![]() Because of her powerful friends, the article said, ordinary bureaucrats were reluctant to confront her about mismanagement. She was also reported to humiliate patients as part of the therapeutic process. The article detailed unpleasant physical conditions in the New York Odyssey Houses, high staff turnover, financial irregularities including use of drug programme funds to pay for Densen-Gerber's luxurious lifestyle, and “an extraordinary measure of personal support and loyalty from those around her.” This was said to include using patients and staff for personal services. The cameras whirr and the lawmakers reach for the handkerchiefs and appropriations. Today, she has become a familiar figure at public forums and legislative functions, detailing the horrors of addiction and ill treated youngsters. has also emerged as an influential spokeswoman for sexually abused children. In 1979 Densen-Gerber was the subject of a scathing profile in New York magazine, “The Mysterious Mistress of Odyssey House,” which said, “Most people think of Odyssey House as a solid, benevolent program. ![]() His support was important when drug free programmes were competing for funds with methadone maintenance programmes. Today there are Odyssey Houses in New York, New Hampshire, Michigan, Louisiana, Utah, New Zealand, and Australia.ĭensen-Gerber formed powerful friendships, including one with Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York state, whose house she picketed to demand funding for her programmes. Their first permanent home was in East Harlem, where the rent was a bargain basement $17 a month. They moved so often that someone said they were on an odyssey, and the name stuck. The group lived in 11 temporary quarters. She started relating to them.” Densen-Gerber consulted other doctors involved in treating addiction and developed the model of a drug free therapeutic community in which users would live together and embark on a “journey of self discovery,” using mostly group therapy techniques borrowed from many schools of psychiatry, Brown said. ![]() They told her they don't get well anyway,” said Ronald Brown, a former user who was rehabilitated through one of Densen-Gerber's programmes, and became a friend, colleague, and executive director of one of her treatment centres, Odyssey House in Flint/Saginaw, Michigan. “She was pregnant and female, and they gave her an easy assignment dealing with drug addicts. ![]() She was doing a residency at psychiatry at Metropolitan Hospital in New York when, in 1966, she encountered her life's work in the form of 17 drug users. She first qualified as a lawyer, graduating from Columbia University Law School, before qualifying in medicine at New York University Medical School in 1963. ORIGINAL PHOTO BY BRADFORD BACHRACH/ Densen-Gerber was the daughter of an heiress and a chemical engineer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |