February 16, 2022 • 30 mins
Dr. Eugene Thorne is profiled as the leading psychologist at PCS with an affinity for behavior modification and control.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah. We had psychologists, psychiatrists on our team of expert witnesses,
and of course they said that this is an abuse
of practice and not a therapeutic practice. Uh, and that
that was the justification they gave. Um. The truth is
it was a way of another way of maintaining control
(00:21):
over the boys. Uh, similar or comparable to reading all
of their mail and sensory all the negative comments. They
wanted to control the boys completely. And I guess uh,
their theory was, these boys are severely damaged and we
need to completely remake them. From Heart Radio London Audio
(01:01):
and executive producer Paris Hilton, this is Trapped in Treatment,
exposing the inner workings of one teen treatment facility. Each season,
we're your hosts. I'm Rebecca Mellinger and I'm Caroline Cole,
one troubled teen industry survivor and one investigator on a
mission to expose the truth of an industry plagued by
controversy and to make sure that no child has to
(01:22):
experience the hell that is teen treatment. So in last
week's episode, we started to dive into the money these
facilities are bringing in millions of dollars annually to care
for these kids. It really begs the question what type
of care are they providing? So one of the issues
that you and I have seen as we've embarked on
this journey is that there's just really not a solid
(01:44):
understanding of what treatment is for young people. Right as adults,
we know that if we go to get treatment somewhere,
there's going to be a doctor, we know that it's
going to be based in evidence based practices, and there's
going to be a certain will of true mental health treatment.
But when it comes to these young people, that's not
(02:04):
always the case. And in this episode, we're about to
discover where this actually came from. So let's dive in.
And before we do so, I just want to warn
you that we are going to be discussing very sensitive topics,
so just over the course of the next few episodes,
please take care of yourself and listen with discretion. If
(02:44):
there was ever a Hollywood movie made about PCs, Dr
Eugene Thorne would be the evil leading character. He became
the director of pro Volcanian School, leaving an imprint of
aversive conditioning techniques that would become the hallmark of the industry.
Law in rooms for hours at a time, hooked up
to machines that they thought could read their mind. Doctor
(03:05):
Eugene Thorne was convinced that it didn't matter what the
root cause of bad behavior was, just that it could
be changed with the right tactics. Today we hear his
story as we dissect the background of one of the
most influential historical characters in Provo's history and his obsession
with the theory of behavior modification. Dennis Eugene Thorne Denny
(03:36):
for short, was born in the middle of three sons
in a middle to lower class family. He was a
difficult child, one prone to fights and running with the
wrong crowd. In the seventh grade, he was kicked out
of school due to a complete disregard for authority figures.
His attitude may have stemmed from a difficult home life,
which was crystallized by his parents divorce when he was
(03:58):
just twelve years old. A tough kid, he was left
to fend for himself. During his teenage years. He worked
on a series of ranches for a bit, getting into
fist fights and standoffs with locals before moving on to
the next opportunity. He eventually enrolled in the Air Force
at the age of seventeen, flying around the world for
the next few years. At twenty, he could hardly read
(04:21):
it about a third grade level, So when his aunt
introduced him to the Church of Latter day Saints and
he was able to read the entire Book of Mormon
without a problem, he took it as a sign from God,
a turning point. This is the moment that young Denny
became Eugene, a man of faith who even went on
to serve as a missionary. Eventually, he studied psychology at
(04:44):
Brigham Young University, a highly regarded local Mormon institution known
for turning out top psychologists. This is also where he
met and married his wife, Myrna, who was also fascinated
with the world of psychology and would later earn a
master's degree in special education. Interestingly, her thesis was titled
(05:05):
Behavior Modification Intervention Programs with Underachievers. During his studies at
b y U, Thorn became increasingly interested with hypnosis, but
would later shift his research towards behavior modification using aversive conditioning.
Over the course of several years, he became a professor,
eventually running the psychology department and sitting on the chair
(05:28):
of the board at b y U. He claimed Through
his techniques, he could treat a wide range of conditions
including ticks, twitching, hiccups, thumbsucking, nail biding, bedwetting, and sexual deviancy.
He was breaking boundaries in the field, focused on the
effectiveness of a verse of conditioning his treatment, even claiming
(05:49):
to cure a boy of a long case of hiccups
through electroshock treatment. He was obsessed with behavior modification theory
and the use of negative consequences and reinforcement to alter
human behavior. Behavior modification is based on the idea that
to create lasting behavioral change, good behavior must be rewarded
(06:09):
and bad behavior punished. Tactics such as isolation, physical punishment,
and mental stress are all methods used to try and
break the patient's behavioral patterns through force. We caught up
a doctor Reamer to discuss there are different definitions out there.
There's the field of psychology definition which is using you
know conditioning, you know BF skinner operating conditioning, classical conditioning.
(06:35):
That's behavior modification using rewards and penalties to shape behavior.
That's kind of the narrow difference. And there are many
programs that use behavior modification in a responsible way. So
I have visited programs that work with children who are nonverbal,
they may have autism. Left to their own devices, they
(06:57):
may engage in severely self harmon behavior, banging their head
against the wall until they give themselves concussions, scratching themselves
till they bleep, gouging an eye out. And I'm not exaggerated.
