Lincoln, California, USA
According to the Lincoln News Messenger, Mercy Ministries, an international nonprofit organization that claims to help “females with life-threatening situations” namely anorexia nervosa a life-threateningeating disorder, has reopened its doors to patients.
Mercy Ministries, formerly of Australia, paid $120,000 for misrepresenting itself to women clients yet was permitted to open facilities in the United States after closing it’s treatment facility in Australia. Currently, it has treatment facilities in Lincoln, California; Monroe, Louisiana; Nashville, Tennessee.; St. Louis, Missouri, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Although some of Mercy Ministries former patients claim the Lord showed them healing, there is a growing number of families telling horror stories of treatment using out-dated and debunked repressed-memory-therapy (RMT) which gained popularity in the 1980s. RMT treatment focuses on remembering alleged childhood sexual abuse that has shown to produce tainted, if not purely made-up, recall fraught with inaccuracies.
Mercy Ministries is repeating a period of psycho-social history and pop psychology in the United States that humiliated the entire profession and left it on its knees. Yet learning from their mistakes did not happen because fathers are once again being accused of sexually abusing their daughters only after their adult-children were influenced at various Mercy Ministries treatment centers to remember. Memories of horrific sexual are meant to heal their serious medical condition.
The Lincoln News Messenger claims that “Someone with an eating disorder might die without the appropriate medical treatment.” Furthermore it’s editor, Carol Feineman, says that while the United States Joint Commission on Health Care Accreditation JCHCA, acknowledges Mercy Ministries, it did not accredit them as a provider of mental health services. The JCHCA oversees hospitals within the United States and it is a serious infraction for Mercy Ministries to operate without their accreditation – not that they are not permitted to do so, but full-disclosure needs to occur with all and any clients that come to them for treatment.
Evidence is growing and indicating that Mercy Ministries may be treating women with debilitating eating disorders without proper authority, supervision, or medical and psychological health-care providers.
A Bible-based counseling and treatment center, Mercy Ministries is permitted under United States, Canadian, New Zealand, and United Kingdom law to open it’s doors to ill women who may or may not know it is not a proper medical facility. Is God’s love and guidance enough to help women overcome anorexia in lieu of medical treatment? Patients deserve and warrant proper nutritional, therapeutic or medical oversight of their medical and psychological conditions. Otherwise, they may just as well go to church and save themselves the money.
What do we does a society concerned with proper mental-health care going to do? How about sending this article to your friends and family? Tweeting, talking, and educating others about how to obtain proper medical care is a good start.
.s.
/ 04/09/2012I am the mother of such a “mercy girl.” She has recreated her life history, alleged horrid abuse by her father and myself. in march she left the area and cut off all contact.
Jeanette Bartha
/ 04/09/2012Ah, gees. I’m so sorry to hear this and the pain your family is facing.
There are websites about Mercy and a blog or two for former patients. Have you found them? I hope you can connect to others going through similar family tragedies. You are free to come here and chat anytime. Take care.
firefly
/ 03/23/2012I found this article to be interesting. I was kicked out of Mercy supposably for learning too slowly but I was aware that Mercy was not a medical facility as they were open about that in the application process. What I think you may find interesting is that they decided when you did or didn’t need to see a doctor. They said and I quote “you wouldn’t be at Mercy if you were in control of your own life and could make decisions for yourself thats why you are here”.
I’m sorry but I know who I am and what I’m struggling with but the one thing I do know is when I need medical attention.
Jeanette Bartha
/ 03/23/2012Yes, firefly, most of us know when we need medical attention.
You may interpret “learning too slowly” as “you know too much and demand medical care” who knows what they were thinking but to be kicked out of a psychiatric facility is shameful. Did they transfer you or help you find what they may have considered a more appropriate place to be treated?
Altus
/ 03/18/2012Sorry to hear WordPress has tried to shut you down. Glad to hear they did not succeed. Castlewood Treatment Center tried to get a gag order recently. Mysteriously, the comments on all the articles in the Saint Louis Today website have disappeared. Some of them, as I recall, were from families as who say they too had lost daughters to the therapy.
