Comeback book review - written by Claire and Mia Fontaine
I picked up "Comeback - a mother and daugher's journey through hell and back" at half price books in one my book buying runs. It was 2.00 and I'm a fan of biographies of people going through traumatic experiences, so I decided it was worth the try.
To summarize, the book is about a mom who marries a man who is a drug addict and pedophile (before well raised suburbanites knew what a pedophile was) and has a daughter with him. He abuses the daughter pretty horrifically until mom finally catches on to it when the daughter is 3. Mom takes daughter, seeks help, doesn't get much. Eventually runs away. Daughter grows up, becomes a cutter, drug addict, and run-away. Mom tries everything to help, nothing works, so she sends daughter to a tough love boot camp first in the Chezc Republic and then for another year in Montana.
The book is well written and is written by both mom and daughter, so you get exerpts from her actual diary entries and her point of view of everything which is awesome. It raises some really great questions about how we as a society currently handle delinquent children vs. how we should handle them. It also throws you into the controversy regarding these camps - at least if you google the camps she was at or read the amazon.com reviews of the book.
For this girl and this mother, there can be no doubt that the tough love camp worked and saved the girl's life. No other option would have worked and that becomes abundantly clear when you read the daughter's words - this girl was smart and excellent at manipulating people.
At the same point in time after googling the camp in Montana I can see the validity of the claim that these camps are out to make money and market themselves inappropriately. Forced detention, isolation, and restriction from all priviledges including cutting your hair seem appropriate when the child is a 15 year old heroin addict with a track record of running away and manipulating her way out of any consequences for her actions. Switch that child to a 13 year old who experimented with dope once or a 14 year old with ADD and the treatment looks less reasonable. Further complicating the issue is how radical some of the groups opposing these camps are. I can get behind someone saying "we need a trained child psychologist on staff to watch for red flags in these kids." It's hard to agree with them though when they follow up that recommendation with a sentence decrying what a violation of human rights it is to not take every patient complaint seriously. It makes you wonder if the critics have ever met or even read true accounts from drug addicts - a hallmark sign of addiction is the willingness to tell any lie to be able to get high.
Overall I think everyone can agree that it exposes a big hole in our current treatment system of teenaged drug addicts. As a mother in California, this woman was unable to commit her daughter to an in-patient treatment program for longer than 3 days despite her daughter being both underage and testing positive for these substances. There were no options for her to keep her child from running away - in fact at one point the social worker told her that she should allow her daughter the freedom to do all these drugs. Really??
So I'll throw it up to you guys. Have any of you read this book, or read about facilities run by the WWASP group or other tough love boot camps? What do you think? And if they should be shut down, what is the alternative for parents such as the one in this book - parents of child runaways who are bent on self destruction?