There are times when I think ethical, constructive behavior modification
may be necessary to protect these children. But then there's
behavior modification in the more vernacular sense of the term,
(07:21):
loosely defined without strict protocols. It's a program that says
on the website, our model is character education. But if
you pull back the curtain, staff believe the way to
modify behavior is by screaming at kids, labeling kids, calling
them names, threatening kids, disciplining them with segregation, isolation. They
(07:46):
call it behavior modification. I'm repeating myself. It's like anything else.
It's the same term. There's a right way to modified
behavior that I think meets the standard of care to
which I referred earlier. And there's a way to modified
behavior that so violent our understanding of the standard of
care regarding modification behavior that it's an insult to use
(08:08):
that phrase. It's abuse. Pure and simple, it's camouflaged as
behavior modification. How does behavior modification then relate to the
term aversive conditioning. So aversive conditioning, which is a behavior
modification term, historically has been used when, for example, a
child who's non verbal severe autism, like I described a
(08:31):
few moments ago, is engaging in self harming behaviors that's
can be life threatening. And there are some programs that
will apply a mild shock, an electric shock as in aversive.
There's some programs that have used spray bottles with water
as in aversive. So this has bear in a long time.
Some of it's controversial, some of it professional. That's not
(08:53):
my field, but some professionals say there are times when
we have to use aversives otherwise this kid is gonna
die or become brain damage. So there are some aversives
which meet standard of care in some narrow circumstances. But
then once again, there are, in my judgment, some horribly
(09:14):
abusive programs which may not use the language of aversive conditioning.
It may not be in their policy manual, their program manual,
it rarely is, but that's what they're doing. And if
this kid is going to talk back to the staff member,
in this way. If this kid is not going to
participate in group discussions, if this kid is going to
(09:35):
act out, we're going to show him whose boss, and
we're going to impose and this is the language negative consequences.
We're going to impose aversives. What are the aversives? Isolation, segregation.
You're not going to have regular meals in the dining room,
(09:57):
You're going to have peanut butter and the is it
that's in aversive? You were going to go on the
field trip next week. You're not going on that trip.
We were going to let you call your parents today.
We're not going to let you do that. We're going
to extend your stay. You don't like it here, you
continue to behave this way, We're going to extend your stay. Aversive, adverse, averse, aversive.
(10:19):
They might call it aversive conditioning. I don't think a
professionally trained psychologist would call that aversive conditioning. They would
call it abuse. We heard from myslive. It's in episode one.
(10:49):
The author of Help at Any Cost, how the Trouble
with Teen Industry calls parents and hurts kids. She agrees
that many of these programs, if you're far off the
path of basic conditioning. There are very few ways you
can terrorize a person into compliance without leaving marks. And
these are the same tactics you will see in trouble
team programs. You will see in quotes, brainwashing programs by governments,
(11:13):
and you will see in programs that UM basically our cults. UM.
So you disorient them, you make them feel powerless, you
make them feel that you're the only person that they
can get or the group is the only way they
can get relief, and compliance is the only way they
will be accepted. UM. You sleep, deprivation, food deprivation, isolation,
(11:36):
social humiliation. UM. All of these things don't physically leave
a mark. You might use, you know, exercise to the
point of exhaustion, stress positions, UM. All of these things
are incredibly stressful, and when people are under stress, they
sort of regress to more primitive areas of the brain
just to survive. And so you're not really ask apable
(12:00):
of abstract thought, you know, when you're being chased by
a tiger or where you're being put in one of
these incredibly stressful situations, and so you're not learning as
well as you do, you are not thinking as clearly
as you normally do, you'll tend to accept ridiculous ideas
in ways that you wouldn't normally do. Um, you just
(12:22):
got to survive it, right, And so it puts people
into this mode where the only thing they're trying to
do is like survive so they can get out of there.
So this sounds like torture to me. I mean, how
would you characterize this type of treatment? Yeah, I would
characterize certainly some of it um rises to the level
(12:42):
of torture, and some felt that's exactly what Dr Thorne
was doing. In ninety six, Dr Thorn teamed up with
Dr Reid Paine at Brigham Young University, Dr Thorne's alma mater,
to perform a series of experiments using a version therapy.
The team utilized a variety of now debunked practices intended
(13:04):
to cure homosexuality. One of the studies experimented on fourteen
gay male subjects to determine if using photographs of nude
men and women from Playboy type magazines was helpful in
electro shock therapy. These fourteen men participated in twenty two
(13:25):
shock therapy sessions lasting fifty minutes each over the course
of three months. Before the shock therapy sessions. Each participant
was required to sign a release form that informed them
that damage to tissue or organs may occur, and that
they would be looking at sensitive materials probably contrary to
(13:46):
their values a k A. Porn, and that b y
U would be released from any responsibility for any damage
done to them a psychology internet b YU name Ray
assisted in giving electric shock. We read his account of
would take place in these sessions. The volunteers would come
in three times a week. They would take electrodes to
their groin, thigh, chest, and armpits. There was another machine
(14:10):
that monitored their heart rate and breathing. If their vitals
changed when looking at homosexual imagery, they would turn a dial.
This dial controlled the electricity that would shock the young men.
Ray says they would start with a low current, but
from what he could see, it looked really painful. Electroshock
is a terrifying form of behavior modification and highlights the
(14:33):
cruel and unusual methodology behind Thorne's work. Only two years
after these experiments, Thorne became the executive director of pro
Vocanian School, bringing his homophobic and abusive practices with him.
