As a part of this blog – I wish to include a variety of folks’ personal experiences. Here is one. The following was a well written recount by a fellow named Ian Morris, regarding his experiences in 12 multiple Step Rehab. I know Ian via a support group for those who have left AA. Much of what he says myself and others have seen. The following is his experience…
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I am willing to be on film to discuss the ways in which the six rehab facilities I was in were harmful. I have already written in Leaving AA on Facebook about how I believed in God before I sought professional help for my alcohol abuse, and how each rehab whittled further away at my faith until now I see people who proselytize as being harmful.
The first point to be made is that all rehabs I went to were centered in 12-step philosophy, which meant that they were pushy about me believing in a Higher Power. The Big Book has granted so-called counselors the semantic legerdemain of claiming that AA works with spirituality, not religion. This is used to disguise the fact that all 12-step organizations are rooted in cult-like devotion of bad religion; most people who have faith in a religion do not have to engage in the emotional self-flagellation demanded by 12-step groups. Also, the claim that AA is spiritual and not religious allows 12-step organizations to do an end-run around the Constitution which expressly forbids any organization which receives government funding to respect an establishment of religion; I hope this film will be a step in the direction of ending the practice of courts of law sending people who have been convicted of crimes to rehabs rooted in AA.
The six rehab facilities in which I voluntarily interred myself (I have never been arrested, and no court of law has ever told me to go to rehab) are all in Florida: the psychiatric unit of Health Park Medical Center in Fort Myers; Darryl Strawberry Recovery Center in St. Cloud; The Kimberly Center in Fort Myers; Harbor Village Detox in Miami; Detox of South Florida in Okeechobee; New Direction in Miami.
I will address how each of these places were harmful to those of us endeavoring to get past substance after addressing a few constants of abuse in each place. One is that, with the exception of Health Park and New Direction (maybe), each of these places are bilking insurance companies; each one is harmful because their profit motives are based on not only bringing more people in but also making sure that people are getting fake help instead of real help so that there are repeat customers which makes the owners of each of these places richer. I was mailed a statement of my time at Harbor Village, and my insurance company was charged $1,000 per day for the time I spent there (nearly a month). The same is true of the other private rehabs, and this is a common problem in Florida. https://www.motherjones.com/…/opioid-epidemic-rehab-recrui…/ Also, all of the private rehabs are funded by Big Tobacco and smoking is heavily encouraged. I have not smoked since 2013, but private rehabs in Florida justify encouraging inmates to smoke by saying that it gets them away from alcohol and illegal drugs; this is merely switching one drug for another, and quitting alcohol to take up nicotine is a lateral move at best. Also, all six of the places I went to pretended to give mental health services to inmates, but our access to psychiatrists and psychologists is very limited and mental illnesses are treated as character flaws. I have been declared disabled by a court of law primarily for my psychiatric illnesses, and also for my physical disabilities. When I am told that I must learn to be more social after being diagnosed as autistic, or told that my major depressive disorder is really stinkin’ thinkin’, or told that I must toughen up from my PTSD, counselors were doing more harm than the good they pretended to; each of these is a fake solution to a real problem. Also, counselors would ask me about my physical disability in the hopes that my alcohol abuse caused it and they would be disappointed when they found out that none of my physical disabilities could be my fault. Also, neither my mental illnesses nor my physical disabilities will go away with prayer; too many people told me that faith and prayer could cure me, and that my illnesses and disabilities were my fault for not having enough belief. This was integral to how I lost faith.
On Sept. 22, 2016, I left my home for a domestic violence shelter in Fort Myers; I went there after asking the marriage counselor where to go because my wife was becoming increasingly abusive, and I was scared for my safety. While at the shelter, I told my social worker that my drinking had risen to the point that I was clearing two bottles of whiskey per week. She said that I would need to seek professional help for that, and I agreed to volunteer to go to the psych unit at Health Park. When I went in, I was brought to a desk where a woman interviewed me and asked me if I was sure I wanted to go in (most people who enter a psych unit to so involuntarily). I said that I did volunteer to go in, on the advice of the social worker, and I understood that I would not be allowed to leave for 72 hours. AA philosophy is the primary source of “help” among the employees of that section.
