I've been reading about various understandings of the internal human experience and have reached a point where my own sense of reality is flickering.
I took a detour from my unraveling when an essay about Jung led me to a book review which led me to this graphic memoir about the Elan School.1
The Elan School was a private residential program for troubled teens, a group which includes people with mental health issues, intellectual disabilities, and addictions.
This “therapeutic community” was:
Based on an existing program hailed as a success
Developed by former participants working with credentialed experts
Operated in partnership with local social workers, education system, etc
Primarily run by the participants themselves
Home to a mix of indigent and wealthy residents
Elan was also a horrorshow of physical and psychological torture. It closed in 2011, after 40+ years in operation. It did not shut down because of abuse allegations. The school experienced financial problems after the original leadership team died of age-related illnesses.
There are so many safety regulations in place to prevent abuse, yet the story of Elan suggests they are ineffective.
There's the idea that the purpose of something is revealed by its actual outcome, regardless of its stated intention. It's clear that the purpose of abuse prevention regulations is not to prevent abuse.
An out of context Scott Alexander quote suggests a potential purpose of the regulations:
"Argue that the Democrats and the government are a jobs program for the upper class. All those Institutes For X and Public Service Campaigns For Y, all those regulations that require two hundred lawyers just to move a potted plant, all those laws that mean every company needs fifty compliance offers working full time just in order to not get sued, they're all a giant jobs program for college-educated people who refuse to work with their hands."
Or perhaps the problem is much deeper and older than our current political parties. Perhaps secretiveness and power hoarding is simply the nature of bureaucratic processes:
"once a bureaucracy has been created, it will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolise access to certain key types of information.
As Max Weber, one of the greatest German scholars of the later 19th and early 20th centuries, writes: “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret . . . in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism.”
Regardless of the real purpose for these safety regulations, the idea that they don't exist to keep people safe is not a new one. The story of Elan is not particularly shocking, coming after revelations about longstanding abuse in residential schools and religious programs.
Indeed, when someone suggests we address injustice by turning to the authorities through the official channels, my automatic response is something like “how quaint.” We were all taught in kindergarten that if we needed help we could turn to the friendly neighborhood police officer. Most of us learned long ago that this advice is not meant to be followed.2
I know that people whose faith in the authorities remains intact have not necessarily led lives of ease. Faith is not about intelligence or experience. The author of the memoir, Joe Nobody, is amazed when he calls the police to report child abuse and they don't care. He earnestly tries to come up with the evidence a skeptical journalist demands as a way to get rid of him. He sends unhinged letters detailing systematic abuse to all sorts of organizations he imagines will expose the truth and get the school shut down. In the memoir he remains shocked that no one did anything.
I am not shocked because I have been the person who opens those letters and puts them in the trash. This is also why I demanded Adrienne get rid of the 1-800 number we used to have. What am I going to do with all the people calling in a panic about the injustices they're facing? I have no power to step in and solve things for people.
Joe Nobody gave up on waiting for someone in authority to do something. He found others working to get the school shut down. He discovered a movement of people trying to stop the “troubled teen” industry. He teamed up with them. He came up with his own clever solution to rescue students from Elan.
Yes, those fifty compliance officers should spend their days preventing injustice. Yes, the police should take claims of systematic child abuse seriously. Yes, regulations should be used to protect the vulnerable, not protect entrenched systems of power. In the meantime, it's often the case that the faster we give up on the official channels, the sooner we can get to making progress.
I struggled as I considered what I would want to see in place to stop programs like Elan. As a program that was ostensibly participant led, Elan aligned with my suggestions for ethical programs based on my musing about Geel.
The way ‘students’ at the Elan school were socially isolated from the wider world was a red flag. However, parents did not understand the extent to which their communication with their children was being censored. Because these were ‘troubled’ teens, parents did not question that their communication needed to be limited, to keep them away from ‘bad influences.’
Perhaps it should have been obvious that students weren't able to speak freely because they were never alone with outsiders. With the extent of psychological manipulation involved, it's hard to imagine that interviewing students alone would be some magic solution.
It’s easy to read a memoir by a survivor and tell myself that I would have seen the signs. Given my IRL track record of seeing through deception, it’s harder to believe I would have. When I was trying to get my ex into a residential psychiatric program, I was so focused on finding literally any program that would take her that I didn’t even consider that I might be sending her to be abused.3
There need to be options for residential care. There need to be systems to prevent and stop abuse. Sometimes I wish I had the power to create a new system. In moments like these, when I'm humbled by how little I know and understand, I'm grateful that I don't have that responsibility.
Joe vs Elan School is a “graphic” memoir both in terms of being a non-fiction comic and as in recounting graphic violence.
Yes, this is an example of last week’s post about my problem with being patronizing.
If you’re curious, I was not able to find a program to send her to.