If one thought about it, does one really need to go to a rehab to stop taking pain pills or a little drinking or smoking marijuana; these were and are issues that the medical profession could not fail in guiding if one wanted to quitreducing, changing or eliminating prescriptions. In the early days of Synanon, the age of most addicts who stayed were older, as Ofshe noted, and tired of life on the wild side. We have a freedom of the press, and when it does its job, and people do theres, there is hope. Dederich in the early days would not release statistics claiming that a dope fiend would identify with whatever percentage failed and therefore would not come; finally declaring in 1967 it was such a failure that no one should ever leave. But instead he made lab rats out of people. But he failed to see while controlled and anti-social pathology still existedit awaited release and that many were eager to respond to their old days ways if the message to do good turned to do bad. It was also capable of controling the floor show when ever there was an investigation, during these times Elan became a large weird hotel lobby, albeit briefly, while investigators simply saw our blank faces. Need your help! Straight used Synanons vaginal and anal searches to search for contraband for years even though they never found any. Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program turned violent cult founded by Charles Dederich Sr. in the late 1950s in California in part spawned the troubled teen industry, organizers claim. It just seems monstrous.". You think I didnt experience Synanon, but I did. Free choice is an American ideal, and we sacrifice for it, to preserve it, because as a nation we believe it is our greatest freedom. I offered the information to Janzen and he didnt want it. Jollett believes the violence to which adults were subjected has received widespread attention. Ramirez set up the synanon-based Phoenix House which hired former Synanite Ted Dibble to manage one of its centers. Also Santa Monica acted because Synanon did not have a license to treat anyone. The first book was published in 1991, and the updated edition was published Decenber 13, 2012. He also admitted violence could not occur without his approval but he forgot the details due to his stroke. Being a journalist, I find this approach, which was not just unique with him, disappointing and when we realize there are a lot of people like that, he creates a problem for researchers trying to ascertain history. While Synanons bragging of curing drug addiction was far off from reality, its public relations system did promote the concept that drug addiction was not impossible to overcome as many had thought when Synanon was conceived. Early on they selected former Synanite David Deitch to run Daytop but later released him when they claimed he tried to set up a Communist-based political action committee of ex-drug addicts. And just how successful were the Synanon imitators? Some had warned of the potential dangers of using synanons (game) on adults. Dederich said free choice in the hands of an addict was like a gun in the hands of a baby. Members were brainwashed, tortured mentally and barred from leaving the communityescaped members were subject to beatings. TimI didnt say I was the only one to fight Synanon. As stated in the Skeptics Dictionary, law enforcement officials, politicians and religious leaders helped push those fearing addiction to what it determined was primarily rackets designed to make money with little regard for human well-being (like Elan and CeDu). in the understanding and treatment of adolescents. Ben had told me you felt I had added more to what you had written and your excellent children study, and when I went back and read it I saw there was ambiguity between when I was quoting you and when I was adding my own additional comment. He noted that the child seemed lost in the rigid hierarchy and confrontation tactics of the program. He wrote: As a clinician I am concerned about the effects of intense, violent verbal interaction upon young teenagers engaged in a sensitive process of identity formation. At the heart of the Cedu program was a philosophy that had grown out of various self-help movements of the 1960s and 70s, such as Lifespring, Werner Erhards EST, and most directly, from Charles E. Dederichs Synanon cult, church, and street-level heroin-cure program. The damage that has been done to many ,many children is unfathomable. Any dammed fool who wants to come in and say Id like to live with you and we let them in. And while it may be true that economics was a motivation, economics are part of the motivation for everyone on these issues. Its wonderful. Totalitarianism societies in the end always end in abuse and a we vs. they war concept. And the grant had been administered by the founding director of NIDA who also happened to be the second White House Drug Czar-Robert DuPont. It was a gift. No one knows the actual final fate of the 19. **, Guy Endores book, Synanon, noted ex-members very early complained that Dederich had forced out the original Board of Directors and replaced them with hand picked trained seals. NIH had even started its own experimental synanon at the federal lockup hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. I would say some things are not debatable. gave a grant to a Florida organization called The Seed, which applied Synanons methods to teenagers, even to those only suspected of trying drugs . I would say probably every decade my views changed, either up or down, but only in small degrees. It was bizarre, surreal,and violent it was not a school in any stretch of the imagination. Oaks and Spokes. By then only 1000 out of the 12,000 claimed to have entered were there and leaving was defined as failure. But is there anything worth giving up freedom of thought? In terms of drug addiction, thats where it ends. Saying his death was caused by cardiac arrest, said Cohen, is really sugar-coating the pill as he