Synanon

Synanon began in California in 1958 as a pioneering drug rehabilitation community founded by Charles Dederich, and in its early years it earned genuine respect for its residential model of recovery, built around an intense group-encounter practice known as "the Game," in which members confronted one another with unsparing honesty. Its influence on the wider therapeutic-community and addiction-treatment movements was real and lasting.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, however, Synanon evolved from a rehabilitation program into a communal movement and then, in 1974, declared itself a religion, a change many observers linked to legal and tax considerations as much as to belief, and became increasingly authoritarian and insular under Dederich's control, adopting practices such as mandatory changes of relationship and, for men, vasectomies. Its later years were marked by serious wrongdoing established in the courts: most notoriously, in 1978 members placed a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had litigated against the group, and Dederich and others were prosecuted in connection with that attack. The organization declined through the 1980s and dissolved. Synanon is studied as a cautionary case of how an innovative and initially beneficial therapeutic community can, under unchecked charismatic leadership, turn coercive and violent.

The group's central practice was a confrontational encounter session known as the Game, in which participants attacked one another verbally without restraint on the theory that the defences of an addict had to be stripped away before anything could be built. Within the community it was defended as ritualised and bounded, something entered and left, and many former members have described it as the thing that saved them.

Its afterlife is the reason the group matters beyond its own membership. The Game was adopted, in versions progressively further from the original and without its boundaries, across a wide part of the American treatment field. It passed into The Seed in Florida, from there into Straight Incorporated, and from there into the network of private adolescent behaviour programmes that has operated since under many names. Attack therapy applied to addicts who had chosen to be there became attack therapy applied to teenagers who had not, and the resulting harms have been the subject of investigation and litigation for decades. That lineage is documented and is rarely acknowledged by the programmes themselves.

The group's own end came from a different direction. Having reconstituted itself as a church, it turned on its critics, and in 1978 a rattlesnake was placed in the mailbox of Paul Morantz, a lawyer who had won a judgment against it. He was bitten and survived. Charles Dederich, the founder, pleaded no contest to conspiracy, and the organisation did not recover.