The whole Internal Family Systems therapy machine (of which Castlewood is only one manifestation) relies on constant positive PR which seems to be self-generated. Their marketing staff is as big as their therapy staff. All the writings on the therapy are authored by Richard Schwartz sometimes calling himself RC. If they can silence critics, they keep raking in big bucks while leaving practitioners free to engage in RMT. Monica Pignotti has raised several questions about the therapy in her blog.
http://phtherapies.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/eating-disorders-residential-treatment-facility-and-psychologist-sued-by-former-patient/
Keep getting the word out…folks like you and Monica are needed to question why it is that people who enter these therapies sometimes come out much worse than when they went in.
Jeanette Bartha
/ 03/20/2012Well, wordpress didn’t try to shut me down, my suspicion is that one or more women who disagreed with what I had to say Tried to shut me up.
Atlus, you say a website disappeared? What was the name of it? Do you know why?
Monica and I are just conduits for information – it takes everyone, including you, to keep these issues in the public eye. Thank.
Altus
/ 03/20/2012Clarification. It was not a website that disappeared, it was the comment section attached to articles on the St. Louis Today website (Castlewood is near St. Louis) The comments were on articles about the malpractice suits at Castlewood. Here is one article. Notice all the comments have been removed. At least the articles remain.
http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/fitness/other-women-come-forward-in-castlewood-center-complaint/article_b4e3ed54-b12d-55cf-8218-37b2390505da.html
Castlewood has a marketing department, an outside PR firm and legal representation. Not sure where the gag order they sought stands. Here is an article on that.
http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/fitness/gag-order-is-sought-in-castlewood-lawsuits-over-brainwashing/article_cffba790-4ba9-54ca-9a4c-5d9036bff4d6.html
The main treatment there is “Internal Family Systems” which is untested yet has a workshop training money making model ($3,000 for level 1) far beyond Castlewood where they teach the Castlewood type therapy throughout the US. Any given state seems to have tons of social workers using this model. It’s being touted as “new” and “cutting edge” yet seems to have come about in 1998 from Richard Schwartz its “inventor” who wrote a book at the height of the repressed memory backlash. He kicks off his whole theory in his book bemoaning the fact about Freud dropped his sexual trauma and id,ego and superego models. Hardly “cutting edge” stuff and as the Castlewood lawsuits seem to indicate, potentially downright dangerous. Judging from the amount of “certified” therapists IFS touts on its site, Richard Schwartz might be one the larger catalysts keeping RMT alive.
Altus
/ 03/17/2012I recall a gentleman commenting about Mercy therapy your Castlewood Treatment Center post. Castlewood is being sued for creating false memories and multiple personalities. He said the case sounded a lot like like what his daughter had gone thru at Mercy.
Seems like repressed memory therapy might be rearing its ugly head again on a couple of fronts. Castlewood uses something developed by Richard Schwartz called “Internal Family Systems” therapy. The therapy is suspect. It has no clinical trials and all the appearance of having therapists tell people they are in “parts” which are named. Furthermore it seems to think eating disorders are the result of past abuse. Some of the practitioners also appear to use hypnotherapy to search for the suspected trauma and discover multiple personalities or dissociative identity disorder as a consequence of the therapy. This seems to be what is being alleged to have taken place at Castlewood.
Even more frightening is the fact that Richard Schwartz seems to have produced his own little diploma mill for IFS. After having educated the first wave of therapists, he appears to be marketing to anyone who will plunk down $3,000 and spend six weekends getting a certificate in turn for which hints at future referrals.for having secured a listing for the investment on his website. If I understand the website correctly, people who learn it are then encouraged to practice it on others.
“Pastoral Counselors” seem to be one of the groups Schwartz is targeting.
