I was completely unaware of the existence of Elan School and I couldn't find much on the site that talks about what's going on unless you actually read the comic. Unfortunately it's the middle of the work day so I don't have time to read the comic right now but I wanted to know what it was about to know if I should come back to it.
If you're in a similar boat: Elan School was apparently a behavior modification/"therapeutic" boarding school in Maine that engaged in some extremely controversial practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Élan_School
The comic is an autobiographical tale of a person that was forced to attend this facility against their will at the age of 16, ostensibly via kidnapping. It's really harrowing stuff.
> Elan School was apparently a behavior modification/"therapeutic" boarding school in Maine that engaged in some extremely controversial practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Élan_School
Not that I'm doubting any intentions here, but I think dressing this up as "extremely controversial" might be under-selling or burying the lede a bit. Had the practices (the ring, isolation, management structure) that occurred at Elan been done on adult prisoners, they would have with absolute moral certainty been seen as war crimes of the highest order. The fact that this happened to children and had the level of corruption and money behind it to persist for as long as it did should give one extreme pause, and the reprehensibility of the institution should not be "controversial," but rather condemned.
Indeed I would agree that this is really harrowing stuff. Just wanted to add that if you're going to look into this without any prior knowledge be sure that you're ready to be exposed to several levels of trauma.
While they are surely morally bankrupt and abhorrent, they aren't "war crimes of the highest order". Let's not dilute and devalue what war crimes are for internet punchiness when they are happening even today.
War crimes are when you break the rules of war. America mistreating its own population does not amount to war crimes.
Does it matter? These crimes were mostly committed with full knowledge and cooperation of government, even organised BY government. Everything was done to avoid real blame on any individual, when of course nearly all were perfectly aware what was happening, or wilfully closed their eyes, including the local police, police from the states the kids were from. Schools, CPS, therapists, ... from various states kids were from. Nobody will be punished, it doesn't matter how serious the crime is.
I'm pointing out that most kids were "coming from group homes" and therefore placed there by CPS. And this is not the worst CPS in the US has done to kids by a long shot, in fact they're still at it. Now with "ABA".
They rename the basic technique again and again, brainwashing with constant violence, inducing 24/7 stress, executed in practice by near-minimum-wage idiots rather than anyone with real training (or, frankly, intelligence), which then "necessitates" constant violence when children grow (you could, of course, also allow those kids a normal life, but no, they "have to be kids". So for instance the standard reaction in smarter autistic people, RAPIDLY becoming independent, has to be punished severely). But the basic premise of 24/7 stress with violence to make it inescapable has not changed.
Of course, the violence means that sometimes "accidentally" the kids get hurt, sometimes maimed or killed. That hasn't changed. Now when I say accidentally I mean they attacked these kids violently, and killed them, and they really meant to use that violence. They merely did not mean for that violence to end their lives. Of course, that's, at best, second degree murder. Nobody, of course, has gotten any serious punishment for such incidents, never mind people running or using ABA institutes.
I went to a similar school called CEDU, same protocol for getting students there, same abuse. Elan school was actually actively contacting current students parents of CEDU right when it closed down to get them to come to Elan. Most of the people I went to CEDU with are broken or dead. There are more schools like this, they just close down and start again. I'll plug Daniel Yuen's name here, he was at the facility with me at the same time and ran away and is still missing 18 years later
They lie to parents and misrepresent the school usually. When parents go to visit everyone is acting to some extent. That being said it's usually narcissistic parents with money who are looking for an easy solution. There were quite a few fairly famous children there. Most of the kids there had issues for sure, including myself, but it was still in the realm of normal teenager issues.
> That being said it's usually narcissistic parents with money who are looking for an easy solution.
After reading this and the previous thread on these programs, I really get the impression that this is the fundamental driver behind it. Some people in comments try to paint a picture of desperate parents at their wits end taken in by the program's lies, but these kids didn't wake up one day and decide to have a lot of problems. I strongly suspect that most were simply neglected and abused by horrible parents that had them and didn't want them and did a shit job being a parent to them because they are narcissistic assholes, the sort of shit people that American society churns out with ever increasing frequency. That sort of people believe things that sound like easy fixes for their years of failure to actually be a good parent, and the child suffers even more for it.