Over the next several years, therapies that Thorne had researched
and upheld became the standard of treatment at PCs. Two
(14:54):
of these controversial therapies were isolation and polygraph testing. Young
boys and girls would be hooked up to machines with
nodes in a graph, watching the needle that would jump
whenever they lied. These practices had nothing to do with
therapy or healing. There were a method of control. The
damage done is far reaching. We had the incredible opportunity
(15:15):
of speaking with Mark Soler, an attorney who got an
inside look at pro Vocanian School during that time. He
had the chance to observe and interview many students. He
was particularly shocked by the use of polygraph testing. What
the procedure was at pro Vo Canyon School. When a
new boy was admitted to the school, they would put
the boy in a room at a desk with a
(15:39):
pad of paper and they would tell the boy right
down all of the bad things you've done in your life,
and they've give him plenty of time. And many of
these boys had been involved in minor delinquency and been
in trouble. The ones that were sent by Jugle Records
were sent there because they were involved as some kind
(16:00):
of delinquent behavior. But I saw the records of all
of the kids. There were no kids who were involved
in violent behavior, serious violence against persons. Most of the
boys there were boys who were from middle class families
who acted out as teenagers, and the parents got tired
(16:20):
of messing with their kids, and they wanted to do
something very similar to the experience that Paris had when
she was growing up. Um And so they would tell
that the boys, write down all the bad things you
have done. When the boys were finished and had made
their list, they would take the boys into a different room,
hook them up into a polygraph, and they would ask
(16:43):
the boys, have you confessed all of your sins? That's
a different question. It's a question that is inappropriate for
someone on a polygraph. I get a lot of research
in those days and learned a lot about polygraphs. There
are very good reasons why polygraph results are not admitted
into evidence in court anywhere in the country because they
(17:06):
are unreliable. They are polygraphs are especially unreliable on adolescence
because they are still in the process of growing. Uh.
Polygraphs use a variety of indicators galvanic skin response and
blood pressure and those things go up and down in
adolescence in ways that don't necessarily accurately reflect whether they're
(17:30):
telling the truth or not. But the experience was incredibly
traumatic for the boys. They all they knew from polygraphs
was this is what they do on television shows when
they have violent criminals and they're trying to course the
confession out of the criminals. They also the boys also
(17:52):
came to believe, where some of them came to believe
that the machines could read their minds because on some
of the matters, when the boy has said something, the
polygraph said they were telling the truth and it was true,
or that they were lying and it was true. Not
all of them, and they never knew exactly which were which,
but for some of them the polygraph did have an
accurate reading, and the boys freaked out. They thought this
(18:15):
machine actually could tell what they were thinking. Again, incredibly
emotionally uh and mentally traumatic for the boys. Imagine thinking
that a machine could read your mind. As a teenager,
every personal and private thought is now up for analysis,
already immersed in an environment where your privacy is at
(18:36):
bare minimum. To think that the staff could also see
inside your mind was inherently coercive and extremely intrusive. Nowhere
was safe. If a student refused to take the polygraph,
they would be punished and could not advance within the program.
Boys were subject to punishment not only for what the
polygraph revealed that they had done, but also for what
(18:57):
the polygraph showed that they thought about doing. The school
also used the polygraph to prevent the flow of any
negative information about the school. Boys entered into agreements and
even formal contracts with the school to obey the rules
and avoid negative thinking, which included saying bad things about
the school. We wanted to know why in the world
(19:19):
did they think that a polygraph was a therapeutic instrument
for troubled teenagers. And we took depositions of the owners
and uh Jeane Thorne became the spokesperson for the owners.
He was a clinical psychologist PhD level and he was
(19:42):
he became the spokesperson for the facility and he said
that he did it based on research. And we asked
who did the research and he said I did. And
I said where did you do to research? And he
said at Proco Cannon School. And we said, is there
anything published in any journal anywhere? In the world that
(20:06):
backs this up. And he said, no, my research is sufficient.
Dr Thorne was convinced that he had the answers. At
the time, he was racking up alcolades, writing books and
speaking on topics that few others in his field understood.
So he considered himself the expert, and as the executive
director at PCs, he answered to himself, and it wasn't
(20:27):
just polygraphs used to control the boys. There was isolation too.
The rooms are small and barren. They keep them cold.
This is a detail they failed to cover in the
parent handbook, a method they forgot to mention in their advertisements.
Solitary confinement goes by many names, solitary confinement, isolation, separation, segregation,
(20:52):
administrative segregation, uh, lots of other names, but it's all
the same thing. All of it involves involunteer early locking
up a child in a room. Generally the rooms are
uh eight by ten or smaller the rooms to give
(21:12):
you a perspective, the the usual room I see children
in solitary confinement measures about UM six by eight or
eight by ten. It's about the size of a parking
space in a shopping mall parking lot. If you looked
at the dimensions of the parking space. That's about the
(21:34):
size of the room that kids were in. And actually,
in Provocanyon School, the prescription rooms, the p rooms were
about half that size. These were not much bigger than
closets that the kids were put in also for the
very long periods of time. And we define in our campaign,
we define solitary consignment as any involuntary consignment of a
(21:58):
young people of young person in a in a locked
room for any reason other than as a temporary response
to behavior by the young person that immediately threatens the
health or safety of another child or the staff. In
other words, in other words, young people should not be
(22:21):
locked up in their rooms except when they are out
of control. There are young people who certainly get out
of control. They get very very angry. They may strike out,
they may get into a fight with another young person.
