121–130 of 281 posts
The people working at these camps should be named and shamed.
You are absolutely correct. It's the only way to make them take a long hard look at themselves.
Gee now that sounds familiar in this context. Perhaps it'll work great!
18 years a slave
18 months
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve gone back and forth on that question a thousand times. I’m almost pathologically agreeable so it’s easy for me to minimize and slip into a place of, “oh, it’s ok, I was off my rocker and extreme measures were necessary.” But just because I needed help doesn’t mean I needed what that school was doing. So, while it introduced me to a way to stay clean, and kept me clean for long enough to clear my head, those aren…
If you had a child like you were, what would you do? What do you think the best solution is for such a “troubled teen”?
If anyone's interested in a first hand account of this type of thing there's good webcomic: https://elan.school/ I haven't checked in a bit but I think he's still releasing new chapters.
I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school. The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensiv…
Anyway, at some point when I was 14 or 15 I ended up in some kind of troubled kids training thing, it was ran by two (older than average, maybe 35~) university students and it was about assertiveness and understanding yourself.
The course was only a couple days a week for 6 weeks, but honestly it completely changed my life. I didn’t even realise it at the time but some low level anxiety seemed to get washed away after that and I became a much less awkward, more outgoing person who could handle making mistakes.
I truly wish I had paid more attention to the course itself so I could refer to it now.
It was probably standard assertiveness training, but honestly I can’t put words on how much my life improved as a direct result.
A large part of it was acceptance of yourself, and acceptance of each other in the group, we told each other what we thought of each other, the bad and the good. Most people didn’t get that kind of feedback and never thought about themselves the way they are seen by Others. Or if they did, it was the negatives or the ego. A few people were perplexed at why their ego didn’t match how they were perceived; or that their negatives were barely considered at all or not brought up when discussing negatives.
EDIT: FWIW this sounds exactly like the training I had: https://www.abct.org/Information/?m=mInformation&fa=fs_ASSER...
I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school. The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensiv…
I'd say that's how childhood looks like for the majority of people on this planet outside of the first-world protective umbrella. Imagine growing up in war-torn Africa, drug-ridden slums of South America or fanatical Middle East with daily executions.
Individuals' life experience isn't the average of a regions, or defined by headlines. For the most part, it's family and immediate community that define childhoods. A lot of good childhoods is otherwise dysfunctional places. A lot of bad childhoods in otherwise wealthy places.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people setting these up get their inspiration from the agoge, the boy rearing system in Sparta. The same methods are used to raise children soldiers in Africa. https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... Also, you might be interesting in Cult of the Badass: https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warr...
Most child soldiers’ mental health is ruined for life. A model of obedience and desensitization achieved through abuse followed by committing unspeakable atrocities is not a great formula for making good citizens. What kind of twisted mental gymnastics convinces the creators of these programs that their programs are anything but harmful?
https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...
You see, if you look things up you will find that psychology is good at exactly what you'd expect it to be good at if you look at their methods: describing behavior "in the large". Think "Of 100 drug addicts, 10 will commit crimes due to drugs", those types of statements. Or "100 kids with IQ>130, 10 will develop severe autism".
It can also often describe what people here call a "funnel". 100 kids go into kindergarten, 10 will fail, of those 10, 5 will get into youth services ... and so on and so forth. Problem is that this makes people always focus on the worst possible outcomes (when reality is that the vast majority of psychological problems (and "problems") go away after a relatively short time, very short time in kids (think months, a year at most), and attempts to treat them make them worse rather than better for the large majority of clients. 3 main reasons are that, especially in kids, psychological problems exist outside of the kid, they're generally the result of repeating very bad experiences at school. Obviously nothing can be done to "fix" the kid that won't be undone 2 weeks after they rejoin school. Second reason is that treatment, especially residential, takes away the information the client needs to fix their issue, and thirdly treatment takes away the need to fix the issue. But ignoring such considerations has been how psychiatry has grown)
Like any statistician knows: predicting numbers can be done extremely accurately. Predicting one concrete situation, also known as "diagnosing", with incomplete situation and everyone lying about it, is utterly impossible.
This means that attempts to change these situations ("help these kids") fail spectacularly and often work extremely contra productively (I mean, everyone knows the reputation of CPS, who do nothing BUT this. Saying they don't produce healthy kids just doesn't do justice to HOW bad these organizations are for kids. Just the suicide numbers alone ...). Psychologists, orthopedagogues and even psychiatrists often CAUSE mental health issues in healthy kids because they interfere, against the wishes of kids and often parents too, without having any ability to make accurate diagnoses.
And of course, the worst of it are the incentives. Especially with kids, the problem is the environment. Generally not the home environment, but the school. However, CPS, psychologists, orthopedagogues have to keep in mind that they get "referrals" (against the wishes of children and parents) from schools, school-related (sport clubs), even sometimes police. So problems in schools grow and fester, because these professionals can't react to problems in schools, they would lose all their business. That even goes for CPS.
Because it is unfortunately not hard to explain why organizations, perpetually short of money and paid per-child (VERY short of money in the CPS' case), refuse to use the "leave them alone and in 6 months 2/3 issues go away" paradigm that research suggests to be used.
The "troubled teens industry" definitely has a lot of weird stuff going on. Some of the institutions are are bad-faith operations that were always scams (or worse); some were well-intentioned but were managed in a way that produced abuses nonetheless. Maybe a few actually did a good job helping out troubled kids, but it does not seem to be the norm. This is perhaps a place where internet culture has been somehow ahea…
Early modern prisons were designed to help/fix people. Some were designed by moral philosophers, experts in ethics. These became nightmarish, producing more psychological injury than many intentionally punitive models like "hard labour."
If anyone's interested in a first hand account of this type of thing there's good webcomic: https://elan.school/ I haven't checked in a bit but I think he's still releasing new chapters.