The morning after I arrived, I was interviewed by a counselor who told me that I was an atheist (I was not) because of my clearly very high intelligence (my I.Q. is in genius range, and it shows), and that I would need to learn to have faith in a Higher Power. He assumed that I was an atheist because of the stereotype that highly intelligent people are atheists; already, I was being subjected to prejudice. I also saw that arguments in favor of 12-step thinking are based on lack of respect for facts and logic. I was labelled an “alcoholic” despite the fact that alcoholic does not have any scientific definition; I have been diagnosed with alcohol use disorder, and I accept that. Being labelled “alcoholic” means becoming a second-class citizen, because an individual is no longer allowed to engage in independent thought, nor allowed to have mental privacy, nor allowed to make decisions for herself/himself. AA, CA, and NA meetings were mandatory at 6 p.m. each day. Group leaders and speakers would call us out with accusations (often false) to ask us personal matters which are none of their business.
Part of the reason 12-step philosophy is a cult is because it is rooted in the idea that someone with a history of substance abuse must change all aspects of their lives, from faith, to being pressured to trust amateur strangers with our secrets, to inquiries about our sex lives, to all manner of other personal matters which have nothing to do with substance abuse. I learned that each person in a mandatory 12-step meeting is presumed guilty until “proven” guilty based on nothing more than the circular logic of AA. I also learned that pointing out logical flaws is called “intellectualizing” which is considered a defect of character; facts and logic do not matter. If someone asked a leading question, and I pointed out that it was invalid, I would be accused of intellectualizing. If I were asked a question which required the answer to include an unfair onus probandi on me (e.g. asking me to prove a negative such as “how can you prove you won’t drink in the future?”) and I pointed out that the question was invalid, I was accused of intellectualizing. If I presented an argument and dismissed with the ad hominem argument that I’m and “alcoholic” and I pointed out that this was unfair, I was accused of intellectualizing.
After my mandatory 72-hours were up, the employees were faced with two problems they could have cleared up earlier by asking me simple questions: 1) I had already detoxed myself before coming in (I had spent 5 days in the shelter); 2) they wanted to release me to IOP, but they could not legally do so since I was homeless. Ergo, they were required by law to keep me there (which was fine with me; I was in a safe place and fed regularly) until they could place me in residence in a rehab. After seven days I was sent to Darryl Strawberry Recovery Center for a 28-day stay (and they did not care about the fact that I would be homeless afterwards).
Darryl Strawberry Recovery Center, being a private facility, can get away with being more draconian than a hospital. We were required to go to meetings all day, and we would be told nonsense such as our permanent state of addiction (once someone is labelled an addict, they are a second-class citizen for life) was a result of our character flaws and could be treated only with life-long faith and devotion to a Higher Power and by getting a sponsor. A sponsor is a rank-amateur “counselor” who is allowed to dictate all aspects of an “alcoholic’s” life and who is allowed to all secrets that person holds. I pointed out in a meeting that a sponsor, someone to whom an “alcoholic” must give cult-leader-like devotion and from whom a person cannot hold any secrets is basically someone given social license to steal from a sponsee; a crowd of people told me that I should not think like that, but we have seen so many examples of abuse (sexual, social, financial, etc.) from sponsors that this is clearly a widespread problem.
Everyone who went to Darryl Strawberry Recovery Center met the baseball legend himself. He is quite charismatic. He is also full of shit when he says he wants to help addicts; that was painfully obvious by his approach to us when I was at the facility in 2016; I just checked with the facility, and it is now called the Blackberry Recovery Center, and Darryl Strawberry is no longer involved. The fact that he is no longer involved is not surprising. He handed out copies of his autobiography Straw to every “patient (we were called patients)” but told that we could only get them autographed if we read the book; on his next visit I proved that I had, and I was the only one who got an autograph (woo-hoo!). In his book, Mr. Strawberry outlined how many times his current wife had to hunt for him at the crackhouse, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she had to do it again. Mr. Strawberry also attributes the times he has cheated on her and his previous wives to his claim that he is a “sex addict” when he is really an adulterer. I left the Darryl Strawberry Recovery Center on Oct. 31, 2016; another person was supposed to leave with me, but she looked quite distraught on that day as she clearly had been told that she would not be released (like all rehabs, the DSRC kept our wallets and phones in a safe so we could not leave of our own recognizance).
I stayed at the Kimberly Center in Fort Myers from Dec. 22, 2016 to Feb. 23, 2017. I stayed there to avoid homelessness, and the place (which also bilked my insurance company for $1,000 per day, plus the exorbitant expenses of many unnecessary drug tests) is so fake that I will have to itemize each clear violation of the law and basic decency one at a time. I was advised to go there by my own psychologist (who was also my AA sponsor) Dr. Francis Valenti. The website, https://kimberlycenter.com/ , is misleading: it creates the illusion that there are on-site counseling sessions and nurses. The place where inmates sleep is a mansion (more like a mausoleum) with men’s quarters upstairs and women’s quarters downstairs; the stairs are quite large, and there are no amenities for those of us who are physically disabled. The website shows that the person who runs the facility is Tom Mourcade. Tom is a narcissistic sociopath who has abused every substance he could get his hands on, and who loves to be cruel to the inmates by removing services which are good for us in the hopes that we will abuse substances while we are there so he can kick us out after our insurance companies no longer pay for us. Tom also showed us a picture of him with Darryl Strawberry when they met at a gala for Florida rehabs; two peas in a pod, and you can see the picture in the gallery section of the website I provided above.
