Help Spread the Word Before Someone Else Signs Up Blind

Please follow us on the social platform you use most: https://linktr.ee/fakehelprealharm

This  link is meant to make sharing and contributing as easy as possible across the major networks, you will see the icons at the bottom of the page. 

It isn’t simple to keep all of that going, but I’ve tried to create one place where people can help.  Your input is welcome and needed. 

If you have a post you’d like me to share on your behalf, or something you want submitted, please send it.  And please join the PRIVATE group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/johnvolkenacademy

A lot of people have asked what this petition is for, and what any of this is meant to accomplish. The goal is to stop the abuse from continuing.

You may already be out.  Others are not.

As recently as this summer, I received messages from people who left within the past year from various U.S. locations after realizing they were not getting adequate addiction recovery treatment or help.  In fact, they were being emotionally and psychologically abused in the process. 

Others deserve to know who they can trust with their recovery.

Let’s work together to make enough noise to prevent more unspeakable tragedies caused by care that is inadequate, yet advertised and presented in a misleading way. 

The goal of this petition:

The John Volken Academy (JVA) is an addiction treatment organization with three current locations in the United States: Gilbert, Arizona; North Salt Lake, Utah; and Kent, Washington. It also operated a location in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, which was shut down following government action. Months later, the organization opened another location at its farm in South Langley, British Columbia, roughly 50 miles away. The program is marketed differently depending on the location. In some places it is presented primarily as a life-skills and work program.

For many years it was marketed as a rehabilitation program based on the therapeutic-community model. Former participants have described practices that bear disturbing similarities to methods historically associated with Synanon, a controversial drug-rehabilitation movement that eventually became an authoritarian and violent organization. These practices include emotional and psychological humiliation, punitive rituals, prolonged bans on speaking, isolation, and other coercive forms of control.

These are not simply complaints about an unconventional treatment philosophy. The allegations raise serious questions about whether vulnerable people seeking help for addiction are instead being subjected to psychologically harmful and coercive practices.

There are also concerns about the use of participants as unpaid labor. Individuals, including people as young as 18, can enter the program at some of the most vulnerable points in their lives and may be expected to perform extensive unpaid work as part of the program. 

We are also concerned about reports that psychiatric medications are abruptly cut off, and about the lack of safe medical detox. Some people are reportedly expected to work the next day at 5 a.m., including operating commercial equipment in settings such as a horse farm or a grocery-store bakery without a clear answer as to whether that is medically safe.

Safe medical detox exists for a reason. Withdrawal from alcohol, benzodiazepines, opioids, and other substances can cause seizures, severe dehydration, dangerous changes in heart rate and blood pressure, psychosis, and in some cases death. People in early withdrawal are also more likely to be confused, unsteady, and medically unstable.

 Putting someone in that state to work at 5 a.m. around animals, machinery, ovens, or other commercial equipment is not “tough love.” It is a safety risk to that person and to everyone around them. Calling people who take prescribed psychiatric medication “using,” or treating those medications as toxic by default, is also dangerous. Antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and anti-anxiety medications are not the same as illicit drug use. Framing prescribed treatment as moral failure or contamination shames people for getting medical care and can pressure them to stop medicines they need.

It is not safe to cut someone off psychiatric medication abruptly. Sudden discontinuation can cause withdrawal symptoms, rebound anxiety or depression, insomnia, agitation, mania, crisis level hopelessness and in some cases seizures, depending on the medication. Changes to psychiatric medication should be made with a qualified clinician, with informed consent, and with a plan to taper when a change is medically appropriate not by labeling the person as “using” and stopping the medicine overnight.

This raises important questions about informed consent, labor practices, power dynamics, and whether the organization is exploiting people who are in desperate need of treatment and support. It also appears to have ties to the Mormon community and church that were not disclosed upon registration. 

That is a lack of informed consent.

Given the number and nature of these allegations, John Volken Academy warrants serious independent investigation and scrutiny not dismissal as merely a controversial or unconventional treatment program.

Please rate the Facebook page and engage with it and other platforms if you have the time or desire.

This may be one of the only ways someone who knows nothing about this organization can protect themselves. 

Many Google results appear scrubbed of negative reviews or placed past page two. People deserve a full picture of what they are about to sign up for. A quick search on social media can save a life when someone is at an impulsive point and trying to make a fast decision about recovery.

P.S. Please keep following the petition signature count as well. It is very concerning to see it at 600 one minute and back down to 595 the next. It is hard not to wonder whether some kind of backend manipulation is occurring.