#like all i have left is this snot that should be cured by a lil night time sleepy sleep | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

placesthatchangedpeople · 5 years

Text

A former resident about Eating Recovery Center

Hi! I'm new here. I've procrastinated for ages wrt joining reddit because I generally don't like it very much, but some communities speak to me. This is one of them.

The place I was sent to wasn't as bad as some of what I see here, I think because it was (purportedly) single-issue, rather than "treating" all kinds of teen trouble. They were hand in hand with wilderness camps and boarding schools, though. Their marketing directors - the people who gussy up the website and advertise their 97% parent satisfaction rate - were trained by, and have past experience at, CRC Health. They run Aspen education programs, and a whole bunch of other ones. They regularly sent kids off to wilderness camps or schools after they finished with ERC. It was like the "next step".

The place that I was was called Eating Recovery Center (ERC) and it's located in Denver, CO, although they have off-shoot locations in Texas, California, and more. They do have an adult treatment center as well, but I believe it is less abusive.

The child and adolescent inpatient and residential facility is awful, but incredibly popular. They've spread to something like ten states, luring families in with their garbage website. The whole thing is written like "Parents, you're so stressed, and it's because your child is a Gigantic Problem. We know how hard it is to have horrible kids. Please, send them to us, and we'll rehabilitate them while you get to relax and connect with the fun parts of life, which you haven't been able to do with your lil problem child over here." It's marketing genius. Whenever a kid says "hey, this is abusive", not only do they say that the kid is a dirty liar who just wants to leave, they actually say that this is proof that it's working. Like, "Your child has been taken prisoner by their Evil Disorder. As we cure your child from the Disorder, the Disorder gets scared and lashes out. Your true child is waiting underneath, and they're very excited to be healing. The more that your child fights our program, the closer to recovery they are. Claiming that we are abusive is, in fact, a sign of recovery." That's a summary, but you get the gist. It's like a god damned exorcism.

I was a patient there in 2013, in September. I wasn't there for long, because I made a fuss about their abuse, and I was 18 and they knew they couldn't fully shut me up, so they transferred me to a lower level of care. They did, however, convince my parents (who, to their credit, were just desperate and didn't want me to die; they've since acknowledged that they fucked up) that if I signed myself out of treatment, I should not be allowed home, and should be left to live on the street. The idea, I think, was that this would "shock" me into getting better. Yet they (the RTC staff) also told me that they didn't care if I was any better when I left so long as I followed their rules in the meantime. But, details. So.

They were emotionally and psychologically abusive, as well as neglectful and I'd say perhaps physically. Psychiatrically, too. The shittiest thing they did, in my opinion, was lock my twelve year old friend in isolation for 14 hours as punishment for exercising (I do not know how much she'd been exercising, but since this place considers standing up from a seated position to be 'excessive movement', it was probably nothing - standing up without permission was considered an infraction). She wasn't allowed so much as access to a bathroom, and wound up defecating on herself. Staff didn't see this as a problem. They told her it was her fault, and that she needed to make better choices.

The threat of isolation as a punishment for ignoring behavior warnings (three "redirections" and you're punished) was always there, and this room was called the "quiet room", if I remember correctly. During my stay there, there was one patient who was eleven years old and had some sort of developmental disability, and they kept him in isolation for what I think was days. I remember that he regularly wound up in there and that we could often hear him crying and screaming. How therapeutic /s

Patients were given NG (nasal gastric) tubes if they refused a meal. I had an NG tube put in, which didn't bother me very much, but it made my nose run like no other and made it really hard to swallow solid food. It wouldn't stop dripping during nighttime snack, but we weren't allowed Kleenex or napkins. I asked a staff member for a napkin due to literally not being able to stop the deluge of snot from my nostrils, right, and she kept refusing and said she wouldn't help me until I finished my snack. I kept asking and eventually, she gave me a really bitchy look and threw the napkins at my face. This isn't particularly abusive, I think, because napkins don't hurt, but that's just not the kind of behavior that should be shown by somebody working in a treatment facility. The staff would regularly scream at kids who didn't finish snacks or meals.

I, along with several of the kids, regularly didn't finish meals. And by regularly, I mean over the course of my first day or two, so not much of a precident, imo. This issue was brought up after dinner, when the group gathered for a post-meal check-in. Patients were encouraged to name the patients who were not finishing meals, explain how said patient was bothersome to them, and then the staff would shame the patients who were named, and ask the other patients to help come up with an appropriate "response" (punishment). The staff decided that we should be made to sit at a separate table, in a separate room, during meal times, and not be permitted to speak to each other, nor communicate in any other way. If we made prolonged eye contact or started giggling, we were reprimanded. Talking at meal times was one of the ways that patients coped with having to eat large meals, and it kept morale up, and they took it away as a punishment. It certainly doesn't make anyone eat better. When we had downtime, we were closely monitored so that we never discussed our grievances re: the program, with each other. We managed to anyway, by whispering and speaking as quickly as possible, by writing notes which we then had to dispose of (since they went through all of our belongings and journals, and withheld these things whenever they arbitrarily deemed them inappropriate - my journal was confiscated because I wasn't displaying the proper mindset). But staff were always looming, and it was stressful.

