Word: synanon
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...techniques that Mount Bachelor allegedly uses, while unconventional, are not new. They are similar to the tenets of the once popular "human potential movement" of the 1960s and '70s, which purported to change people's lives through intense emotional experiences. The movement grew out of the practices of Synanon and other California experiments in utopian living, which later helped spawn so-called large group awareness training programs, such as LifeSpring...
...Synanon began as a drug-rehabilitation program before morphing into a controversial cult and is credited with putting forth the idea that confrontation and boot-camp-style breakdown tactics could cure teen misbehavior and addiction. Synanon's confrontational techniques influenced est and LifeSpring, which began selling weekend seminars designed to prompt emotional breakthroughs in participants...
Mount Bachelor's Lifesteps seminars appear to share these tactics and philosophy. Several of its top employees formerly worked at a now defunct chain of troubled-teen programs known as CEDU, which was founded by former Synanon members. "The process of breaking kids down is very much integrated into the therapeutic milieu," says Kat Whitehead, executive director of the Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth, an expert on such abuse, who has testified before Congress on the topic. "Unfortunately, that seems to be very common, at least in the private facilities...
DIED. CHARLES DEDERICH, 83, power-mad founder of the drug-rehabilitation program Synanon; in Visalia, California. Synanon, which combined spartan communal living and aggressive group therapy, was widely acclaimed in the 1960s but eventually disbanded in the wake of increasingly bizarre behavior by Dederich, who proclaimed his organization a religion and was convicted of conspiring to commit murder by placing a rattlesnake in an opponent's mailbox...
...regard happiness as an almost incidental by- product of living by the accepted values of hard work and family obligation, the Baby Boomers have relentlessly pursued happiness as an end in itself. Few found it in the dizzying array of self-help movements like est or cults like Synanon and Scientology, which proliferated like weeds in the 1970s. Nor was the sexual revolution the answer. "Casual encounters and open sex left most Baby Boomers with a sense of emptiness, of personal isolation and loneliness," says University of Chicago Psychologist Froma Walsh. The spread of herpes and AIDS...