When that happens, there's nothing wrong with separating the two boys,
putting them in their rooms for a chance to calm down,
(22:41):
giving them a quiet place to be to calm down
is a very good way of addressing the situation. But
the key is as soon as they calm down, they
should go back into regular activities. In the program, and
what happens, what happened in pro Vocanyon School, and what
happens in lots of places around the country, is that
(23:01):
the young people, when they lose their temper, when they
get into a fight, they're put into their rooms for
a set amount of time. It might be four hours
or eight hours or a day. Sent to these rooms
for blocks at a time with no distraction or mental stimulation.
Solitary confinement is attacked to huston prisons, meant as the
(23:23):
ultimate punishment, complete isolation. Its use has been debated as
cruel and unusual. Anybody who wants to know what solitary
confinement is like, can you can do this in your
own home and get a sense of what it's like.
Go into one of the bathrooms in your home. Take
out the magazines and any other reading material, take out
(23:45):
the radio, take all the cosmetics and other things off
the counter, so there's nothing in there except you, and
put the seat down on the toilet and sit on it,
and set your timer on your cell phone for ten
minutes and sit there for ten minutes. It's very, very
hard to do. We are social people, by uh, we're
(24:08):
biologically social people, and we need to have interaction with
other people, and solitary confinement is a cruel way of
stopping us from having normal social interaction with other people. Isolation,
solitary confinement, such little social contact is bad for even
(24:29):
the strongest of us. So what about for a child.
We wanted to know what these tactics due to someone
over the long term. Here's Dr Reamer. What I've observed
is a teenager who struggles to begin with. You remember,
it's the vast majority of teams who end up in
these programs struggle. And I'm not blaming them. I'm just
(24:50):
saying they have struggled. That's how all this happened, not
their fault. That they have a biological inclination toward anxiety
or depression which interfered with their school work, which got
them into arguments with their parents and yelling and screaming,
and the kid ran away from home. And it turns
out the kid is depressed and anxious, and the kids
(25:11):
start self medicating with substances because here she hates their life,
and they end up in one of these programs. So
they come into these programs typically with all kinds of struggle,
and their behavior sometimes can be challenging. In these programs.
Not every kid is compliant, some are not, and so
staff sometimes react with what we've just referred to is aversives,
(25:34):
not in the professional use of the term reversives, with
the isolation, with the segregation, with the name calling, with
the screaming, with the hitting, with the deprivation. And here's
what I've seen over and over and over again, already,
fragile self esteem takes a nose diet. A lot of
these kids are not feeling great about themselves to begin with,
but now they've got the steady diet of unrelenting verbal abuse,
(25:57):
and they feel even worse about themselves. Suicidal ideation maybe exacerbated.
I've had my moments when I don't want to live,
but I really don't want to live because I hate
this the way I'm being treated, So increased depression, increased anxiety,
reduce self esteem, increased suicidal ideation. Cutting. I've met many
(26:18):
kids who, under this unrelenting verbal, physical sexual abuse will
start cutting for the first time or again they may
have been in remission. I've seen kids take paper clips
and they'll snap the paper clips so that the edges
are rough and sharp, and they'll scrape their arms until
(26:39):
they bleed horrifically because they're trying to cope with this abuse.
I know if kids have run away, if they're not
in a locked program. Most of these programs are not locked.
They're out of there. They climb out the window, they
run because they got to get out of there. I've
seen with some of these kids, either the onset of
or the exacerbation of substances because they're in so much pain.
(27:01):
And I'm not excusing this, I'm trying to explain this.
They are so miserable that they'll self medicate without truly
understanding the road that they may be embarking on with
the substance use. So the whole range of mental health
behavioral health challenges that struggling teenagers may encounter if they
(27:23):
are subjected to emotional, physical, sexual abuse that we know
has occurred in some of these programs, what they experience
pretty much the same list of mental health behavior health challenges.
With an exponent on steroids. The symptoms can be deeper,
that can be wider, and sometimes kids die as a
(27:48):
result lifelong emotional scars. When I watched the footage of
the interview in this is Paris where par Us and
her former program participants talked about the legacy of their
experience of Provo Canyon. There you have it, There you
(28:13):
have it. The legacy is long, it's deep, it's wide
abuse that teens experience in these programs at age fifteen
or sixteen. They talked about this at age six, at
age thirty five, and thirty six, some times times forty
(28:34):
six and on. It stays with that. We've all heard
the term PTSD. Maybe sometimes it's overused, but this is
serious post traumatic stress that's genuine. In the spring of
(29:04):
PCs came up against one of the largest battles it
would ever fight. A lawsuit filed by the a c
l U was begun on the testimony of two boys
who ran away, shackled at the ankles and desperate to escape.