That's a comforting narrative, that good parents couldn't end up with terribly behaving and out of control children. I think that good parenting probably does greatly reduce the chance, but it would be surprising if it totally eliminated the possibility.
Brain disorders (like fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, which can be caused by drinking moderately before becoming aware of pregnancy) can do that to children of well-behaving and loving parents.
One challenge parents face is they don't feel there are other options.
They often cannot get services locally, cannot get kids into anything in patient, cannot get discipline going.
It's a weird dichotomy. You let your kid walk to park alone, you could face jail time. You send them to one of these camps, no issues.
In addition to criticizing these program's I'd love to see better suggested options for often desperate parents, especially for kids who are a bit older.
A lot of bad actors, but these schools have an opening sometimes where other systems are not stepping up.
In a lot of U.S. states now, the age is as high as 12. The U.S. has gone absolutely insane in the name of protecting children. And, if you dare question the wisdom of any of these policies, you're typically met with something like, "I guess you just want children to DIE".
As an aside, there's also this creepy trend in the U.S. to refer to 15 and 16 year-olds as "children". If someone had referred to me as a child at 16 years old, I would have looked at them like they were insane.
The rational answer is that you absolutely can send your children to play in the park.
Why don't people do this then? In the U.S. in most states, leaving children unattended even close to home for any amount of time is considered a form of neglect or abuse, though the precise wording varies by state and the age of the child.
The risk is that if the police pick up your kid or if the state department of child and family services catches wind of this, they can take your children from you and you have to go through a very unpleasant process to get them back, after which there are mandatory home visits by the state.
Sadly, this happens more than it should since the laws in most states are very vaguely defined and the police and state employees at the department of child and family services are given extremely wide latitude in these situations. In some states the precise age at which you can leave children unattended isn't even explicitly defined; the interpretation "too young to be left alone" is left to the police or the state agency that handles these types of things.
The most common victims are the working poor who sometimes will leave children unattended because they have to work and either can't afford or can't find childcare.
It's a really bad situation on many levels, and for some reason there hasn't been a serious effort to reform a lot of these issues. I know the whole thing must sound absolutely crazy to anyone outside of the U.S. but it really is how things work in most places here.
When we moved into the neighborhood we went door to door introducing our children and handing out copies of Playborhood[1] with our phone number written inside the cover to each of our neighbors. If no one in your neighborhood calls the police when they see your kids walking to the park the chances of a negative interaction go way down.
Just one small local step towards reform, so far it has worked out well for us.
This seems shockingly dumb. I wasn't aware of such things going on in the US, my cultural knowledge on the subject of growing up in the US was of kids roaming around on their bikes all day.
Kids roaming around on bikes was the norm in the U.S. for a long time. It started changing sometime in the mid-nineties and has been getting progressively worse since then.
There are some glimmers of sanity emerging though, but it's very nascent. This org in particular is doing some good work: https://letgrow.org/ - there are also some stories on the site that explain things much more eloquently than I have.
I'm now curious if this links to the childhood obesity epidemic in the country.
edit/ I just saw another comment you made that suggests that it does. I wonder then if the "free-range parenting" legislation in Utah, Texas, and Oklahoma has made a difference.
Folks who believe in "protecting children". Who believe in CPS, while they are perfectly aware what a monstrous system CPS really is, but want to see others hurt and punished. Who actually believe something like CPS protects children. Who feel children need to be saved from, oh, lots of things, from sex to satan, drugs to iphones, saved from not getting vaccinated ... to saved from getting vaccinated, or are just after revenge, but while they want to intervene in children's lives, "if necessary" with violence, they absolutely DO NOT want to take care of any children. They also see NO need whatsoever to pay for either education or care, not even for the physical facilities, but they won't let them stay at "bad"/suboptimal homes, ESPECIALLY not if the kids want to (resulting in regular research pointing out that even outright abusive parents are producing much better results in children than even good CPS homes)
Note that the comic says this place was "full of children from group homes". That would be CPS, mostly ex-foster children.
