The Roots
CEDU sprang from a short family tree: the 1930s "Oxford groups" that became Moral Re-Armament gave birth to Alcoholics Anonymous in the early 1940s, and Charles Dederich, Sr. (founder of Synanon, 1958) was an ex-AA member. What Dederich did differently was concoct a group "struggle session" or "attack circle" called "The Game" wherein the group would sit in a large circle and all take turns talking about themselves then being verbally attacked by the group for their statements, though sometimes the sessions would be about anything or anyone if Dederich thought they had run out of targets. And then they would have dances or social events as a treat after ripping each other or the world to bits. Just as Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous has a five percent success rate (which is the number of people who successfully spontaneously remit), Synanon barely cranked out cured heroin addicts, so it became a utopian communial society by 1966 and then a "religion" by the early 1970s. It didn't end well - the cult collapsed in the early 1980s after one of their "Imperial Marines" stuck a de-rattled rattlesnake in lawyer/anti-Synanon activist Paul Morantz's mailbox in early October of 1978. And it turned out that Chuck Dederich, Sr. was still a drunk after TWENTY years of running "The Game."
The Furniture Salesman
Mel Wasserman was the owner of a furniture store in Palm Springs in the mid-1960s, and did not like that the youth protest culture had come to that desert community. He was a supporter of Synanon and figured that he could be doing similar work, so he sold his store and set up shop in Running Springs, California, which is sixty miles north and in the Angeles National Forrest east of LA. That was in 1967. When it started, CEDU (motto: "See Yourself As You Are, and Do Something About It") was there for teenagers who wanted to get their act together, then it quickly morphed into a drug rehabilitation center as the Nixon administration began it's "war on hippies" which they sold as a "War on Drugs." CEDU's large rambling ski-lodge was packed with pot smokers, needle drug users, and other William S. Burroughs characters, all keeping the place spotlessly clean for presentations (to the parents of future enrollees) under the direction of Brigitte Wasserman (née Steinnman), Mel's German wife - when they weren't in circles screaming at each other in "raps", which were the teen (and later pre-teen) version of "The Game." These sessions were the alleged "key" to getting teenagers off drugs, or shaming them into diets, or keeping them from masturbating, or whatever else parents were unhappy about - CEDU didn't use them for anything but drugs and "antisocial behavior", but the later CEDU knockoffs like The Seed, Straight, Inc., the KIDS chain, and a bevy of others would go that route, throwing drug addicts (alleged or confirmed) into raps with girls that were "too fat" for their mothers' taste.
Of course the locals were unhappy with CEDU from the moment it started, so much so that local radio stations KDES-FM and KGEC-FM ran an interview between some of the internees and a journalist on the Face to Face show - the tape and the name of the presenter are lost to history, but we know it happened in 1969. At that point, CEDU was less drug-rehab, and more of an encounter group to get frazzled young people back toward equilibrium. That would quickly change into a two-and-a-half year drug rehab program where kids got high school credit for shoveling horse manure out of stables.
The Story of "Medium Anonymous" the CEDU escapee
This post began as a series of emails with Eric Barbour over the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Mass. - it's a school for a large swath of "special needs" kids, and they use electric shocks to reform behavior on many of the student inmates. I heard about it years ago through a Mother Jones article, which has spawned a number of updates, because the powerful shocks dished out by overseers are not liked by the State of Massachusetts, and the FDA wants to shut down the practice sometime this year. I brought up Synanon, and all the spinoff "tough love" organizations that Mother Jones listed in 2007. Near the top of their chart was CEDU.
I'd heard about CEDU before I read Medium Anonymous' Running My Anger: The Legacy of the CEDU Cult (link here), and how they did this odd ritual of "smoshes" lying on the floor in one room, and that certain people used it to have quiet masturbation sessions under blankets. What I didn't realize was that how much of a non-religious cult CEDU was - they even had their own complicated jargon shared between staff and inmates, and a woman whose job title was "family liaison" but who was really paid to keep the parents on edge and willing to keep little Jimmy or Jane "in therapy" for the full 2.5 years. This was a stunt also carried out by Art Barker of "The Seed" and Miller Newton of the "KIDS" chain (and probably every other "troubled teens" school or program operating under modified 12-step rules), though Barker and Newton used tent revival-like meetings to keep parents willing to pay for the salvation/reform of their children. The actual author of the piece is a nameless Jewish North Shore Chicagoan who was sent to Running Springs because he was considered a "suicide risk" by his parents for "generalized anxiety disorder" - their pharmacologist had the kid on Kolonpin (!) He knew it was a two year stay, but he thought he would be out in "a few weeks" - he was nearly there for a year and a half. That was 1999-2000.