Cathy Collard called me and said, we have a very
bizarre situation here. A young boy named Ken Rice escaped
(29:29):
from a school in Provo and went to the local
police station and went to the police and said that
boys are being mistreated, abused, and manhandled at the Provo
Canyons school. Next time on trapped in treatment
Yeah. We had psychologists, psychiatrists on our team of expert witnesses,
and of course they said that this is an abuse
of practice and not a therapeutic practice. Uh, and that
that was the justification they gave. Um. The truth is
it was a way of another way of maintaining control
(00:21):
over the boys. Uh, similar or comparable to reading all
of their mail and sensory all the negative comments. They
wanted to control the boys completely. And I guess uh,
their theory was, these boys are severely damaged and we
need to completely remake them. From Heart Radio London Audio
(01:01):
and executive producer Paris Hilton, this is Trapped in Treatment,
exposing the inner workings of one teen treatment facility. Each season,
we're your hosts. I'm Rebecca Mellinger and I'm Caroline Cole,
one troubled teen industry survivor and one investigator on a
mission to expose the truth of an industry plagued by
controversy and to make sure that no child has to
(01:22):
experience the hell that is teen treatment. So in last
week's episode, we started to dive into the money these
facilities are bringing in millions of dollars annually to care
for these kids. It really begs the question what type
of care are they providing? So one of the issues
that you and I have seen as we've embarked on
this journey is that there's just really not a solid
(01:44):
understanding of what treatment is for young people. Right as adults,
we know that if we go to get treatment somewhere,
there's going to be a doctor, we know that it's
going to be based in evidence based practices, and there's
going to be a certain will of true mental health treatment.
But when it comes to these young people, that's not
(02:04):
always the case. And in this episode, we're about to
discover where this actually came from. So let's dive in.
And before we do so, I just want to warn
you that we are going to be discussing very sensitive topics,
so just over the course of the next few episodes,
please take care of yourself and listen with discretion. If
(02:44):
there was ever a Hollywood movie made about PCs, Dr
Eugene Thorne would be the evil leading character. He became
the director of pro Volcanian School, leaving an imprint of
aversive conditioning techniques that would become the hallmark of the industry.
Law in rooms for hours at a time, hooked up
to machines that they thought could read their mind. Doctor
(03:05):
Eugene Thorne was convinced that it didn't matter what the
root cause of bad behavior was, just that it could
be changed with the right tactics. Today we hear his
story as we dissect the background of one of the
most influential historical characters in Provo's history and his obsession
with the theory of behavior modification. Dennis Eugene Thorne Denny
(03:36):
for short, was born in the middle of three sons
in a middle to lower class family. He was a
difficult child, one prone to fights and running with the
wrong crowd. In the seventh grade, he was kicked out
of school due to a complete disregard for authority figures.
His attitude may have stemmed from a difficult home life,
which was crystallized by his parents divorce when he was
(03:58):
just twelve years old. A tough kid, he was left
to fend for himself. During his teenage years. He worked
on a series of ranches for a bit, getting into
fist fights and standoffs with locals before moving on to
the next opportunity. He eventually enrolled in the Air Force
at the age of seventeen, flying around the world for
the next few years. At twenty, he could hardly read
(04:21):
it about a third grade level, So when his aunt
introduced him to the Church of Latter day Saints and
he was able to read the entire Book of Mormon
without a problem, he took it as a sign from God,
a turning point. This is the moment that young Denny
became Eugene, a man of faith who even went on
to serve as a missionary. Eventually, he studied psychology at
(04:44):
Brigham Young University, a highly regarded local Mormon institution known
for turning out top psychologists. This is also where he
met and married his wife, Myrna, who was also fascinated
with the world of psychology and would later earn a
master's degree in special education. Interestingly, her thesis was titled
(05:05):
Behavior Modification Intervention Programs with Underachievers. During his studies at
b y U, Thorn became increasingly interested with hypnosis, but
would later shift his research towards behavior modification using aversive conditioning.
Over the course of several years, he became a professor,
eventually running the psychology department and sitting on the chair
(05:28):
of the board at b y U. He claimed Through
his techniques, he could treat a wide range of conditions
including ticks, twitching, hiccups, thumbsucking, nail biding, bedwetting, and sexual deviancy.
He was breaking boundaries in the field, focused on the
effectiveness of a verse of conditioning his treatment, even claiming
(05:49):
to cure a boy of a long case of hiccups
through electroshock treatment. He was obsessed with behavior modification theory
and the use of negative consequences and reinforcement to alter
human behavior. Behavior modification is based on the idea that
to create lasting behavioral change, good behavior must be rewarded
(06:09):
and bad behavior punished. Tactics such as isolation, physical punishment,
and mental stress are all methods used to try and
break the patient's behavioral patterns through force. We caught up
a doctor Reamer to discuss there are different definitions out there.
There's the field of psychology definition which is using you
know conditioning, you know BF skinner operating conditioning, classical conditioning.
(06:35):
That's behavior modification using rewards and penalties to shape behavior.
That's kind of the narrow difference. And there are many
programs that use behavior modification in a responsible way. So
I have visited programs that work with children who are nonverbal,
they may have autism. Left to their own devices, they
(06:57):
may engage in severely self harmon behavior, banging their head
against the wall until they give themselves concussions, scratching themselves
till they bleep, gouging an eye out. And I'm not exaggerated.