People who believe in punishing "bad parents", while obviously NOT agreeing on what bad (or good, or "good enough") parenting actually is, sometimes resulting in 2 people in CPS intervening for outright contradictory reasons. People who work in the front-end of CPS are all about why they are better, and why society needs to be fixed. With violence and punishments, of course, not with help and/or support. Grace is the real evil in that movie, despite being innocent and spending all her time trying to help, executing the will of the "folks" "protecting" children.
You will note the ONE constant in all CPS systems around the world: those who decide what is done to the children NEVER actually have to watch (or even follow up on) what these actions actually do to those children. And absolutely nobody is responsible for what happened, except the children themselves. NEVER will you see a system where the people administering the system assigned the same responsibility parents have. They take kids away, with violence, make them shut up until 18, then dump them on the street.
And make no mistake: these people ONLY want punishments dealt out. In theory, not to the children, but those children are "not their responsibility". Which effectively means they take everything from those children, "for their protection" and give nothing to them. The caretakers are minimum wage failures (sometimes victims of CPS themselves) that cannot give a decent future to their kids. It's "not a punishment, it's just difficult". Everything from their parents, school, friends, right down to the idea of a playground they recognise is taken from those children. You can tell me that's "not" punishing children as much as you want.
And people misunderstand children's reactions. Like in the movie "Short Term 12". After a while you realise WHY Jayden attacks her dad's car. Not because of the abuse, but because he is responsible for getting her into CPS, and taking away her future (same reason Marcus attacks himself). Jayden is attacking Grace for being a terrible pseudo-parent that takes away her future, a parent that's nothing but a countdown timer to prison, she is not attacking her dad for abuse at all, but for delivering her to Grace.
CPS also creates institutions themselves, along these lines. They rename them and the techniques they use every 10 years or so, currently they're on "applied behavior analysis" (ABA), a supposed cure for "autism" (this decade's catch-all diagnosis masking the fact that CPS, psychologists, psychiatrist and whatever cheaper version of those (orthopedagogy is the current name) is bullshit and can't correctly diagnose disorders, or do anything about them. Oh well. I guess it's an improvement over PDD-NOS).
The concept is always the same: isolation, idiotically bad schooling or none at all, and constant violence against children.
I originally found this link 2 days ago from this HN discussion on the troubled teen industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30819756. I sat through and read the entire thing in one sitting. It's gripping and incredibly horrifying at the same time.
I read the entire comic two days ago, it left me disturbed and angry.
It's tragic to what humans are possible, and terrifying to see the results of countless studies in real life - abused for money.
I don't understand how the school could exist for so long, conditions were straight up evil - how did nobody publish that in a mainstream newspaper?
I read this last fall. It completely shook me. Even if the whole thing was made up, it's an extremely compelling read. I couldn't stop. Afterwards I went down an internet rabbit hole reading all about Elan. While it's thankfully gone now, I still can't believe schools just like it are all over the US at this very moment.
There's a few new entries to the comic that I should read, but I don't know if I can.
I went to a similar programme as a kid and then was horrified to see the same techniques at a rehab I attended as an adult. There have been some improvements, especially in the previously lawless states as Utah, but I'm certain there are still countless schools abusing students in the same or similar methods.
Horrifying read, kudos to the author for getting it all down there.
I can't help but think that similar yet broader tactics are in play with the way we are governed.
* Our reality is mediated for us by screens and education. These determine what we can conceive of. For our parents and peers too. This is under control of government+corporations.
* We defer to experts, are not 'discouraged' from individual opinions or from exercising free speech. Dissenting from acceptable opinion will mean being downvoted, de-platformed, labelled anti-vax, pro-putin, etc.
* Collectivised behaviour is encouraged, individuality, independent thinking is discouraged except in narrow bands - eg developing some software solution for a corporation, or art to help sell a product.
