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Hi, I am new to this list. Rowdy Yates suggested that I forward an email that I had posted on the list I manage (ADD_MED) to this list because of common interests. My post had to do with some of my experiences in treatment and TC, regarding the issue of inter-mixing the sexes in programs where both sexes are in the same facility. I have just started searching for research literature on the subject, and am surprised to discover that there does not seem to be a literature even describing, let alone recommending how to handle the situation. One of our list members responded with a description of his treatment experience, so i did the same. Before i give the forwarded post, I ask for help -- if anyone knows of any articles on the subject, please let me know. OK, here it is... remember, the subject had started with mixing the sexes. _______________________ Subject: Re: [A-M] Mixing Genders in Mixed-Gender Treatment My Daytop Village experience in 1967-68 was different [from another list member who reported his experience in a 12 step based program], maybe in part because almost all of the residents were heroin addicts, mostly from the streets, median age maybe 26 for the men, 24 for the women, and we, the therapeutic community, had little money. Culturally, many of us were on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. Educationally, some verged on illiteracy. Blacks and Latinos were over represented in comparison to the general population, but not in comparison to New York dope fiends. But there were a few middle class white kids whose drug use was less problematic. Women had a separate dorm, isolated from the men. We were mixed in virtually all groups (occasionally there would be special interest groups) and in work activities. There were no restrictions on talking, but we were not supposed to go anywhere away from others alone in mixed sex pairs. The issue of sex "problems" was very individualized. People would be confronted and/or put on bans with each other and/or punished in response to events and behavior patterns. In the facility where I was housed, a building was opened for families, and during my last two months (out of 14) at Daytop I lived with my then wife and three children in a two room apartment. There was for a time a Montessori school with up to19 children, run by a couple of nuns who lived at the facility (both of whom were later discovered to have been independently "compromised" by male residents). We all ate in the common dining room, where the food was sometimes of surprisingly good quality -- my work title for some months was "Coordinator: Kitchen, Commissary, Bakery and Purchasing." (Even in treatment i was a pathological over-achiever.) No effort was made to separate the sexes in the dining room as elsewhere, but always, there was careful observation and reporting. There were no paid staff per se except for certain directors -- some of us got small stipends. At night, the Expeditors made "runs" of the entire facility, and there were strict rules of accountability for anything untoward. For my last two months of treatment, when the directors realized how comfortable i had become in my little fiefdom, with the largest group of workers in the facility, they "shot me down" and made me Chief Expeditor" -- the Police Chief -- the Eyes and Ears, of the TC -- with more power, but also more conflict. It was good for me. In the 1950s I was in Riverside Hospital in New York for a short time. Females there were completely isolated from males (the age range was from 15 to 24) except in special group activities, always supervised by staff, whose functions resembled guards far more than counselors or aides. Riverside was famous among New York addicts for a decade during the fifties -- it was on the site of a former TB hospital and for a time was the only site in the US, maybe the world, to treat adolescent heroin addicts. It was shut down in 1963 after an evaluation found that not a single addict had stayed "clean" six months after treatment. Riverside was the teenie bop version of Lexington, Ky, where in the 1940s, after some years of being all male, one ward was isolated and used for female inmates. (Lexington, while being called a hospital, was in fact a prison.) I remember reading a sociological article on Lexington which mentioned how, when groups of men were moved from one location to another in the huge facility, always with guards, when they encountered a female group moving in the same hall, the men were required to stop and face the wall while the women passed. An interesting side-light of Lexington was that some New York addicts who were sent there became proficient in Sign Language as a result of communication with the women across the quadrangle that separated them. Also, Lexington occasionally had top notch small jazz groups. Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Joe Pass, the list of alumni goes on and on. I am told that there are facilities today which house both sexes, but in which they are totally separated in all activities. I am particularly interested in this situation. Does anyone have experience specifically with combined yet isolated treatment programs? John F