There are times when I think ethical, constructive behavior modification
may be necessary to protect these children. But then there's
behavior modification in the more vernacular sense of the term,
(07:21):
loosely defined without strict protocols. It's a program that says
on the website, our model is character education. But if
you pull back the curtain, staff believe the way to
modify behavior is by screaming at kids, labeling kids, calling
them names, threatening kids, disciplining them with segregation, isolation. They
(07:46):
call it behavior modification. I'm repeating myself. It's like anything else.
It's the same term. There's a right way to modified
behavior that I think meets the standard of care to
which I referred earlier. And there's a way to modified
behavior that so violent our understanding of the standard of
care regarding modification behavior that it's an insult to use
(08:08):
that phrase. It's abuse. Pure and simple, it's camouflaged as
behavior modification. How does behavior modification then relate to the
term aversive conditioning. So aversive conditioning, which is a behavior
modification term, historically has been used when, for example, a
child who's non verbal severe autism, like I described a
(08:31):
few moments ago, is engaging in self harming behaviors that's
can be life threatening. And there are some programs that
will apply a mild shock, an electric shock as in aversive.
There's some programs that have used spray bottles with water
as in aversive. So this has bear in a long time.
Some of it's controversial, some of it professional. That's not
(08:53):
my field, but some professionals say there are times when
we have to use aversives otherwise this kid is gonna
die or become brain damage. So there are some aversives
which meet standard of care in some narrow circumstances. But
then once again, there are, in my judgment, some horribly
(09:14):
abusive programs which may not use the language of aversive conditioning.
It may not be in their policy manual, their program manual,
it rarely is, but that's what they're doing. And if
this kid is going to talk back to the staff member,
in this way. If this kid is not going to
participate in group discussions, if this kid is going to
(09:35):
act out, we're going to show him whose boss, and
we're going to impose and this is the language negative consequences.
We're going to impose aversives. What are the aversives? Isolation, segregation.
You're not going to have regular meals in the dining room,
(09:57):
You're going to have peanut butter and the is it
that's in aversive? You were going to go on the
field trip next week. You're not going on that trip.
We were going to let you call your parents today.
We're not going to let you do that. We're going
to extend your stay. You don't like it here, you
continue to behave this way, We're going to extend your stay. Aversive, adverse, averse, aversive.
(10:19):
They might call it aversive conditioning. I don't think a
professionally trained psychologist would call that aversive conditioning. They would
call it abuse. We heard from myslive. It's in episode one.
(10:49):
The author of Help at Any Cost, how the Trouble
with Teen Industry calls parents and hurts kids. She agrees
that many of these programs, if you're far off the
path of basic conditioning. There are very few ways you
can terrorize a person into compliance without leaving marks. And
these are the same tactics you will see in trouble
team programs. You will see in quotes, brainwashing programs by governments,
(11:13):
and you will see in programs that UM basically our cults. UM.
So you disorient them, you make them feel powerless, you
make them feel that you're the only person that they
can get or the group is the only way they
can get relief, and compliance is the only way they
will be accepted. UM. You sleep, deprivation, food deprivation, isolation,
(11:36):
social humiliation. UM. All of these things don't physically leave
a mark. You might use, you know, exercise to the
point of exhaustion, stress positions, UM. All of these things
are incredibly stressful, and when people are under stress, they
sort of regress to more primitive areas of the brain
just to survive. And so you're not really ask apable
(12:00):
of abstract thought, you know, when you're being chased by
a tiger or where you're being put in one of
these incredibly stressful situations, and so you're not learning as
well as you do, you are not thinking as clearly
as you normally do, you'll tend to accept ridiculous ideas
in ways that you wouldn't normally do. Um, you just
(12:22):
got to survive it, right, And so it puts people
into this mode where the only thing they're trying to
do is like survive so they can get out of there.
So this sounds like torture to me. I mean, how
would you characterize this type of treatment? Yeah, I would
characterize certainly some of it um rises to the level
(12:42):
of torture, and some felt that's exactly what Dr Thorne
was doing. In ninety six, Dr Thorn teamed up with
Dr Reid Paine at Brigham Young University, Dr Thorne's alma mater,
to perform a series of experiments using a version therapy.
The team utilized a variety of now debunked practices intended
(13:04):
to cure homosexuality. One of the studies experimented on fourteen
gay male subjects to determine if using photographs of nude
men and women from Playboy type magazines was helpful in
electro shock therapy. These fourteen men participated in twenty two
(13:25):
shock therapy sessions lasting fifty minutes each over the course
of three months. Before the shock therapy sessions. Each participant
was required to sign a release form that informed them
that damage to tissue or organs may occur, and that
they would be looking at sensitive materials probably contrary to
(13:46):
their values a k A. Porn, and that b y
U would be released from any responsibility for any damage
done to them a psychology internet b YU name Ray
assisted in giving electric shock. We read his account of
would take place in these sessions. The volunteers would come
in three times a week. They would take electrodes to
their groin, thigh, chest, and armpits. There was another machine
(14:10):
that monitored their heart rate and breathing. If their vitals
changed when looking at homosexual imagery, they would turn a dial.
This dial controlled the electricity that would shock the young men.
Ray says they would start with a low current, but
from what he could see, it looked really painful. Electroshock
is a terrifying form of behavior modification and highlights the
(14:33):
cruel and unusual methodology behind Thorne's work. Only two years
after these experiments, Thorne became the executive director of pro
Vocanian School, bringing his homophobic and abusive practices with him.