was tortured to death and also denied medical treatment. there were a lot of people in the early days who left because of the way Dederich was taking it, and its too bad the idea grew out of person with such a tortured past. I suppose if they werent why Id have to find another business. The leader, Chuck Dederich, decided we wouldn't have parents, and then we just didn't.". That is just a fact. Joe Ricci, the owner, survived the state of Illinois pulling residents out because of the abuse and beat them in court. God bless you. And yes, there is some bad grammar. Synanon was discredited in the late 1970s and 1980s as its violent record was exposed. They covered his mouth with a hand and forced him to inhale ammonia, which caused spasm of his vocal cords and prevented him from being able to inhale. The evil was he boasted that they would cut off any charity that did not do as Synanon told them to do. Eventually, the future could only be Orwellian. Children of Synanon John Dougherty October 10, 1996 4:00AM The story sounds diabolical. He told me he was completing a book on Synanon. And I think he saw I might be going down that path, too. Dederich said those who left fell through the open manhole and would post descriptions of their calamities for all to see as a warning if they ever left. In Maias book it is described one woman was not even allowed to leave a teen rehab after she turned 18, the organization threatening her mother to toss out her younger child if the mother took the older one back. Gina Score, 14, at the state-run juvenile prison camp at Plankinton, South Dakota, 1999 was run to death. Did you change partners? Jollett, then just a little boy, hid to save himself. Jollett and his older brother Tony were taken from their parents his father a recovered addict and former convict, his mother an anti-government activist from Berkeley when they were just 6 months old. This intrusive, assertive therapeutic style works well for a few clients but may injure many more. Professor Bellis noted that, A number of clients. I was forced to watch twenty men and women beat a 14 year old girl in what we called a, Cowboy Ass kicking, for ten to twenty minutes. You would know that in general I have a higher regard for Synanon people than the public at large. In one sense it becomes like the question of which came first the chicken or the egg. . Researched by Maia Szalavitz for a book in 2006 and for Mother Jones in 2007 she described the clone horrors and traced them back to Synanon. Real crazy people. How old were you. It is true, we are lied to, propagandized and subject to many attempts to have us all think the same way. Worse, when others, like Dr. Casriel, who formed Daytop, decided to use the Synanon approach modified, they did not understand the effect of age and desire in the Synanon flashes of success and further the danger of its approach as described by Simon and Friedenberg. Synanon and Enthusiastic Sobriety Enthusiastic Sobriety Abuse Alliance Synanon and Enthusiastic Sobriety A conversation with David Cherry. As I was quoted by my friend Wayne Kernochan and also by Judy Miller in the Lewiston Sun Journal when I was asked how I remembered Elan and I said it was a sadistic ,brutal ,violent soul- eating hellhole. None of us were hardcore drug addicts. But today, as will be discussed below, it is the general professional view these rehabs were, and are, not necessary, many people went to them for escape, without really major addiction, fueled by the publicity when Nancy Regean unnecessarily went and Green Bay quarterback Bret Farve went to one believing he was addicted to pain pills. . "I became very interested in the idea of buried history, all the ways that we as children were told things that were patently untrue, and that we believed them," says Jollett, whose book will publish on May 26, just after the same-titled album. By 1971 Dederich would submit that while 10 to 12,000 people had gone through Synanon only about 10% stayed free of drugs for as much as 2 years, which was similar to the statistics everyone else concluded, which were the same at Lexington Hospital when Synanon was founded. You say it is unscientific nonsense, but prove that any of the statistics and studies were not accurate or that the events that took place in the clones did not happen. Tony, always angry as a child, sank into addiction at an early age and went to rehab. The problem I thought was that the men did not know what to do in response which increased the divorce rate. WebSynanon Survivors 136likes 149followers Posts About Photos Videos More Posts About Photos Videos Synanon Survivors Intro Link To The Synanon Survivors Group And It was only after the invasion of Iraq and discovery that the administration dangerously burned a spy to get even with for Sen. husband who wrote the administration had no evidence of Iraq weapons of mass destruction when it created a greater attack than 911 itself, that journalist took back their mandate to look for the truth and present that truth the country. It is with Dederich who created the system, a person who in his own words never cared for one single second about any person who left. And thank you for further documenting the direct connection of where all these horribly abusive re-education brainwashing treatment centers came from, the mother of them all Synanon. Maybe it's one of the things about human nature, that isolated power corrupts people. But it is a calculated risk we take. I suspected this would happen, because it is well known that people in cults go from outrageous anger to a final whimsical yearning at the end for a time of spirit and comradeship. "Sometimes I think about this book as this primal scream, this assertion: 'This happened. This piece was limited to legacy and was put together through stats, admissions and results in clones. ("There was no soft place to land, there was no one really caring about us," he explains. If you have a complaint it is with Yablonsky and Janzen who