“I was 14 when I entered the TTI (Troubled Teen Institution). It started at a mental hospital, Herrick 3N, in Berkeley, CA. Where I will admit, I asked to go. My mom found a loaded pistol on the floor of my room while she was picking up dirty clothes. I had been kicked out of a fancy private school, stopped attending the local public school, and had recently enrolled in homeschooling. I had also been disappearing for days at a time, so much so that the cops got involved. I was not being very cooperative.
After a week in the mental hospital, where I witnessed patients being forcibly restrained for up to forty-eight hours in what they called the ‘Quiet Room’, I was told I would be going on a camping trip.
The camping trip was a wilderness program called SUWS, in Idaho. Where we hiked in circles for three weeks. At SUWS, a favorite line used by the staff who ran our program was, “It all depends on you.”
“How long are we hiking today?”
“Where are we going?”
“When can we take a rest?”
“Can we make camp?”
The stock answer was, “It all depends on you.”
Three weeks went by, at the end of the second week, going into the third, we had a three-day “solo,” where we stayed alone in canvas army tents separated from the rest of our group. We were supposed to sit there and read a book. I was given Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, The Little Prince, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, one of the three perennial hits of the TTI.
My tent was freezing. Someone before me had smeared feces on the inside. I crafted a noose out of the nylon webbing they gave and tried to hang myself, but I did not know that a proper hanging required a drop to break the neck. I ended up making myself faint.
A week later, it was over. They put me on a plane back to San Francisco, other people in my group had their parents there to meet them at the end of the program, but mine were not there. No big surprise, our relationship was already basically destroyed.
When I got to San Francisco Airport, my parents were there to meet me. They told me I would be taking the next flight to Redding, CA, to go to a boarding school. I was made to be thankful that this boarding school would accept me because I had gotten myself kicked out of the fancy boarding school just a few months earlier. These people were going to give me a second chance!
I got to Redding, where I was met by an escort, who was surprisingly nice. He took me to KFC, we got a couple of buckets, watched TV, then I went to bed. He drove me up the hill to Cascade School the next day, May 5th, 1994.
My move-in was pretty painless. I had been to two boarding schools before, getting adjusted to new environments was old hat. What I was not prepared for was the next day after class when I went to my first “forum.”
A “forum” is a group therapy session where participants are encouraged to “run anger”—scream at the floor—and ‘indicted’ one another—scream at each other for perceived slights, personal issues, attitudinal differences, you name it. After a short check-in, the forum went off with fellow students crossing the room to yell at one another. It was one dogpile after another. When an indictment came to a close, the indicted was encouraged to run anger.
Running anger is not pretty. There are tears, snot, spit, and blood flying. Other participants kick Kleenex boxes at people who had finished running anger. In my first forum, over half the room was indicted by the other half in no particular order. The indicted could easily turn around and indict others. I had never seen anything like it before. I started crying. When the smoke cleared from the indictments and running of anger, I was still sobbing in my seat. The “facilitator” of the forum, an adult, asked me what was wrong.
“I’m scared,” I said, “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is crazy.”
The other students smiled and chuckled darkly, knowingly. Later on, in my stay, I would smile and laugh similarly when a new student would cry in their first forum.
I stayed at Cascade for 26 months. I went through their whole behavior modification program. While I was there, I went through various stages of being punished and being given privileges. At times I was able to go into town to watch movies and eat at Chevy’s. At other times I was not allowed to speak to over three-quarters of the student population. I had times when I could run the library at night and others when I was put ‘on bans’ (not allowed to have or read) with books because they were an “escape.”