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
And I was like, why is this like, what you're describing to me as therapy sounds like it would make me want to get high, not want to get into recovery in any possible way.
And as a person who's on the autism spectrum, the idea of an entire group of people screaming at me about my faults is probably my worst nightmare.
But in the 50s and especially in the 60s and early 70s, other states started sending representatives to California to sit in on to learn what they were doing so they could set up their own similar programs to cure heroin addiction.
So New York did this.
We got Phoenix House and Daytop.
Delancey Street in California, another direct descendant of Synanon.
Virtually everything in the addiction treatments field that calls itself a therapeutic community in the United States is a descendant of Synanon, either directly or indirectly.
And until probably the late 90s, a large chunk, maybe half of addiction treatment in the United States was based on the idea that we break you to fix you.
It goes into the troubled teen sector quite early.
Synanon itself had a boot camp and they would march around with weapons and they did all kinds of training.
But literally at this time, when they are doing things like stockpiling weapons, forcing men to get sterilized, forcing women to have abortions and doing all this confrontational, humiliating, emotional stuff,
states were literally sending juvenile offenders there for treatment.
I have to give props to New Jersey here because New Jersey is the only state that said, let's study this thing before we replicate it.
And so what they found was
about 15% of people got better.
Most of them dropped out in the first two weeks.
And you know what?
About 15% of people get better anyway.
And because, of course, there is a lot of stigma against people with addiction, the idea that what they need is a good kick in the butt
became very popular.
Showing 61–80 of 249 · page 4 of 13
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