvark posted:There was a documentary made about Elan with a lot of victims interviewed. Looks like it's still only showing on theater circuits, a shame, I'm interested too, they'll probably come out with a physical media release eventually.
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Feb 12, 2020 10:12
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