This program is staffed by college students and under-experienced glorified secretaries and accountants, hired for their ability to somehow keep afloat a program which regularly consists of under five patients in all three levels of treatment combined. The staff run lectures based on internet printouts, during which they refuse patients' questions because they know they do not have sufficient information to answer our questions adequately. They regularly condemn patients who dare speak up about clear discrepancies in the program, particularly concerning the uneven enforcement of rules based on whether the patient in question is "compliant" i.e. sits down and shuts up regardless how outrageously incorrect is the information presented by staff members as "fact". The "bad" patients, i.e. those that dare challenge the "authority" of staff members whose major point of competence, as is regularly stressed to patients, is that "they do not have eating disorders"--which is hardly an accomplishment worth bragging about, let alone qualification to lecture to eating disorder patients about how to actually cure their illnesses. The program's primary method of "teaching" in fact is to blame residents for "not surrendering" to the program's attempts to "re-parent" residents, all of whom at least when I was there were of adult age. This is downright creepy, not to mention simply bad psychological practice; no other program practices these methods because the methods are outdated and ineffective. The program at times preaches the 12-step model, at times preaches an 'I hurt you because I love you' method of healing--at no time do they present a clearheaded, logical method for combating eating disorders. Additionally, the male staff member who was a new hire when I was at New Dawn was super creepy; he literally walked around the table to make sure, patriarchal father figure he clearly imagined himself to be, that we had all portioned ourselves the correct amount of food according to New Dawn's unnecessarily convoluted method of determining such things. Now, we had all put our portions together under the watchful eye of two staff members prior to this point, but CLEARLY he needed to walk around behind us all [CREEPY] again to make sure we hadn't, I don't know, conjured an extra roll out of thin air. Additionally, the impression in the program consistently was that the amounts of food we patients ate was far more important than anything we might have thought or felt about, well, anything at all; the program believed their job was to push us to eat the amounts they deemed correct for us, not to heal our minds of any beliefs we might have held which might have caused us to develop the eating disorder in the first place. My therapist, in addition to all the rest of the program's clear issues, was clearly under the impression that her job was to fix my personality rather than to help me heal my eating disorder; my treatment plan was almost three full pages long, single-spaced, yet had absolutely no mention of any of the issues I told staff that I was admitting myself to the program for.
Let's put it this way--I have never been diagnosed with a personality disorder in my life of four months- or years-long periods of treatment with four different psychologists and two different psychiatrists, nor was the New Dawn therapist in question diagnosing me with one, exactly..she had simply described in my treatment plan all the ways that she personally found my personality difficult to work with. To say this was inappropriate is an understatement; to say it is the height of unprofessionalism is the reality of the situation. A therapist has no business declaring that their patient's behavior must be changed not because it directly harms the patient or anyone else, but rather because the therapist finds it "annoying." I was literally told that I had difficulty handling my anger because after being literally told flat-out that the program heard my concerns but didn't give a crap about them, I was unwilling to smile at the staff members present for that meeting when I encountered them in the halls. What horror! What terrible behavior on my part--how dare I express the slightest hint of disapproval of any staff member of this most awesomely horrific of programs? This program's entire attitude held that if a patient had a problem with the program, well, that was just more indication that the patient had problems, not an indication that the program was doing anything wrong. Basically--patients were treated as undeserving of respect as though insanity is a side effect of eating disorders, which let me assure you, it is not. We were mentally functional adults, who voluntarily admitted ourselves to this program; rather than treat us as such, we were treated like wayward children at a strict boarding school who had been delivered into the hands of staff who believed that shaming us and verbally slapping us around were effective and perfectly reasonable methods of getting us to "behave" i.e. to do what the staff wanted us to because they wanted us to, rather than because they displayed any evidence of trustworthy behavior [they did not].
What the program was asking of us patients--that we trust staff members who regularly bullied and belittled us, as well as showing us other signs of disrespect--to do that, we would have had to be insane. Remember--this was a staff whose crimes against thier patients included staring at our breasts and dismissing our concerns with an air of superiority, thank you, Summer, for whom there are not enough insults in the English language to cover the depth of your failure as a human being at being one.
I wish I had never gone here.
I believe I deserve the program's bankruptcy on a silver platter for my troubles--but I will settle for no one making the mistake I did in believing that just because individuals work for an eating disorder treatment center, they must want to help people with eating disorders.
These staff member clearly do not.