By that point CEDU had been expanded to seven other sites and had been sold to another "troubled teen" outfit, Brown Schools, in 1998. It is not clear if the Wassermans still controlled the Running Springs campus or the places they had set up in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho (Rocky Mountain Academy, Boulder Creek Academy); the Casacade School in Whitmore, California; the two sites in Naples, Idaho (Northwest Academy, Ascent Wilderness Program), the CEDU Middle School on the Running Springs site; or the "location unknown" site of the Milestones Transitional Program, for whom Wikipedia claims that the "property is in litigation." Why the Wassermans had sold out at the height of operation was pretty simple - running CEDU was a daily headache of dancing around litigation, dealing with California state investigators who knew full well the place was more of a group home than a psychiatric reform program with a grade and high school attached, dealing with similar investigators in Idaho, dealing with a staff who were mostly not trained psychiatrists nor therapists of any kind, and of course trying to minimize the fallout when "students" escaped (constantly), committed suicide (July 1994) vanished (1993, 1994, 2004), or the great Northwest Academy riot of 1997 which resulted in five injuries between students and staff.
In the middle of the piece, Medium Anonymous quotes a 2013 article from Cabinet magazine on Synanon ("Shaved Heads, Snipped, Tubes, Imperial Marines, and Dope Fiends: the Fall and Rise and Fall of Chuck Dederich and Synanon") by George Pendle, wherin the author relates how "The Game" actually went:
The Game consisted of a dozen or so addicts sitting in a circle. One player would start talking about the appearance or behavior of another, picking out their defects and criticizing their character. But as soon as the subject of the attack tried to defend him-or herself, other players would join the barrage, unleashing a no-holds-barred verbal onslaught. Vulgarity was encouraged — “talk dirty and live clean,” said Dederich — and so the other members would accuse the defendant of real and imagined crimes, of being selfish, unthinking, of being a no-good, ugly, diseased cocksucker who was too weak to go straight and was too much of an asshole, junkie, cry-baby motherfucker to admit it. Faced with this unrelenting group assault, the recipient would eventually have little choice but to admit their wrongdoing and promise to mend their ways. Then the group would turn to the next person and begin all over again.
The difference between The Game and the "cedus" that were renamed into "raps" were that the alleged counselors started the verbal reamings, let the inmate/students attack one poor member for a period, stop, then let into another person, repeating the cycle until everybody was crying or frothing at the mouth - and all of it was lies, concocted to get the group and the "counselor" off the attacked person's back. What none of the inmates knew was that the counselors were taking mental notes and passing along tidbits to the family liaisons, who would call the parents to throw gas on the FUD ("fear-uncertanty-doubt") cycle they kept burning as long as the child or children were in the system.
Enter Serial Killers and Child Molesters, Stage Right
Remember the disappearances we mentioned a few paragraphs above? Psychiatrist Burnell Forgey would travel up from Costa Mesa to Running Springs and his assistant was a man named James Lee Crummel. Dr. Forgey allegedly was a child molester, while Crummel was a serial killer of teenagers.
John Christopher Inman, who vanished in 1993, and next year's disappearee, Blake Wade Pursley, were allegedly Crummel's victims.
***
....And this is where my tolerance with the horror and inhumanity of these bizarre outcroppings of middle-class paranoia finally faded away three years ago. Medium Anonymous was given a ton of material on CEDU from an ex-employee, plus he found the link between Synanon and CEDU in Bill Lane, a Synanon member, that Wasserman and Lane had concocted CEDU together. He also found that CEDU had a forgotten first space beyond Wasserman's house, a ranch in Reche Canyon, Riverside, CA. That was short-lived. What can be said of the entire "tough love" rehabilitation industry is that it was doomed to constantly skirt the edge of legality until it became impossible to continue operating, unless it's a Fundamentalist Christian "faith based" outfit; those are allowed to run wild.
The man in the background is Mel Wassermann as he looked in 1972-73.
Christmas from Hell - a CEDU holiday card from the 1970s.
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