* Money is God.
* Personal verification of knowledge is pfff, impossible! so individuals have to accept the provided belief system, with experts mediating everything health, diet, even morality (ethics committees). Unverified and unverifiable science is our religion.
* Its acceptable to have corporations and governments owning your private data.
* This all perfectly normal.
* Etc
Anyway, I'm pretty sure we are all living in a cult - what we experience is not naturally unfolding. I also think we all know this too, but are in various stages of denial about the scope - it is far more comforting not to engage. Don't look within, don't try to know for oneself, heaven forbid.
This is horrifying. Can we be sure something like this isn't still happening? Are there people trying to help stop this kind of thing? I don't even know where to start.
Imagine the horrors of the Uighur reeducation camps. 10000x the scale but with rape and physical torture.
I made it only 20 slides into this comic. I didn’t have it this bad but it triggered memories of the high-control group (a term much better and more descriptive than “cult”) I used to be part of.
There’s definitely some tried and true methods of mentally destroying and controlling human beings.
Here's a lovely list of notable alumni, from their wikipedia page:
Notable alumni
> Tiffany Sedaris, artist, and sister of Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris. Tiffany's two years at Élan is cited in her sibling's writings and interviews as deeply traumatic to her, and a direct cause of her inability to form normal relationships with her family members. After decades of struggling with mental illness, Tiffany ultimately committed suicide in May 2013.[23][24]
> Michael Skakel, convicted in the murder of Martha Moxley. The case drew media attention largely because Skakel is related to the Kennedy family.[5]
> Ben Weasel, of the punk rock band Screeching Weasel.[13]
> Phil Williams Jr. died at age 15, after being forced to participate in the school's notorious boxing-ring punishment.[25]
One of my earliest memories of the internet was reading about Tranquility Bay, another similar school with the added bonus of being outside the US. It was absolutely mind boggling that kids could be kidnapped and abused for profit like that.
I first learned about the Elan "School" from this video by Nexpo [0], and later watched a documentary. I honestly couldn't believe how surreal the whole story was.
Lots of kids end up in places like these. Paris Hilton even ended up in a similar place where they abused the kids (as much as legally allowed). I'm not sure if it was as bad as depicted here, but it started off with what was essentially a legal (parent sanctioned) kidnapping by thugs from the school. I think her documentary mentioned she was around the same age when it happened.
I took a look around the site outside of the comics, and saw that there were a list of social media sites to share the content, with the Reddit entry containing a link to the author's reddit account. Curious to see what the latest updates were, I clicked on the link but saw that it was suspended – does anyone know why?
Im 10 pages in, taking a break because its too heavy ..
Random thoughts come to mind, given recent events, such as how a whole populace can be subjugated by regular abuse and misinformation .. and follow the whims of a despotic cult-leader. [ It strikes me most Russians have no idea whats going on in Ukraine, or are happy to pretend its not really happening. Why do millions have to have their lives uprooted by the decisions of one person ? ]
How many of us have the wherewithal to question the cultural rules we were brought up with, or the persistence to improve or change things, fighting a life-sapping bureaucracy ?
I fortunately live in a liberal democracy with excess food and security, with only first-world problems .. and yet .. it seems 85% of the citizens want action on climate change, while our elected leaders are hell bent on burning as much carbon as possible - so I have to ask, am I even living in a democracy ?
As a software dev, Ive been long thinking that almost all of our systems are far too centralized, and thus too brittle .. banking/currency/payments, social media, communications, food production, energy supply, politics, military, shipping/trade/transport, workplaces, education ..
yes, all of this is off-topic, but there are echoes .. we do have to keep re-remembering the Holocaust, because we are the same humans.
If you're in a similar boat: Elan School was apparently a behavior modification/"therapeutic" boarding school in Maine that engaged in some extremely controversial practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Élan_School
The comic is an autobiographical tale of a person that was forced to attend this facility against their will at the age of 16, ostensibly via kidnapping. It's really harrowing stuff.
EDIT: brevity