Synanon

Hello, Andrew.

Today we are joined by Janet Best Dart, a survivor of the Synanon cult and author of Tender Loving Care, a book about her experience.

Synanon originally began in the late 1950s as a drug and alcohol rehab program offering people a place to recover from addiction.

Over time, however, it evolved into a highly controlling organization using intense psychological pressure and and increasingly extreme practices.

Janet shares how she was initially in the group and said that it seemed fun and exciting and full of community.

Eventually, it took a dangerous turn, leading her to escape.

But leaving was not the end of her journey.

She still believed in a lot of Synanon's ideas and missed the community.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with those.

It was heavily based in Synanon.

Shame.

I'm not sure you've been down that rabbit hole, but that's a good one to explore.

If you'll recall, we have talked a great deal about certain treatment centers and the cultiness of them.

We did an episode on Synanon, if you'll recall.

And if you can think back to that episode, there was something that they practiced in Synanon, in this treatment center, where they would do these group therapy sessions and they would play something called The Game.

But it was not a game whatsoever.

It was a very manipulative tactic to get people to make false confessions, to basically talk shit to each other, tear each other down.

I don't know.

Also with the Coleman guy, Gregory, he said that on another occasion, Michael fully talked about like attacking this girl and bashing her head in with a golf club because she denied his advances, which is crazy.

But it's hard to say, too, because when you think of Synanon, at least, and some of the stories that came out of there, it's like these people were placed under such coercion and control where you're like, was this a real confession? Or were people just telling this Michael kid, like, you're a murderer, you're a murderer.

And they used to have these groups that, I'm just trying to think of the name, it's on the tip of my tongue, but it was where maybe 8 or 10 or 12 people would get together and be brutally frank about each other.

And so that was not only in the VA setting, but there was also a group called Synanon.

Oh, yeah.

Some people might

If you wanted to join the Panthers, you had to go get political education.

You had to read stuff.

There were these various groups, like she was mentioning, Synanon, who were, you know, were doing these kind of encounters, and there was human potential.

There's all these people who are trying to figure out...

Tear them down and build them back up with good work ethic, community, all that kind of stuff.

That's what Synanon was.

That's what Delancey Street was.

That's what Cryo-Helping Impact became.

I'm like a white trash kid from the suburbs of Northern California.

So I'm already stripped of my identity, but then I'm thrown into another culture in which I don't really belong and I don't fit in anyway, even though all of these barriers to connection have been removed and we've all been made sort of anonymous in a sense, right? So long story short, I mean, we could go on for three hours just about that school, but What I didn't know then and what I know now is that that school had evolved out of a cult, like an actual cult called Synanon.

And Synanon was formed by a few people that had defected from Alcoholics Anonymous in Southern California, I think in the 60s.

And basically, they created their own little offshoot recovery program that used... force and coercion and um control and you know really mind control and manipulation to keep their members intact and it kind of devolved into a legitimate and and very dangerous cult which and you know people ended up going to jail and people were killed and people that tried to defect i mean it was like a really dark organization and and that was the basis of the school i went to which in the book i had you know for legal reasons i had to use a different name but it was called i can say it here because I don't give a shit.

It's called Rocky Mountain Academy.

Yes.

And the public humiliation aspect of it serve multiple functions for the leader in terms of making you feel bad, but grateful that you're being told these things, because how else would you have known about them? But then also feeling like the one person that didn't speak put themselves in such a vulnerable position to then be sat in that chair themselves, Synanon style.

This-- I feel like this has come directly from Synanon and, and the treatment centers that this person has accessed.

Sounds like they were probably using kind of the Synanon format that the troubled teen industry has kind of absorbed, and is then using that in a really nefarious, um, abusive way.

So what a crazy-making situation to be in.

You don't know whether you're coming or going, which I, I imagine is by design.

All of these experiments.

I do want to mention, actually, for people who haven't heard, we do kind of get into some of this stuff, the history of the sort of this kind of behavioral revolution and its kind of sad legacies in our series on Synanon, which traced a bunch of this stuff as well.

Was that Maslow? Some of it, yeah, some of it Maslow, but also kind of like behavioral psychology and kind of different strands there.

Let's talk about animal experiments.