We arrived far more unlucky than disordered, “the victims of hysterical overreaction,” to borrow a line from the legal scholar, Garrett Epps.

In the 1960s, the program claimed it offered “what some call ‘the fountain of youth for youth’ and an opportunity to regain normalcy.” In the 1970s, it promoted itself as a “youth oriented drug rehabilitation center” run by “former drug addicts” no older than twenty-five. “All were rehabilitated by their CEDU experience,” the full-page ad boasts.

By the late 1990s, my era, CEDU had a more distinguished pitch: “the nation’s first emotional growth boarding school.”

CEDU was indeed a great shaggy originator of “therapeutic education.” But forced recipients of that education — perfectly ordinary teenagers, as I recall — weren’t students, and our backwoods behavior modification facility wasn’t a school.

CEDU was licensed by the state of California as a group home— a fact the program tried to conceal.

I was sent to CEDU’s remote compound in the San Bernardino Mountains for adolescent depression treatment. By 1999, CEDU had become an involuntary two-year program, but my parents shaved off the final eight months for something like good behavior. I returned home in the late spring of 2000. Since then, I’ve told one civilian: my longtime girlfriend, just a few years ago.

I’ve stayed silent — until now — because it’s too knotty and embarrassing to out. But I want to understand this institution; to see beyond my own confinement. Prior to its supposed 2005 closure, CEDU existed for nearly forty years. Decade in and decade out, it was one of the country’s most influential, harmful, and cultic residential treatment programs — “similar to Zimbardo’s prison experiment or Jim Jones’ Guyana,” according to Psychology Today.

Investigating CEDU wasn’t liberating; it was ulcerative. Still, I attempted interviews, dug up stories in regional newspapers and magazines, and scanned all the forums and survivor sites. I also sent California Public Records Act requests. Some of these hellish records (especially ones from the California Department of Social Services) are, to my knowledge, revealed here for the first time.

But first, another disclosure: for twenty years, I’ve completely failed to understand CEDU.

I’m not alone. “What is CEDU?” has been asked for over a half-century, leaving its questioners buried under vastly different responses. For example, in 1969, a few years after it officially launched, CEDU’s “young people” appeared on a local news show to describe their program to a concerned and confounded SoCal public. The tape is lost, but the California Digital Newspaper Collection archived a Desert Sun advertisement for this episode.

“What’s CEDU?” the ad asks. “Is it a hotbed of sex orgies? Or a haven toward decent living?”

CEDU ad from 1969.

My parents — many parents — missed CEDU’s “hotbed of sex orgies” question. Instead, to them, it was a sort of touchy-feely kibbutz with hippie counselors at outside tables reading aloud passages of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

This easy narrative can be found throughout the media, too. When CEDU isn’t sensationally misdescribed as a “controversial home for social dropouts” (the San Bernardino Sun, 1968) or a “scandal-ridden boarding school” (the Jewish Journal, 2015) or a “now-shuttered behavioral school” (ABC News, 2019), it’s dwindled down to a therapy camp with a hippie vibe, a retro eccentricity. At CEDU, Forbes observed in 2002, a “Sixties mindset still prevails.”

Ah, and wasn’t that mindset groovy. Before beginning to write this article, I came across CEDU in an old issue of Billboard magazine. It’s 1973, and Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods “will appear live at the CeDu school in Running Springs, Calif.” The Billboard blurb continues: “CeDu is a public, non-profit corporation functioning as a rehabilitation center for emotionally disturbed youths who have experienced serious drug involvements.”

You may recall Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods, launched by the Osmonds, from their 1974 hit, “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero.” Or, perhaps, you don’t. By 2011, Rolling Stone listed that tune — “insipid…drivel” — on its 10 Worst Songs of the 1970s.

When I discovered the archived concert announcement, despite the wonky spelling of a wonkier name, I felt momentarily satisfied with the program’s description. But anyone who has lived at CEDU — a “closed system,” to quote Philip Elberg, the former president of the International Cultic Studies Association, where “amateurs operat[ed] an unregulated prison camp” — knows a moment of clarity is followed by decades of incomprehension.

First, the only “non-profit” part of CEDU was its residents couldn’t hold money. Also, nearly every genre of music was forbidden — just humming a degenerate, “unacceptable” tune was a punishable offense. The music I recall hearing? A non-stop soundtrack of soft rock and easy-listening songs blasted throughout CEDU’s hysterically violent large-group awareness training.

According to a CEDU brochure from the early 1970s: “Music is used extensively as a tool to experience feelings.” Instead of the standard thrash-metal music torture, I was deafened by John Denver and Neil Diamond and Randy VanWarmer and sleep-deprived teenagers screaming themselves into convulsions.

So, how did Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods get this gig? Did they arrive in their fire-sequined bell-bottom jumpsuits? (Completely out of agreement with the CEDU uniform.) Above all, why would an unapologetically self-enclosed facility allow a public show?

Here’s the harder question: why was a fifteen-year-old from Chicago’s suburbs — a teen lacking any “drug involvements” — immured in a mountain-town rehab half a country away from his home?