Over the next several years, therapies that Thorne had researched
and upheld became the standard of treatment at PCs. Two
(14:54):
of these controversial therapies were isolation and polygraph testing. Young
boys and girls would be hooked up to machines with
nodes in a graph, watching the needle that would jump
whenever they lied. These practices had nothing to do with
therapy or healing. There were a method of control. The
damage done is far reaching. We had the incredible opportunity
(15:15):
of speaking with Mark Soler, an attorney who got an
inside look at pro Vocanian School during that time. He
had the chance to observe and interview many students. He
was particularly shocked by the use of polygraph testing. What
the procedure was at pro Vo Canyon School. When a
new boy was admitted to the school, they would put
the boy in a room at a desk with a
(15:39):
pad of paper and they would tell the boy right
down all of the bad things you've done in your life,
and they've give him plenty of time. And many of
these boys had been involved in minor delinquency and been
in trouble. The ones that were sent by Jugle Records
were sent there because they were involved as some kind
(16:00):
of delinquent behavior. But I saw the records of all
of the kids. There were no kids who were involved
in violent behavior, serious violence against persons. Most of the
boys there were boys who were from middle class families
who acted out as teenagers, and the parents got tired
(16:20):
of messing with their kids, and they wanted to do
something very similar to the experience that Paris had when
she was growing up. Um And so they would tell
that the boys, write down all the bad things you
have done. When the boys were finished and had made
their list, they would take the boys into a different room,
hook them up into a polygraph, and they would ask
(16:43):
the boys, have you confessed all of your sins? That's
a different question. It's a question that is inappropriate for
someone on a polygraph. I get a lot of research
in those days and learned a lot about polygraphs. There
are very good reasons why polygraph results are not admitted
into evidence in court anywhere in the country because they
(17:06):
are unreliable. They are polygraphs are especially unreliable on adolescence
because they are still in the process of growing. Uh.
Polygraphs use a variety of indicators galvanic skin response and
blood pressure and those things go up and down in
adolescence in ways that don't necessarily accurately reflect whether they're
(17:30):
telling the truth or not. But the experience was incredibly
traumatic for the boys. They all they knew from polygraphs
was this is what they do on television shows when
they have violent criminals and they're trying to course the
confession out of the criminals. They also the boys also
(17:52):
came to believe, where some of them came to believe
that the machines could read their minds because on some
of the matters, when the boy has said something, the
polygraph said they were telling the truth and it was true,
or that they were lying and it was true. Not
all of them, and they never knew exactly which were which,
but for some of them the polygraph did have an
accurate reading, and the boys freaked out. They thought this
(18:15):
machine actually could tell what they were thinking. Again, incredibly
emotionally uh and mentally traumatic for the boys. Imagine thinking
that a machine could read your mind. As a teenager,
every personal and private thought is now up for analysis,
already immersed in an environment where your privacy is at
(18:36):
bare minimum. To think that the staff could also see
inside your mind was inherently coercive and extremely intrusive. Nowhere
was safe. If a student refused to take the polygraph,
they would be punished and could not advance within the program.
Boys were subject to punishment not only for what the
polygraph revealed that they had done, but also for what
(18:57):
the polygraph showed that they thought about doing. The school
also used the polygraph to prevent the flow of any
negative information about the school. Boys entered into agreements and
even formal contracts with the school to obey the rules
and avoid negative thinking, which included saying bad things about
the school. We wanted to know why in the world
(19:19):
did they think that a polygraph was a therapeutic instrument
for troubled teenagers. And we took depositions of the owners
and uh Jeane Thorne became the spokesperson for the owners.
He was a clinical psychologist PhD level and he was
(19:42):
he became the spokesperson for the facility and he said
that he did it based on research. And we asked
who did the research and he said I did. And
I said where did you do to research? And he
said at Proco Cannon School. And we said, is there
anything published in any journal anywhere? In the world that
(20:06):
backs this up. And he said, no, my research is sufficient.
Dr Thorne was convinced that he had the answers. At
the time, he was racking up alcolades, writing books and
speaking on topics that few others in his field understood.
So he considered himself the expert, and as the executive
director at PCs, he answered to himself, and it wasn't
(20:27):
just polygraphs used to control the boys. There was isolation too.
The rooms are small and barren. They keep them cold.
This is a detail they failed to cover in the
parent handbook, a method they forgot to mention in their advertisements.
Solitary confinement goes by many names, solitary confinement, isolation, separation, segregation,
(20:52):
administrative segregation, uh, lots of other names, but it's all
the same thing. All of it involves involunteer early locking
up a child in a room. Generally the rooms are
uh eight by ten or smaller the rooms to give
(21:12):
you a perspective, the the usual room I see children
in solitary confinement measures about UM six by eight or
eight by ten. It's about the size of a parking
space in a shopping mall parking lot. If you looked
at the dimensions of the parking space. That's about the
(21:34):
size of the room that kids were in. And actually,
in Provocanyon School, the prescription rooms, the p rooms were
about half that size. These were not much bigger than
closets that the kids were put in also for the
very long periods of time. And we define in our campaign,
we define solitary consignment as any involuntary consignment of a
(21:58):
young people of young person in a in a locked
room for any reason other than as a temporary response
to behavior by the young person that immediately threatens the
health or safety of another child or the staff. In
other words, in other words, young people should not be
(22:21):
locked up in their rooms except when they are out
of control. There are young people who certainly get out
of control. They get very very angry. They may strike out,
they may get into a fight with another young person.