The medical doctor advertised, Peggy Mourcade, is Tom’s wife, and she never examined me nor either of the other two inmates during the time we were there. The facility had a psychiatrist, Dr. Brandon Short, who abruptly died in his sleep at the age of 40 in late January and was not replaced. The facility also had a psychologist, Missy, who was squeezed out of her job by not getting paid for her work; she was pushed out because she was actually doing a good job of determining the underlying problems Michelle and I had that led to our substance abuse. Missy’s main job is as a psychologist in a prison; she knows how to help those of us who have abused substances, and that was a threat to Tom’s intent to wear us down psychologically. Tom kept telling us that he was going to start holding AA meetings at the facility, but that never happened and we were told that we had to find our own rides to AA meetings each day.
There was no staff at night in the Kimberly Center. None. After Tom and the others left at 7 p.m. or so each night, we were left on our own. There was no one to check on me while I slept at night on the second floor of a place I could not leave quickly due to the combination of my physical disabilities and the big stairs; if there had been a fire at night, I would have burned. During my 64 days there, there were only three inmates (not the numerous people the website pretends). Dustin (I will only use first names to maintain anonymity of fellow inmates) had ordered to the Kimberly Center by a court because he got so drunk one night that he thought he could beat up a police officer; he was wrong. This meant that I was left overnight each night alone with a violent criminal until Dustin abruptly left on Dec. 27. After that, I was alone in the building each night until Michelle arrived on Jan. 2.
Michelle was not a dangerous person, but she had previously been arrested diverse times in Pennsylvania for stealing to cover for her heroin expenses. Michelle was one of many people who had once been prescribed opioids and then slowly descended into heroin; the opioid crisis in America is alarming, and I am too scared to ever take opioids. Michelle had come to Florida in the hope that she would find a good rehab, because the court-ordered IOP in Pennsylvania was corrupt; Michelle’s substance abuse counselor became her new heroin dealer, and she wasn’t paying him back with money (this corruption among substance abuse counselors exploiting addicts for sex is horribly common). The Kimberly Center proved to be no better. Michelle was kicked out on Jan. 29 because she was abusing heroin again.
Dustin came back a few days later, but he was soon kicked out because he was drinking whiskey on-site. One night when he was still out after work, Tom and one of his two lackeys came upstairs, gathered all of his belongings, and threw them out of the second-story window of the kitchen (the kitchen where we had to buy our own groceries, because the amount Tom was bilking us for apparently wasn’t enough for him to feed two inmates at once; it also wasn’t enough to pay the water bill, and we were restricted about when we could wash our clothes, which left me wearing dirty clothes many days).
After Dustin was kicked out, this left me alone at night again, every night, until the day my friend Paul came to get me so he could move me to Miami. During my remaining time at the Kimberly Center, two of my friends would come by to take me places so I could get out of the mansion and have some social interaction. One friend started taking me to weekly gaming sessions (I am a big nerd, and I play D&D as well as other RPGs) in an Italian restaurant. One of Tom’s two lackeys came upstairs to my bedroom when he found out that I go to the Italian restaurant to socialize, and he said that when I’m there it would be O.K. if I had some wine. This was a trap. I was being set up to fail. I had already seen Dustin and Michelle get kicked out for ingesting mood-altering chemicals, and I wasn’t going to fall for it.
