The world is still dealing with leftovers from the abusive Synanon/CEDU-cult

December 2013 The Daily Mail published a story about an English mother who sent her daughter to a boarding school using CEDU methods. This prove that there still are boarding schools out there which use the methods invented at the Synanon-church and later used at the CEDU schools. The CEDU School closed around 2005 due to a number of lawsuits which would have cleaned the owners out if they hadn't closed the schools before the trials.

However former employees and a number of students who had learned to bully their fellow students during the marathon group therapy sessions formed new boarding schools. Officially they have modernized the methods used at CEDU, but testimonies from a number of students’ show that they still end up hurt emotionally and to some extend a number of them suffer from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

In the article the mother and daughter speaks of starting similar places in Europe. It had been tried and the authorities did shut the schools for good reason. In Europe our treatment methods are more developed. We do know that it is of no use to confront drinkers and even drug users before they are ready. We know that every person who suffers from some kind of abuse will reach a point in their life where they want to change.

I want to challenge that her daughter ever had a problem. We all lose people in our life. We lose parents, we lose friends, we lose co-workers, we lose children, and we have stillborn children. Farewell is a part of life. We learn to live with them when we gather as a family.

I believe that this mother had a problem she should have solved. Because she was a superwoman there was no family who could stand at the side of her daughter. So why then sent the daughter away? BECAUSE THE MOTHER WAS IN DENIAL!!! She neglected her position as a mother.

Teenagers drink. In Denmark where I live the law allows teenager to drink alcohol with the percentage below the safe limit of 16.5 Teenagers who drink are not the problem. Teenagers who don't and chose to stay away from their peer groups in school at the Friday bars in our high schools are the problem. They create alternative groups with alternative rules about morale and law. Before they realize it they have a criminal record.

She shouldn't have sent her daughter to the United States. She should have quit her job and found a local therapist for both her and her daughter so she could learn to parent again.

Normally I don't give a crap for therapist and social workers who speak of us as parents with a need for counseling and therapy. We are not only a result of our upbringing but also by culture, social heritage and our life experience. When you are aged above 30 you don’t need to learn new tricks.

But once in a while you find adults who are so focused on their career that they tend to avoid noticing what life tries to teach them and Nicola Horlick is one such woman. She put her daughter through hell and all she allowed herself to take in was a short list how to command her daughter around life a dog. A blog run by another human rights organization speaks of informing the social services about parents who exile their children abroad. Horlicks children are in need of protection from the social services so they don’t end up being outsourced to boarding school and wilderness boot camps whenever they try to live like normal teenagers do in England.

The school Horlick did choose was Carlbrook. It is one of the remaining schools using the CEDU system. I have made a link below where some of the former Carlbrook students provide testimonies. It is not fun reading and a reason while persons like me should continue to put a stop to such schools.


Sources:

• Multi-millionaire superwoman Nicola Horlick: The agonising day I let a 'Child Whisperer' into my home... to take my daughter to a US boot camp (and why her teenager Antonia says she was right to do it) (The Daily Mail)
• Factsheet about Wild2Learn (A CEDU alike program shut down in England)
• Testimonies from Carlbrook Students (Tales from the black school blog)
• Exiled and unwanted children (A blog about children exiled abroad by their parents)

CEDU - a legacy

CEDU existed from sometime around 1967 or 1968 to 2005. CEDU spanned almost 4 decades and the lessons learned continue to exist even today despite denial from various schools and programs. It wasn't happy lessons nor was they based on facts and research.


Above: Part 1 of the CEDU documentary by Liam Scheff

It was basically a scaled-up Stanford prison experiment. At a time even a serial killer had unlimited access to one of the isolated campus's and so far there are records of 3 teenagers who disappeared never to be heard from.

Each kid had a unique experience. Sometime praised the old saying which goes: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Some continued to live their life covered with the shadows of what they lived through while they were sent to CEDU.

CEDU was basically research into the unknown. They started out without knowing anything about the needs of teenagers. Over the time they accepted that some children needed medication. They accepted illness in general but they never learned what they were in the market for: To heal the problems children struggle with during their upbringing.

Now where CEDU has been closed for several years adults are starting to reflect about the missing years where they should have been discovering life instead of being held back in what was basically a B. F. Skinner box. There is now a documentary about CEDU in the market. A number of schools founded on the same principles have found themselves targeted by the authorities when it became too obvious that the so-called treatment hurt more people than it helped.

It is difficult to say whether we ever will learn the truth about what went on to the full extend. There are still many secrets to be revealed.

There are however one lesson to learn from CEDU. When it existed it seemed to hold the solution for many parents who face what many express as teenage rebellion. As it is with many thing which is considered to be too good to be true it was the case.

Whenever we hear of some who seem to hold the answers to basic things in life we must learn to distrust the happy messages and demand facts and proof.

There must never be a CEDU again.

Checking the staff

When you have minors in your care it is important to conduct background checks of the staff. Here in Denmark it is mandatory for even sport clubs to conduct such checks.

If you as manager for a facility or a program fail to have a policy about what kind of background checks employees must pass, tragedy might happen. One of our volunteers wrote a piece about recent findings at a boarding school in California:

A boarding school was infiltrated and children began to disappear

Outside Los Angeles there was once a boarding school for troubled teenagers.

It was founded by a person who worked with a cult.

He saw a market for toubled teenagers and he took advance of it. The methods used at the cult became the basis for modern so-called treatment of troubled kids across the United States.

The name of this school was CEDU.

Several of the cases we have on our Missing and wanted page in our Wiki Database are from the CEDU school in California.

Now we are talking of troubled teenagers. Most people would think that the children just ran off like it happened last week in Old Fort, North Carolina where two girls suddenly were missing from a camp.

But sometimes the truth is so much more awful.

Three kids officially disappeared from CEDU. They were:
John Christopher Inman, Blake Wade Pursley and Daniel Yuen

For many years people believed that they just ran away, but then the police started to investigate a certain James Lee Crummel. He had unrestricted access to the CEDU campus for decades. Based on evidence in another case he is now locked up, but will we ever learn whether the children made it off campus or their lives were cut short in the boarding school?

We must learn from this case. We must learn not to automaticly assume that a teenager missing is a teenager who has run away.

Background checks is almost impossible to do when you are a private business responsible for making profit to the shareholders. As a boss hiring staff you have to go with your feeling alone and they can trick you.