The Children Under Its Care

“CEDU, as the drug institute is called,” a 2001 Los Angeles Times cover story noted, “was the brainchild of Mel Wasserman, a Palm Springs furniture store owner who had sponsored recovering addicts at Synanon.”

Wasserman’s role was murkier than mere sponsorship. Synanon, after all, was an ass-backwards rehab that turned itself into a religion. But CEDU’s founder most certainly was a Synanite. In a 1972 letter endorsing CEDU as a “serious and dedicated treatment establishment for drug addicts,” Dr. Frank A. Seixas wrote “[t]he director, Mel Wasserman, had previous experience with Synon [sic] after which the therapy is modeled.”

(Seixas, it should be noted, was “an expert on alcoholism and a leader in the effort to classify it as a medical illness,” according to his New York Times obituary.)

Other individuals in CEDU’s cabal were from Synanon, too. For example, a gruff heroin addict from Brooklyn, Bill Lane, joined Synanon in 1962 — one of its first and youngest members. While there, he met Mel Wasserman, “a big contributor, big donor, a good friend, big supporter of Synanon,” Lane said in a recent BlogTalkRadio show.

The two went on to “develop” CEDU: Mel as its founder and Lane, according to a 2005 profile with the cloyingly-titled website, StrugglingTeens.com, “mov[ing] into admissions and every other aspect of the organization, culminating in his becoming president.”

Screenshot of Bill Lane acting in an early Synanon promotional video.

Mel’s drug institute — which moved from his Palm Springs home to a ranch in Reche Canyon to a lodge in Running Springs — was, if anything, one rolling allegation since the late sixties. “From the first months of the program until the final days of the CEDU schools nearly forty years later, Wasserman’s educational philosophy and methods were always draped in controversy,” note the authors of Second Shelter, a book on residential therapeutic treatment.

Second Shelter correctly mentions CEDU’s “therapeutic approach borrowed heavily” from Synanon, but suggests “Wasserman employed a milder version.” Similarly, in a 2009 Bend Bulletin story, a onetime CEDU admissions director stated, “Mel Wasserman was influenced by Synanon, and so used the confrontation model watered down quite a bit in the founding in CEDU.” More striking, The LA Times cover story very mistakenly — very horrendously — claimed “Wasserman eschewed Synanon’s confrontational approach to therapy.”

These are repulsive errors. As it turns out, you can’t actually modify behavior modification — especially when it’s fueled by rage and meant for children. And, anyway, if Mel the Would-Be Guru really wanted to water down Synanon (or avoid its “cult-like trappings”) he probably shouldn’t have named his institute after its founder.

The Church of Synanon, as Gizmodo smartly put it, was “a tyrant’s ant farm masquerading as a grand experiment with the good life.” That tyrant was Charles E. Dederich, a hypermasculine, addict-alcoholic who ran Synanon like, well, a drug lord.

Under Dederich’s rabid, loopy leadership, Synanon went from “treating” substance abusers with attack therapy to forcing them into vasectomies and abortions and divorces and partner-swapping and head-shaving. Chuck’s good life also came equipped with a militia, “The Imperial Marines,” and — as People Magazine wrote in 1978 — “rumors of an arms cache worth $300,000.”

This People article includes a parenthetical Dederich quote. “‘Brainwashing is a very apt term,’ [he] once observed. ‘We get very dirty brains in here.’”

Not a clever line, but still troubling to read. Mel Wasserman and Bill Lane were those dirty brains. They were also cold, savvy businessmen — dirty brains clear enough to establish a program based on Synanon’s duplicatable bits.

Mel Wasserman, date unknown.

I’m still struggling to understand whether this was a steal or a tribute or both. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence that CEDU was an acronym for “Charles E. Dederich University.”

(A quick word on spelling: I grew up with “CEDU” in all-capital letters, and will continue writing it in uppercase. However, variations existed throughout its history. Mostly, “Cedu” and “cedu.”)

At any rate, my parents learned about the CEDU-Synanon relationship in 2015. At first, they were confused and incredulous. Then they were confused and devastated.

I wondered why my parents never asked about the program’s bizarre name. “We believed what we were told,” my mother said. The common explanation was that CEDU stood for: “See yourself as you are and do something about it.” Whatever the hell that means.

Photo from a 1973 brochure.

For obscure reasons, this “See yourself/Do something” line was widely accepted. And yet a 1968 San Bernardino Sun article says that “Cedu was a manufactured name [Mel Wasserman, his wife, and early members] gave to encounter groups.” Another 1968 piece in the same newspaper says a resident’s “free time is spent in ‘cedus’ — encounter sessions in which young people work out their problems and discover themselves.”

I don’t know when CEDU officialdom cooked up their marketable slogan, or why the outside world — reporters included — ignored or excused its unmissable sketchiness. (The obvious question: if the facility’s name was an abbreviated motto, why not spell it “Seedo”?) One thing is clear, though: Charles E. Dederich often went by his full initials.

As the pre­eminent Synanon expert, Paul Morantz, says in a filmed interview, “probably the biggest reference to [Dederich] was ‘CED,’ particularly in writing.”