I insisted on going to my regular psychological counseling sessions each week with Dr. Valenti. Dr. Valenti was the one who recommended that I go to the Kimberly Center, because he had been given Tom’s name and phone number at an AA meeting as a rehab. However, Dr. Valenti and Tom had never met, and Tom was getting worried that I was getting good psychological help at these sessions, and Tom did whatever he could to stop them. He told me that I could not catch rides there, so I said I would take a taxi. I am mentally ill, and I need a mental health professional. On Feb. 21, Tom called Dr. Valenti early and arranged for Dr. Valenti to meet him at the Kimberly Center before the psych session scheduled that day (Dr. Valenti is self-employed, and this leaves his schedule open). Tom charmed Dr. Valenti, and Dr. Valenti, in total violation of ethics in his capacity as a therapist, told Tom what I had said in my sessions; since Dr. Valenti was my sponsor, he felt he could do this to me as his client since the person he was revealing my secrets to is another AA guy. People in authority in AA believe they are above ethics, and they believe that it is O.K. to cheat someone for The Cause. So, that session was held in my bedroom. Tom brought Dr. Valenti into the room, and Dr. Valenti asked if it was O.K. for Tom to stay; this was a bogus question, since the door to the room was open, and if I asked Tom to leave he would simply wait outside and listen. Therefore, Dr. Valenti committed another ethical violation by inviting someone who was abusing me into my psych session. I could not report Dr. Valenti to any effect, since he is self-employed.
I started a 24-day session at Harbor Village in early March, 2017. I am uncertain of the date. I was staying in a friend’s apartment in Miami, I was not getting any mental health treatment, I was still reeling from my collapsing marriage to an abusive wife, my disabilities were getting worse, and I was unable to find a job within my physical limitations. I fell deep into a bottle of whiskey, and that was my own doing. The night I arrived, I was sent to my bedroom and medicated to help me through detox. At about midnight, a guy came into the room with a large bag full of packs of cigarettes and bellowed, “Smokes! Smokes!”. He was there to hand out our rations of cigarettes which we were encouraged to use while we used 12-step philosophy to get away from alcohol and illegal substances. Why nicotine is considered just fine while alcohol and other drugs are not is based on where rehabs’ bread is buttered: Big Tobacco is paying them. All substance abuse counselors at Harbor Village carry cigarette lighters hanging from their necks by the same ropes that hold their employee IDs. This fact alone seems like a dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, but it’s true.
Harbor Village has mandatory AA meetings each night. Over the course of our daily sessions in a different building to which we are transported each weekday, we are pressured into the self-flagellation of confessing our defects of character. This puts inmates in a position where we are likely to make up things, or embellish things, in order to please our self-appointed and badly educated judges. Harbor Village is also does not have proper amenities for people with physical disabilities. The free ice cream is nice, though.
I was asked to be the speaker at an AA meeting once, and I wrote down eight pages of notes about my life on which to speak. I kept getting delayed night after night until, finally, I was allowed to speak. Sessions are supposed to be 55 minutes long. Mine was abruptly cut in half because one employee wanted to hold a surprise party for another employee for spending one year sober. However, the other inmates were so intrigued by my speech that they wanted to stay to hear the whole thing. The employee who wanted to host the party yelled at people to come inside. I guess that an AA meeting isn’t so sacrosanct when an AA authority wants to eat the cake immediately.
I was still looking for a way to get mental health help in May of 2017 when I fell into drunkenness again because I was in real psychological trouble. I was drinking to cover for psychological pain, emotional pain, physical pain, and just to get to sleep because I couldn’t. I have had suicidal thoughts for as long as I can remember in my life, and I was quite suicidal then. The evening that I went to Detox of South Florida I signed away legal possession of my firearms because I was afraid of having them around when I was suicidal (I am a solid believer in the Second Amendment, and I respect all people’s rights to bear arms; however, I have decided that I am too mentally ill to have guns in my home). I stayed there for one week, with the intent that I would be taken from there back to Harbor Village.
Upon entering Detox of South Florida, I saw a large cigarette machine on the right. Cigarettes are a constant at this rehab as they are at all private rehabs. Big Tobacco is pushing its drug onto people with a history of abusing drugs; they do this while wearing a halo, because they are able to present the illusion that their drug is O.K. Detox of South Florida is in a very small town, and not near any urban center where someone can run to or find illegal drugs. That did not stop my roommate from jumping the fence one night with a woman who decided to leave abruptly with him. AA meetings were mandatory each day, and one AA leader was particularly sadistic about emphasizing that we were all locked inside the facility.
The day before I left Detox of South Florida, I went to a nurse (a real nurse; a medical professional who has the time to listen to an inmate is a rare and valuable person) and told her that after I was transported to Miami that I intended to go straight home instead of going inside Harbor Village. I called Harbor Village from her office to say so, and was harangued by a supervising counselor, Chad, to say that I would go inside Harbor Village; they wanted that $1,000 dollars a day they could get from the health insurance I still had when I was still legally married. When we arrived at Harbor Village, I refused to enter. My phone and papers were taken inside. Chad came out to tell me that I had to come in, and I said that nothing he said would get me to pass through the doorway and that I needed my phone. It was only after I was having difficulty breathing (I have allergies and asthma) and I told him that I did not want this to turn into a media incident that he finally brought out my phone after nearly an hour of his nonsense. That did not stop him from publicly shaming me in front of the others when they came out for their cigarette break.
