Roots of Behavior Modification
In some respects, Teen Help's behavior modification program has roots dating back a half-century.

Rutgers University psychologist Karlin said that Teen Help seminars share some techniques of the thought-reform program that Chairman Mao Tse-tung and his communist theorists pioneered in China in the 1940s. Teens are isolated from their normal environment, made to feel uncomfortable and induced to confess numerous shortcomings -- what Karlin described as the core of Mao's system of thought reform.

Psychologist Margaret Singer, professor emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley and one of the nation's pre-eminent experts on mind control, said Teen Help and similar programs attack the psyche in ways similar to Mao's methods.

It was 1949 when Mao introduced a new kind of thought reform for the newly conquered peoples of Communist China. Unlike the brutal torture techniques that Stalin had developed in the Soviet Union, Chinese methods were more subtle and in many ways more effective.

Western scientists became alarmed when these mind control tools were used on American prisoners in the Korean War of 1950-53. How could the Chinese so easily manipulate captured GIs into criticizing the United States and expressing admiration for the North Korean cause? The techniques, dramatized in The Manchurian Candidate, a Richard Condon novel and subsequent movie, quickly got a pop-psych nickname -- brainwashing.

In the 1960s, the methods began to be used in America. But instead of Communists with a collectivist political bent, the new practitioners were American entrepreneurs who charged thousands of dollars per client.

Amid the political and spiritual uproar of the 1960s, Americans developed an appetite for companies promising self-improvement in the secular world -- through personality change, enlightenment and self-awareness.

The first of the genre psychologists call "large group awareness training" was the Leadership Dynamics Institute, started by Robert Penn Patrick in the early 1960s.

For a fee of $1,000, LDI clients "were held virtual prisoners for four days of living hell, during which members of the class were beaten, deprived of food and sleep, jammed into coffins, forced to perform degrading sexual acts, and even crucified," said a 1972 study cited by the American Psychological Association.

Patrick also created a less extreme form of LDI called Mind Dynamics. Trainers in Mind Dynamics soon began their own companies, the most noted of them Werner Erhard's est and John Hanley's LifeSpring.

Beatings were now off-limits. The new groups relied extensively on what psychologists call "coercive persuasion."

Erhard Seminars Training, which used the lowercase acronym est, attracted an estimated 750,000 people in the 1970s. It exhorted participants to create their own version of reality through deep introspection and self-awareness. Many entertainment celebrities, including the late singer John Denver, embraced est.

LifeSpring has fought pitched battles as plaintiff and defendant in civil lawsuits. A key issue in these cases was whether it was a cult and used coercive psychology to induce clients to pay large sums of money for the program. LifeSpring settled several suits out of court and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements and judgments. The company denied that it was a cult.

Singer said Teen Help's techniques "are very similar to the ones used at LifeSpring. And I've interviewed many, many people that have been at other large group awareness training programs, and most of (them) feed off the same exercises."

Group leaders tell recruits to show their trust in a stranger by revealing deeply guarded secrets. The leaders use exaggerated rewards and punishments to control behavior, Singer said. Independent thinking and nonconformity are punished through humiliation and peer pressure. Recruits receive rewards for strict adherence to the new ideology.

Another ingredient: an us-against-them mentality -- the group is right, outsiders are wrong. Group leaders single out the deviant thinker and turn their anger -- and the group's -- against him or her.

While the Chinese attacked the political beliefs of their subjects, Singer said, the contemporary programs use "intense, coordinated, coercive influence programs to attack the person's very sense of self and being and reality. You are likely to get more psychological casualties from these commercial attack groups than from Mao."

"The way it works is to take the person, isolate him and make him uncomfortable," Karlin said. "And you ask him to confess, in some sort of way, his sins."

After the confessions, it becomes easier for the subject to be persuaded to adopt different ideas, Karlin said.

"These kids are seen as disciplinary problems ... so the program is oriented toward some sort of awareness of the way in which they have been making the wrong choices about how to behave," he said. "And that's all fine and dandy, except that it's done in a situation where you are totally isolated from all previous social supports, and in which you're made uncomfortable.

"You're in a strange place. You're out of the country in a world that you never made. And it's exactly the kind of situation that pulls the support out from under people and makes them vulnerable to this kind of influence."

"You don't need physical force," Singer said. "You just get a program put together that makes an attack upon a person's belief system."

In some cases, Karlin said, even those who seem to adopt the core philosophy can emerge with something missing.

"You can see a real loss in spontaneity, in ease, in creativity," Karlin said. "This kind of thing is not what we consider a real good idea for most people."

Gilcrease dismissed the criticisms and said his TASKS seminars for teens do not practice mind control. "We don't force the kids to do anything," Gilcrease told the News.

"We're not doing therapy with them. We're presenting concepts, like accountability and integrity. Is there some, at the time, emotional stuff? Yes, there is. ... "Do I say that it's for everybody in the world? No, but I don't think everybody in the world needs a psychological examination either."

One Colorado parent at a Teen Help support group earlier this year put it this way: "They call it mind control. Well, maybe mind control isn't such a bad thing."

Parents Expect Complaints
Teen Help warns parents to expect complaints from their teens in their initial letters home -- we're miserable, we're being abused, the program isn't working.

"Initially, the kid will call it kidnapping," said Farnsworth, until recently head of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs. "A kid will call it a bad thing."

Teen Help's explanation: They're manipulating you, just like they did before you sent them to us.

The company even categorizes the complaints that are sure to come: First, the denial phase. The child pleads, "I don't belong here." Second, the guilt trip. "You don't know how terrible it is here, or you would get me out." Next, the anger phase. "You'll wish you had never done this to me." Finally, the negotiation phase. "If you bring me home, I promise there won't be any more problems."

Ignore all this, Teen Help advises, and your teen finally will enter the acceptance phase. If the teen repeatedly refuses to participate in the program, parents are told they may need to cut off contact with their child once he or she turns 18.

"I strongly recommend you communicate to your teen the fact you are not willing to have them return home without (our) recommendation," Gilcrease said in a recent Teen Help newsletter.

Gilcrease suggested the parents give their teen a return ticket to their hometown, a two-to-three night stay at a hotel, money for food and no car. After that, he recommended, unresponsive teens should be on their own. It may sound unforgiving, but for some parents convinced they have no place else to turn, the tough Teen Help approach works.

"We are living proof of the value of these seminars and the success of the Tranquility Bay (Jamaica) program in improving our family health and happiness," said Timothy Riley of Huntington Beach, Calif. "We now embrace each other with love, honesty, integrity and commitment. My life is full of joy where before joy was fleeting.

"I feel we were blessed as a family when we had to put our daughter (16) into a Teen Help program. We will reap the benefit of this blessing for years to come."

No follow-up studies have been done to gauge the long-term effects of Teen Help's intervention. Rutgers' Karlin said he anticipates that Teen Help's techniques will produce post-traumatic stress casualties in "hearts, spades and diamonds."

Tulsa, Okla., psychologist Eric Nelson said re-entering American society after a year or more in a Teen Help camp "would have to be a very unusual situation psychologically."

Nelson treated a Tulsa teen who had spent a few months at Paradise Cove in Samoa.

"One of the points of these programs that remove kids completely from their environments is to provide an environment where there can be almost total control of their behavior," he said. "Some of the kids manage to internalize those values and take the external control and make it internal control.