Word: synanon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...psychiatrist friend once told me that in therapy, as in show business, you gotta have a gimmick. Howard Lester's Children of Synanon keyed on The Game, a nebulously-defined situation in which a circle of adults and ten-to fourteen-year-old kids were supposed to get out front through continuous verbalization. Warrendale has the "holding session," which is spoken of as a physical vet loving restraint in which hostile feelings are "worked out." But since these holding sessions mean holding down every one of a child's limbs, physically demanding immobility, it's hard to see exactly...
...look at it as an infectious disease." Epidemic, of course, is a relative term, but as a Chicago psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Schwarz, says: "Now we're seeing it clinically, whereas before we weren't. The kids on heroin all have long histories of drug use." At the California-based Synanon self-help centers for addicts, the teen-age population has risen from zero five years ago to 400 today. In San Francisco, Dr. Barry Ramer, director of the Study for Special Problems, calls heroin now "the most readily available drug on the streets." He adds: "In my wildest nightmares...
...drug. And it is moving so fast that it is different this year from last year." The traditional barriers between much of society and the users of such hard drugs as heroin, cocaine and morphine are collapsing. "Heroin has become respectable," says Mrs. Harriet Benjamin, a worker at Synanon in Santa Monica, Calif. "The image of the dirty old man in the schoolyard is dead." Ten years ago, middle-class high school kids looked down on heroin users; now it has shed the fear and the lower-class taint. Heroin users are no longer an exclusive club. Heroin is part...
...most accepted means of dealing with the drug addict is through a small, controlled therapeutic community. These residential communities first detoxify, then attempt to rehabilitate the drug user by restructuring his eqo and life pattern. Some, like California's famed Synanon, are run largely by former addicts. They accept only those who have proved their determination to kick the heroin habit, and seek to increase the addict's understanding of himself and his problems through often brutal group-encounter sessions. Others, like New York's city-run Phoenix and Horizon Houses, utilize both ex-addicts and professionals...
...months for an individual. Though those who leave the communities often return to narcotics, most of those who complete the programs stay on. forming a cadre to help other addicts through the ordeal of rehabilitation. A few go on to form similar communities. More than five Synanon chapters have sprung up across the country since Synanon was founded...