Until quite recently, I was homeless. I was without a permanent home from the time I left the abusive marriage in 2016 until the time I began living in an apartment in mid-October. I only recently began receiving disability payments, and returning to civilization has been rough. I have gone to rehabs to avoid sleeping on the street, and I have spent a lot of time sleeping on the street. The longest stretch I have gone sleeping on the street without being able to spend a full night in a bed was 97 days. I had to leave an abusive household I was staying in late 2018; I called 911 and asked to have myself Baker Acted on Dec. 19, 2018 because I had become suicidal (a friend talked me out of it). I stayed in the psych unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital until they could find me a place to stay. The psychiatrist asked me if I would be O.K. staying at a rehab, and I stated that I was while also stating that by then I had become very skeptical of AA and I understood that AA meetings would be mandatory.
I was transported from JMH to New Direction on Jan. 4, 2019. New Direction is run by Miami-Dade county, and not a private facility. I stayed there until I escaped on Feb. 20. Most inmates of New Direction are ordered there by a court, and all of us were locked in day and night inside a tall chain-link fence. Several counselors there are quite good and have our best interests at heart; a couple of counselors are not, especially my assigned counselor Ross Fried. Ross ran the mandatory morning meetings, and he enjoyed being sadistic. Twice, during those morning meetings, he told all of us that the best way to commit suicide was by taking a gun and placing it under our jaws while aiming the gun at our brains; he would pantomime the action while doing so. Then, he would let out a malicious laugh. Those of us who have abused substances have a higher ratio of mental illness than the general public, and a county-paid counselor who is there to help us knows he can get away with a joke that is not really a joke about how we should kill ourselves because he knows that no one will listen to us if we complain. The ad hominem argument that alcoholics and addicts have nothing valid to say to our supervisors is a constant problem in New Direction.
I chose to leave New Direction on my 48th day there because I was in fear for my physical safety. The only other inmate who used a wheelchair was attacked by another inmate who knocked John over and broke his wheelchair; the attacking inmate was never punished for this. Another inmate who had been caught bringing drugs inside was expected to be ejected from New Direction. Everyone who slept in the same house as the one who brought the drugs in was punished by the staff, because the staff claimed that those other inmates should have told them that he had brought in drugs. They did not know that he had brought in drugs, but they were punished just the same. New Direction is a place where the innocent are punished with the guilty, which sends the horrible message that it is better to be guilty than innocent.
The inmate who had brought the drugs in was not ejected from New Direction, since the staff learned that his girlfriend was pregnant and the staff knew that if he was ejected from New Direction that he would be going to prison for a long time. When he was not ejected, he knew that he had suckered the staff into letting him get away with anything, and he started becoming more thuggish. He started brazenly breaking rules left and right, and his facial expressions and body language became more threatening. When I saw him glaring at me at the morning session run by Ross, I decided that I needed to leave New Direction as quickly as possible. Once I had gone past my 30 days in the facility, I was allowed to go out for limited amounts of time for official reasons for which I had filed paperwork the previous week. I left that morning in fear, determined to never go back because I was sure that guy would hurt me. I called New Direction from the library and said that I would never come back. About an hour later, the guy who had attacked John and broken John’s wheelchair came into the library looking for me; Ross had sent him. I had just left New Direction because I was afraid for my physical safety, and Ross responds by sending the guy who had previously attacked the only other inmate in a wheelchair to come find me. This is how cruel Ross Fried is, and he knows he can get away with it as a county employee since no one at New Direction will listen to a complaint from an “alcoholic” or addict.
I spent the time from Feb. 20 until later in 2019 sleeping on the street and sometimes being in psych units. Sleeping on the street is horrible, dirty, and dangerous. However, I felt less threatened on the street than I did in New Direction or any of the other rehabs I was in. Part of the reason I felt safer is because I was not subjected to the cult of AA while on the street. I got drunk several times, and I considered suicide to the extent that I have scoped out the best places in downtown Miami for someone to jump to their death. It is because friends came to visit me on the street, and the fact that many former colleagues at my previous job joined together, that I was able to spend several weeks before I got this apartment in hotel rooms. I am grateful to all of the people who helped me through that last period before I got a permanent home. Since I have been in this home, I have not felt the need for alcohol. I have my proper psych meds, my own food and amenities, and I have my work. I am doing quite well.
Ian Morris
The 14th Step Lounge 