Maia Szalavitz
speaker
249 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Maia Szalavitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's okay.
Tell us the history of these sorts of schools.
Okay, so Synanon was a cult that sold itself to the American public as a treatment for heroin addiction.
And when it was started in the 50s, it
was believed that there was no cure for heroin addiction and nobody ever got better.
Well, they'd actually never followed people long term, so this was not true.
The guy who founded Synanon, Chuck Diedrich, he didn't think AA was tough enough on people.
So he basically twisted the 12 steps into, you know, the first step is about you're powerless, right?
So we will make you powerless.
Other steps involve confession.
We will make you confess.
Other steps involve humility.
We will humiliate you.
The whole idea was to break through these horrible antisocial personalities and
that were believed to be people who have heroin addiction.
Of course, certainly there are some people with heroin addiction that have antisocial personalities, but the vast majority of people with heroin addiction are actually depressed, traumatized, anxious, trying to self-medicate, something like that.
The idea that telling them that they're worthless would be helpful to them
is just so counterproductive.
I mean, this is how I got interested in this whole area, because I was addicted to heroin in my 20s.
And I knew that this was what treatment was like.
Showing 41–60 of 249 · page 3 of 13
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