I also hope you let us know what happened to Gino, if anything. It’s funny how you stayed friends all those years, despite him clearly maintaining ties with Elan and selling drugs. I hope he has a redemption arc, or has the chance for one, and that he wasn’t another soul lost to the treacheries of Elan.
2023-03-29 04:38:41 +0000 UTC
I cried reading that Elan closed. I’m on my 30s and remember when Reddit and social media was new, but I never heard about the troubled teen industry (maybe because I’m in Canada?). Congratulations, Joe - whoever you are, don’t ever forget you aren’t a nobody, but definitely somebody… a somebody who saved a lot of future children from the trauma and abuse that shaped your life. I hope you got professional help at some point, because you deserve so much better for yourself.
2023-03-29 04:36:41 +0000 UTC
Holy wow. I've said this before, but the way your talent has evolved throughout drawing this comic is breathtaking. It was always good, but then it became great, and now sometimes I just sit and stare at a panel like the rose or the mother demanding her child and just marvel at it. And my attention span is typically awful! I hope that, when this comic and process is finished, your brain is able to sit back and be truly able to comprehend and appreciate what you've achieved in the same way that I and many others do. You couldn't deserve that self-validation more.
2023-03-22 00:20:23 +0000 UTC
Incredible. Joe I can't even imagine how much trauma you have endured. I hope that you have everything you need and are well taken care of. Thank you for all the work you did to close Elan. I work in children's mental health and while I can't apologize for the entire mental health industry, I can tell you that things are changing drastically. Everyone now tries to be trauma-informed, which means gentle, positive, supportive interventions; no punishment, no coercion, no anger, no yelling. It can be hard to convince some parents and older school staff to behave in these new trauma-informed ways, but once they see that it works, they're usually in. There are certainly problems with treatment for kids, mainly that there's not enough of it. But hopefully what happened to you and your family, would not happen now. And that's due to your efforts and the efforts of all the other activists.