It’s bad enough that residents of Castlewood where Schwartz teaches seemed to have developed “false memories” and “multiple personalities” under the founder of the therapy, to think that anyone wiling to buy a certificate from Schwartz might be practicing this stuff at places like Mercy is downright horrifying.
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From The Internal Family Systems site:
Can I apply if I’m not a therapist?
Yes. While the majority of participants are therapists and counselors, we welcome participation from anyone who has a personal or professional interest in learning the IFS model and who has a sincere commitment to the process of doing so.
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Perhaps you could look over the site and give your opinion in a post. I don’t know how this guy has flown under radar for so long. I think he concocted this thing in 1995 or thereabouts. I find his videos on Youtube a little disturbing. He seems to have just pulled something out of thin air that breaks people down into parts and between the lines seems to say eating disorders are a consequence of trauma. Which can lead right down the RMT rabbit hole at places like Castlewood and Mercy.
Richard Schwartz strikes me as more of a new age workshop marketer (He makes claims of enlightenment among his patients!) than someone with a clinically tested therapy. The sad thing is a licensed social worker with no medical training and a few hours of hypnotherapy could do some real damage with his model as it seems happened with “The Courage to Heal” workshop fads. To think there are people with less training than a non-medical social workers license, which is bad enough, using this is just something I don’t want to think of.
Here is the site. http://www.selfleadership.org/
Here is a video of Richard talking…notice how his system presupposes trauma.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQPYffB-r6Q
Jeanette Bartha
/ 03/18/2012hello Altus, appreciate you stopping by to share your thoughts.
Repressed memory therapy RMT is not starting all over again – it never left. It just went underground for a few years to regroup while many psychiatrists, therapists, and hospitals were being sued. I’ve been screaming in a storm that RMT was on the rise for the last 5 years but as you know, a voice in a storm is not easily heard.
This new generation of trauma therapists didn’t just appear on the scene. They were educated (some of them) somewhere and likely by the first wave who were taking a break from performing therapy until the legal swords were being waved around. My former art therapist teaches at Drexel University in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, USA. Wonder what her class description is and how it deviates once the class has started?
Anorexia is what I see therapists hiding behind to practice RMT and to find multiple personalities in vulnerable patients – that’s what my former art therapist is doing. Back in the first wave of this pseudotherapy, I didn’t see skinny anorexic patients (except one and she died for reasons unknown to me). I did see plump women like me from privilidged backgrounds – and by privilidged I mean roof over head, piano lessons, college – not mansions and private schools.
Trauma is something that can’t be quantified or verified much of the time so it makes for good therapy fodder. As the infamous Basss & Davis quote goes: if you Think you were abused then you were. There remains no accountabiity in the psychotherapy industry. There is no oversight or anything close to what we see in most medical personnel and hospitals. The American Psychiatitric& Psychological Association collect member fees, publish articles and put on conferences but pay no attention to disciplining or excommunicating members who have been severly negligent in their various practices.
That’s the reality of psychotherapy (in the US) and people who care about quality mental health care and the fall out to families and friends, are left to pick up the pieces. The only accountability are websited and blogs that address these matters. WordPress has tried to shut me down twice because someone (who was pissed that I dare publish her remarks) complained. The owness was on me to prove there was no wrong doing, not on her to show anything.
Thank you for the links. I agree the “family systems” is a phrase able to be trademarked so therapy could be sold and redistributed to unknowing patients and their families. Keep talking. Keep letting people know what you experienced. Some will hear you.
concerned dad
/ 03/24/2012Altus, I’m the gentleman you alluded to earlier talking about Mercy Ministries. I have since found out there are several other families with very similar stories to ours at the same brance of Mercy, and several of them not know why their daughters have cut off contact with them and have no idea where they are now. It also seems as though there are at least two particular counselors that these girls had in common in which girls developed these false memories of horrific sexual abuse by their fathers. Mercy also lied through their teeth in the recent story about Mercy in the Lincoln CA Messenger, there are statements made in this story by them that can be proven to be false.