it discusses the Synanon cult that was born out of AA, how it related to MKULTRA and 60s psychiatric research, and how it birthed the modern troubled teen industry.
also i finally learned what the fuck Deleuze meant when he talked about rhizomes
I have a lot of experience with AA and it's not good. It used to be very cultish when Bill W. was alive and since it's become more decentralized but still maintains a lot of cult like approaches like being shunned for leaving the program, having to cut off family and friends who are active in addiction or not supporting of the program, and weird power dynamics between sponsor and sponsee that lead to things like sexual abuse. iirc the success rate of aa is real low, like single digits.
IIRC AA's success rate is about the same as people trying to quit cold turkey without any support whatsoever.See my comment below.I wonder how smart recovery or life ring is and how their success rate is? AA works for a very small minority of people it seems. What helped me with my three years of sobriety I had before was medication and therapy.
Looking into it further, either my memory was wrong or the thing I remembered was out of date. Pretty much every recent survey into AA finds that it's pretty effective - as long as you keep attending meetings.
Treatment of alcoholism includes some of the follow- ing interventions: aftercare telephone monitoring, regular medical checkups, participation in self-help groups, pharmacotherapy, attendance of the Outpatient Long-term Intensive Therapy for Alcoholics (OLITA) (OLITA program includes psychiatric care, cognitive-behavioral therapy, patient-centered psychotherapy and classical addiction therapy). The research shows that people who abstain for 3 to 6 months are more likely to achieve and maintain long-term abstinence.
SourceIt seems to indicate to me that the secret to success isn't the twelve step program so much as it is being constantly reminded that you're in recovery for addiction and having someone to talk to if you slip up. AA's effectiveness also doesn't invalidate other criticisms, like how the sponsor relationship can turn abusive, and how there are a lack of treatments for those who can't remain abstinent for 3-6 months.
The only positive thing I can mention about 12 step programs is the fellowship so that tracks.
The latest episode has a brutal fucking opening where they act out a session of the game.
yeah that shit was insane. how the fuck anyone gets put in that situation and enjoys it i'll never understand
Turns out when they really script out what they want to talk about in advance, True Anon is an informative, comprehensible podcast.
Trueanon is the bridge between chapo and citations needed, even the more riff-y TA episodes are more insightful than most chapo episodes
I 100% listen to Chapo for lighthearted vaguely-political entertainment. Occasionally they do have quality interviews, but I mostly just like the way they vibe together and they make me chuckle.
The last episode I caught was the one where they dismiss Settlers as paralyzing (third worldist stuff can be, for sure) but the funniest part was that none of them had even read it. They were just making guesses based on how the people they spoke to about it who had read it acted. Fuckin lol.
Although it's best to give something a good try before commenting, you can see the effect of some piece without reading the piece itself. Being about 70% through myself, it's not far off from how it's usually portrayed in leftist circles.
I think hexbear sent me here: https://elan.school/. Graphic novel about a troubled teen abuse camp stemming ultimately from Synanon. Content warning: this sent me into a funk for like a day.
Learning about the Elan School is a legitimate cognito hazard. Every time I think about it and get doomer about it all over again.
when I first read this I spend some time looking for existing schools within driving distance of me. incomprehensible this was/is allowed to exist.
I was cynical coming in because these child torture chambers are just American imperialism aimed back at the homeland, on a small and individually tragic scale. All the atomization and dehumanization of our country, perfected and performed on purpose.
Elan is despicable, but it’s nothing new.
I think it's the "individually tragic scale" that really activates my empathy. On a conceptual level of course shit like napalm bombing Vietnam or blowing up important water infrastructure in Iraq is much worse, but the story of a kid's parents signing him up to get a black bag thrown over his head and driven across country to be physically and emotionally abused for years feels like something that could have happened to me if things had turned out slightly different.
The sheer sociopathy that late stage capitalism encourages and permits in parents is revolting on a fundamental level.
The Elan School was like the worst of the worst, kids dying, fighting rings, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if it was being studied by some government institution while it was around.
Thank you! Read through it awhile ago and was waiting on updates. Then I forgot the address and title.
Wow I was up past midnight reading this while my heart accelerated, I have issues with ignoring “Do Not Enter” signs.
Been reading it for several hours now. I should have heeded the content warning, this story is all kinds of fucked up.
Its a little confusing, because I feel like Brace and Liz tried to really hype what amounts to a deeply personal story because it felt cathartic to them personally. From the outside looking in its not really clear why this is worthy of such a deep dive.
But Synanon is basically why Brace is who he is as a person. It would be like Peyton Manning doing a podcast tell all about the origins of the NFL. Or Pete Buttigieg doing a long-form piece on the history of the United States Army Ordnance Department.
I much prefer this deep dive than the few weeks they were randomly talking about Utah politics even setting aside the extra production they’ve been putting in this series.
The real problem with the Utah series, as they admitted, is they didn't even really know what they were looking into until they brought that Recluse guy back on to bend your ear for 2 hours about modern Mormon mythos. If they had known that is where they were going before doing 3 baffling episodes on the court case, or did one more capstone episode after that, it might have turned into one of the better episode arcs.
For sure for sure, just a bit of yes-and-ing you there.
perhaps I should have added a last line about how much of a difference it makes with a proper plan to tie it all back around.
I mean, everyone deserves a vacation. But I feel like this particular series was intended to be more personal than - say - the Elon series or the Utah series.
It reminded me a lot of what happen(ed) at Elan. You can look that up, there's a guy who does a sort of comic about his experiences there.
Something so fucking grim about the idea that, at least from what I have seen, the most "successful" brainwashing method is still literally just a systematically abusive cult structure where you isolate someone from reality, break them down as a person and then control their new reality. Even moreso than stories about like "yeah we stuck a footlong metal spike into a guys skull and shocked him to see how he'd react and he looked confused for a while then died".
And then not only that but the fact that again and again its been deployed seemingly for fucking profit, like yeah there are sickos getting pleasure from it but like every organization cant only be made up of sex sickos.
they both discuss synanon but TrueAnon's series focuses on how it formed the troubled teen industry, not so much the addiction rehab industry
