{"id":9629,"date":"2022-03-11T15:58:42","date_gmt":"2022-03-11T23:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.breakingcodesilence.org\/?p=9629"},"modified":"2022-03-13T17:38:38","modified_gmt":"2022-03-14T00:38:38","slug":"rivendell-of-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.breakingcodesilence.org\/rivendell-of-utah\/","title":{"rendered":"Rivendell of Utah"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rivendell of Utah<\/b> (1986-1997) West Jordan, UT<\/span><\/h1>\n

Psychiatric Hospital<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

History and Background Information<\/b><\/h2>\n

Rivendell of Utah (also called Rivendell Psychiatric Hospital of Utah) was a behavior-modification program that opened sometime in 1986. It originally was opened as a psychiatric hospital that specialized in the treatment of “sexual impulse disorders”, namely, homosexuality. Rivendell was known to practice conversion therapy on LGBTQ+ residents, including horrific methods of shock therapy and aversion therapy. Rivendell had a maximum enrollment of 80 teenages, and the average length of stay is unclear. Many residents were only discharged once their insurance stopped paying.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rivendell was located at <\/span>5899 Rivendell Dr, West Jordan, UT 84081<\/span><\/a>, which is the current location of <\/span>Copper Hills Youth Center<\/span><\/a>. <\/span>Copper Hills Youth Center is believed to be the rebrand of Riverdell of Utah.<\/b> In addition to being in the same location as Riverdell, many former staff at Rivendell also went on to work at Copper Hills.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rivendell of Utah was <\/span>ordered<\/span><\/a> to close in May of 1997.<\/span><\/p>\n

Founders and Notable Staff<\/b><\/h2>\n

Jared Balmer<\/b> is the co-Founder of Rivendell Psychiatric Hospital. He later went on to help Co-Found <\/span>Island View RTC<\/span><\/a>, a confirmedly abusive program owned by <\/span>Aspen Education Group<\/span><\/a>. He later helped open several other Aspen Education Group programs, including the <\/span>Oakley School<\/span><\/a> and the <\/span>Aspen Institute For Behavioral Assessment<\/span><\/a>, which was a branch of Island View. In 2006, he was the recipient of the <\/span>NATSAP<\/span><\/a> Leadership Award. He is currently the Executive Director of <\/span>WayPoint Academy<\/span><\/a>, which he helped found in 2013 with Mike Bulloch, who is involved with various <\/span>Aspen Education Group<\/span><\/a> programs including the <\/span>Aspen Institute For Behavioral Assessment<\/span><\/a> and the <\/span>Oakley School<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Delbert T. Goates<\/b> was the Chief of Psychiatry at Rivendell Psychiatric Hospital. He also worked in the same position at the <\/span>Brightway Adolescent Hospital<\/span><\/a>, a confirmedly abusive <\/span>WWASP<\/span><\/a> program in St. George, UT. He died on April 19, 2000 in Blackburn, England. His cause of death was a massive brain hemorrhage caused by a fall he experienced while serving an LDS mission with his wife, Julie Anderson Goates. <\/span>Goates’ obituary<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

David Ericksen<\/b> worked at Rivendell in the late 80s, providing psychological assessment services. In 2008, he began working at the <\/span>Aspen Institute For Behavioral Assessment<\/span><\/a>, an <\/span>Aspen Education Group<\/span><\/a> program founded by Jared Balmer (<\/span>source<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Manuel Tello Jr.<\/b> worked as a Community Relations Presenter and Acute Unit Leader at Rivendell of Utah from 1987-1992. He then went on to work at <\/span>Olympus View Hospital RTC<\/span><\/a> from 1992 until 1999. He then returned to work at <\/span>Copper Hilss Youth Center<\/span><\/a> from 1999 until 2012 in various roles, including Transportation Officer and Residential Center Scheduler, Staff Trainer, and Mental Health Specialist. <\/span>https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/manuel-tello-jr-09a84186\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Charles McCusker<\/b> worked as a Clinical Staff at Rivendell from 1986-1988. Around 2008, he created a <\/span>website<\/span><\/a> promoting the use of Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation (CES).<\/span><\/p>\n

Lesa Nelson<\/b> worked as a Registered Nurse at Rivendell from 1988 until 1990.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lee Roy Bodily<\/b> worked as a teacher\/counselor on the Adolescent Unit at Rivendell, eventually becoming one of the head counselors over the Children’s unit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Program Structure<\/b><\/h2>\n

Little is known about the specifics of the program at Rivendell. Conversion Therapy is known to have been a large component of their methods.<\/span><\/p>\n

Conversion Therapy<\/b><\/h2>\n

Rivendell is widely known to have practiced conversion therapy. Survivors of these practices describe being forcibly shown images of homosexual sex (as well as extremely graphic images of deviant sexual acts such as sexual abuse of children and animals) and then were either shocked on their private parts or given an aversive stimuli (such as ammonia) to smell.<\/span><\/p>\n

The following are excerpts from published stories about Lyn Duff, a teenager who was sent to Rivendell at age 15 because she had told her mother she was gay: “In Duff’s case, her already rocky relationship with her mother was sent into orbit when Mrs. Duff read a poem that Lyn, age 15 at the time, had written in her diary; a love poem to another girl. After a series of visits to psychiatrists and attempted institutional placements, things seemed to settle down for a while, and the younger Duff moved back into her mom’s South Pasadena apartment. But the calm was an illusion. On Dec. 19, 1991, her mother and grandfather tricked her into getting into the family car and virtually kidnapped her, taking her to an institution known as Rivendell of Utah, located outside Salt Lake City. What followed was a [six-month] nightmare of ‘treatment’ that, as Duff describes it, sounds like something out of an old B movie: isolation rooms, heavy use of powerful psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, word associations in which ‘sex’ is equated with ‘the pits of hell,’ and punishments that included scrubbing floors with a toothbrush. ‘I felt like I was being raped,’ she says now of the ‘therapy’ to which she was subjected. ‘I felt like I was being violated.’ …You would sit in a room with a shrink. I was being shown pictures of people having sex-every kind of sex, sex with animals, everything. They test how turned on you get. With guys they put a rubber band around [their penises]. For girls it’s different; they put these suction cups all over your body, on your chest, on your back. I remember the first time looking at [these drawings] and I remember this electronic box with digital numbers, and they were going up quickly. After that this other kid told me, ‘Don’t look at the pictures, just look right above the pictures. They think you’re looking at the pictures, but you don’t get turned on and they think it’s working.’ So I did that after the second time, and my test scores dropped and they were so proud of me. I felt like such a shitty person. I mean, here I was convincing everyone that I was a heterosexual. But that was the only way to get out.” (<\/span>source<\/span><\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n

The following are excerpts from an interview with another former patient of Rivendell of Utah, a 16-year-old male (who reportedly committed suicide shortly after the interview):<\/span><\/p>\n