When that happens, there's nothing wrong with separating the two boys,
putting them in their rooms for a chance to calm down,
(22:41):
giving them a quiet place to be to calm down
is a very good way of addressing the situation. But
the key is as soon as they calm down, they
should go back into regular activities. In the program, and
what happens, what happened in pro Vocanyon School, and what
happens in lots of places around the country, is that
(23:01):
the young people, when they lose their temper, when they
get into a fight, they're put into their rooms for
a set amount of time. It might be four hours
or eight hours or a day. Sent to these rooms
for blocks at a time with no distraction or mental stimulation.
Solitary confinement is attacked to huston prisons, meant as the
(23:23):
ultimate punishment, complete isolation. Its use has been debated as
cruel and unusual. Anybody who wants to know what solitary
confinement is like, can you can do this in your
own home and get a sense of what it's like.
Go into one of the bathrooms in your home. Take
out the magazines and any other reading material, take out
(23:45):
the radio, take all the cosmetics and other things off
the counter, so there's nothing in there except you, and
put the seat down on the toilet and sit on it,
and set your timer on your cell phone for ten
minutes and sit there for ten minutes. It's very, very
hard to do. We are social people, by uh, we're
(24:08):
biologically social people, and we need to have interaction with
other people, and solitary confinement is a cruel way of
stopping us from having normal social interaction with other people. Isolation,
solitary confinement, such little social contact is bad for even
(24:29):
the strongest of us. So what about for a child.
We wanted to know what these tactics due to someone
over the long term. Here's Dr Reamer. What I've observed
is a teenager who struggles to begin with. You remember,
it's the vast majority of teams who end up in
these programs struggle. And I'm not blaming them. I'm just
(24:50):
saying they have struggled. That's how all this happened, not
their fault. That they have a biological inclination toward anxiety
or depression which interfered with their school work, which got
them into arguments with their parents and yelling and screaming,
and the kid ran away from home. And it turns
out the kid is depressed and anxious, and the kids
(25:11):
start self medicating with substances because here she hates their life,
and they end up in one of these programs. So
they come into these programs typically with all kinds of struggle,
and their behavior sometimes can be challenging. In these programs.
Not every kid is compliant, some are not, and so
staff sometimes react with what we've just referred to is aversives,
(25:34):
not in the professional use of the term reversives, with
the isolation, with the segregation, with the name calling, with
the screaming, with the hitting, with the deprivation. And here's
what I've seen over and over and over again, already,
fragile self esteem takes a nose diet. A lot of
these kids are not feeling great about themselves to begin with,
but now they've got the steady diet of unrelenting verbal abuse,
(25:57):
and they feel even worse about themselves. Suicidal ideation maybe exacerbated.
I've had my moments when I don't want to live,
but I really don't want to live because I hate
this the way I'm being treated, So increased depression, increased anxiety,
reduce self esteem, increased suicidal ideation. Cutting. I've met many
(26:18):
kids who, under this unrelenting verbal, physical sexual abuse will
start cutting for the first time or again they may
have been in remission. I've seen kids take paper clips
and they'll snap the paper clips so that the edges
are rough and sharp, and they'll scrape their arms until
(26:39):
they bleed horrifically because they're trying to cope with this abuse.
I know if kids have run away, if they're not
in a locked program. Most of these programs are not locked.
They're out of there. They climb out the window, they
run because they got to get out of there. I've
seen with some of these kids, either the onset of
or the exacerbation of substances because they're in so much pain.
(27:01):
And I'm not excusing this, I'm trying to explain this.
They are so miserable that they'll self medicate without truly
understanding the road that they may be embarking on with
the substance use. So the whole range of mental health
behavioral health challenges that struggling teenagers may encounter if they
(27:23):
are subjected to emotional, physical, sexual abuse that we know
has occurred in some of these programs, what they experience
pretty much the same list of mental health behavior health challenges.
With an exponent on steroids. The symptoms can be deeper,
that can be wider, and sometimes kids die as a
(27:48):
result lifelong emotional scars. When I watched the footage of
the interview in this is Paris where par Us and
her former program participants talked about the legacy of their
experience of Provo Canyon. There you have it, There you
(28:13):
have it. The legacy is long, it's deep, it's wide
abuse that teens experience in these programs at age fifteen
or sixteen. They talked about this at age six, at
age thirty five, and thirty six, some times times forty
(28:34):
six and on. It stays with that. We've all heard
the term PTSD. Maybe sometimes it's overused, but this is
serious post traumatic stress that's genuine. In the spring of
(29:04):
PCs came up against one of the largest battles it
would ever fight. A lawsuit filed by the a c
l U was begun on the testimony of two boys
who ran away, shackled at the ankles and desperate to escape.
Cathy Collard called me and said, we have a very
bizarre situation here. A young boy named Ken Rice escaped
(29:29):
from a school in Provo and went to the local
police station and went to the police and said that
boys are being mistreated, abused, and manhandled at the Provo
Canyons school. Next time on trapped in treatment
Hosts And Creators
Paris Hilton
Rebecca Mellinger
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