had no understanding of the Synanon system. *. In context, my conversation with Rod Janzen, as he certainly knew of me, and if he was a true journalist, he would have had to interview me to follow all leads. It can be found on Amazon. I have countless books of interviews and depositions. He would want to know the reasons that motivated me, if he was in search for the truth. Also true, is that my ego places me in my eyes in a higher position than others. Yet it was from this that the miracle was proclaimed. The musician also remembers the period with his mother and brother in Oregon, where they went to hide. Its just simply if your writing a book on the history of an organization and you are aware that someone filed multiple actions against it, and they tried to murder him for it, if you are a journalist you are going to interview that person. This is not a criticism of that policy; but just the fact that it was insignificant in relation to the civil rights movement which was raging in the 60s and pushed by the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and many black actors and athletes and my generation that marched and died in name of civil rights. (Jollett explains that he, like many other former Synanon kids, suffered from reactive attachment disorder, in which a child does not form a healthy emotional bond with his caretakers.). WebSurvivors report physical abuse, exploitation (human trafficking), and several types of psychological torment, including harsh discrimination and LGBTQ+ conversion therapy. Anyway good luck and I hope you found a practice you enjoy. 5 years from now we wont need people like you.. I had gotten your phone number from Ben Parks. It is the freedom of thought and free speech that gave America the chance to go on and recover from its mistakes. Sometimes I think women are more revenge orientated, but it probably still comes down to the individual. I witnessed a few cow boy ass kickings. You know ts great fun, to watch that. (Joe Ricci was a former Daytop student who went on to found his own program for troubled youth in Maine called Elansee below.) [Chuck] Dederich [Synanons founder], an exile from A.A., is credited with being the genius behind the TC [therapeutic community] movement. Leon Brill acknowledges in The Clinical Treatment of Substance Abusers that the original therapeutic community directed by ex-addicts was Synanon though others, he writes, such as Daytop Village, Odyssey House and Phoenix House in New York City have used psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and other professionals as part of their staff.. Good luck. Such people probably would be happier in a small environment with given friends, lovers, jobs and a sense of purpose, where most needs are fulfilled. '", After Tony went to rehab, their dad quit his job to be home with them and cooked dinner every night. Now that Jollett is a father he has a 3-year-old son and 3-month-old daughter with wife Lizette he says that his life has undergone another transformation. WebI run the Synanon Survivors Facebook group and wed love to have to as a member!! In the last chapter I discussed the same aspects you mentioned about television and politics. Ex-members have no idea how close they all came to being arrested for conspiracy of RICO violations. Synanon was the first therapeutic community devoted to the treatment of the drug addicted according to the Encyclopedia of Drugs and Alcohol, which is edited by the first White House Drug Czar; Dr. Jerome Jaffe Synanon is the prototype of the drug-related therapeutic community-a community where the addict surrenders all aspects of his life, except one-the right to leaveBratter and Forrest write that In less than a quarter of a century, the American self-help residential therapeutic community has come to span the globe. In his final letter to his mother, he wrote, They found my weakness and I want to go home.. Another boy froze to death (given no coat or shelter), and the victims even included former Synanon children who were placed in these camps by parents still believing in the Synanon system. Rose Lena Cole was court ordered to Syanon by a juvenile court judge in 1972 for running away from home. "He was just this big, masculine, Italian, strong guy that loved his boys. And we sort of took that on, and it's sad because it's not a real portrait of a man, it's a child's imagination of a man. Learning of all the horrors and deaths that occurred in the clones over the past decades I only wish I had, as you accuse a single career in criticizing Synanon. He wrote that the Synanon experience in playing the game, peers caring for peers without doctors, created a cure for drug addiction. ", After reconnecting with his father, Jollett who didn't understand what a "mother" and "father" were while living in Synanon finally had a loving, real-life dad and mom. Perhaps worse, was Dederichs friendship with Caesar Chavez wherein CED convinced Caesar to live like a rich man on La Paz and import the game which led to mutiny and the downfall of the UFW. Dr. Roger Meyer, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University, and formerly the Acting Chief of the Center for Studies of Narcotics and Drug Abuse at NIMH, was one of the first to question the wisdom of subjecting kids to the brutality of the Synanon Game. It still such a bracing business that I like to stay in it. S. B. If I did not want comments i would not have it set up too comments. So in that sense, Synanon contributed to the idea that one could get off addiction. see review. The Cedu schools (one in California, and one in Idaho) were each located in a mountain wilderness, and students soon discovered that they were teenage captives, without identification or money, in an imposing geography they could not easily or safely negotiate or escape. Its goal was to take it to the context of greater society.I would appreciate you know your feelings. And I still do. 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