I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure that I wasn't allowed contact with my parents for the first three days of my stay. I could be conflating it with some other hospital or center, but I don't think so. All parents of patients were encouraged to stay in the Denver area for as long as possible, and my parents rented a condo (while also forking out some $30,000 per month) and came in for family therapy a couple of times a week. Family therapy consisted of my "therapist" (she was licensed, but I've no clue how) encouraging my parents to complain about me, and when I said that I didn't like something my parents had done, she just said, "well, I don't think they're doing that. That's not what I see at all. Maybe you should change your behavior/perception/etc." She gave me these ridiculous assignments a few times each week, and I never completed them, because they were stupid and I was on Mission: Get Myself Kicked Out of Here, but I found the way she handled this to be a red flag. She was /so/ disappointed that I hadn't done the assignments, and looked at me all sad, and said "[name], that hurts me. It hurts me when you ignore these things that I've worked so hard on for you. I want to help you. This is hurtful, can you see that?" The fact that she was so manipulative without a single qualm really worries me, because the majority of the patients were younger and less defiant than I was, and bought into all of the brainwashing and manipulation that these people touted.

The majority of them came from abusive homes, but the RTC's whole philosophy is that mental illness treatment has been centered on parental flaws for too long, that parents are perfect, and that kids are bitchy little problems for no good reason. This is a tempting philosophy both for parents like mine who aren't abusive and don't want to be told that they are, and for abusive parents who want to be validated and excused.

Everyone there was deprived of sleep (I used to fall asleep on the concrete floors), water (only one cup with meals), and the right to use the bathroom when we needed to. Staff actually bragged about having had patients pee on the floor before, like this was some kind of accomplishment, not letting children pee.

The psychiatrists would keep children on medications that the children complained about, things that didn't help, and I was personally fine with my meds but I had friends who were being kept on awful medications. They eventually just started doing that thing where they move the pills to that little pocket between their teeth and cheek, swallow the water, pass the "swallowed pills" check, and then spit them out.

Somehow, at one point, the staff got it into their heads that I wasn't changing my underwear every day. I have no clue how this happened, but they implemented a policy where I had to show them my clothes each day so that they could "make sure" I was changing all of them. Like, what? That doesn't even make sense to me, because wtf, but it was just really degrading. This might be slightly TMI, but when I was on my period (and I have endometriosis, so it's really heavy and makes me nearly pass out/vomit when I'm not on 'round the clock birth control), they still wouldn't let me use the bathroom except on Their Schedule. I had to beg to be allowed to use it, and they got so mad at me. Like, sorry? I can't actually do anything about this?? That was really degrading too. As if I wanted to tell a whole bunch of hostile, abusive near-strangers that I'd bled through my clothes again, damn.

I don't remember ever having a phone call. I saw my parents on weekends for an hour, but there wasn't much communication. When they kicked me out of residential and put me in partial hospitalization (a ten-hour-a-day every day outpatient program in a nearby building, also run by them - it was a "step down" thing), they told my parents to never let me have my cell phone for longer than thirty minutes, and to watch me (and its screen) the entire time I had it. To go through all of my electronics and journals to make sure I was Doing It Right. They told my parents that withholding everything I enjoy until I recovered was completely reasonable, and that it was okay (even good) to kick me out on to the street if I was noncompliant. Hilariously, I'd nearly been sold into sex trafficking not two months before I went to ERC, when I was 17, and I'm like, y'all, if you'd kicked me out I'm absolutely sure I would have been trafficked for real. Like, damn, talk about a bad idea. The whole reason I developed the eating disorder, self harm, suicidal behavior etc was because I was sexually abused as a kid, but we weren't ever allowed to discuss anything of any real import in therapy groups, and anyway, I was just A Problem Child, not traumatized /s

To this day, I still can't handle the word "manipulative". I use it very occasionally myself, but for the most part, seeing it used to describe anyone just makes me bristle. Even genuinely manipulative people. I just can't handle it. I was branded as manipulative so many times just for hurting and wanting real help.

I know that most other patients there went through worse things than I did, but I don't know the extent at all. It seemed like the younger the kid, the worse the abuse. Some of the young kids were able to quickly adapt and become The Perfect Patient, but those who didn't, got it bad.

I'm glad that I was relatively lucky (a three month stay, a somewhat less abusive center, being older). But all of these places just piss me off so much. The general public knows nothing about it. I've lurked on this subreddit before and finally decided to bite the bullet and post on it. I know my RTC experience wasn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets, but it still screwed me up for a long time. Luckily, I'm 100% mentally healthy and happy these days, but it took a lot of work and was only ever made worse by ERC and abusive therapists like them.

#Colorado #Eating disorder

3 notes · View notes