Behavior: Valley of Horrors

The Rev. George von Hilsheimer, 39, a self-styled minister in the Free Religious Association, is fascinated by psychiatry. Though he has no degrees in the subject, he likes to talk about such “therapies” as electrosleep, vivid confrontation, megavitamins and hypode-sensitization. What is noteworthy about Von Hilsheimer, however, is that he has been able to try out these techniques, and others as well, during his nine years as superintendent of the Green Valley School for emotionally disturbed and delinquent children in Orange City, Fla.

If a child misbehaved, for example, Von Hilsheimer would sometimes gather the students together to declare him “morally dead”; then, concocting his own version of reality therapy (which denies the importance of past traumas and encourages a patient to cope outright with his current dilemma), Von Hilsheimer and the students would force the youth to dig himself a grave and lie in it overnight. “I think it is a beautiful symbolic thing for the kids to go through,” he explained. “It’s a way of forcing them to look at themselves.” At other times he would shackle the child, jolt him with an electroshock machine dubbed a “lalapalooza,” or shut him up in a storehouse.

All this came to light last week at hearings conducted by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The Senators are probing a federal medical-insurance program called CHAMPUS (Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services), the benefits of which Include payment for the care of emotionally disturbed children of military personnel in 486 schools and psychiatric centers round the country. Senate investigators claim that CHAMPUS administrators do not properly check out facilities before handing over money. Green Valley, they point out, has received $1.2 million from the Government over a three-year period to perpetrate outrages that Committee Chairman Henry Jackson called worthy of “Hitler, Use Koch and Buchenwald.”

In 1973, Florida investigators testified, the school was raided by state officials; among other brutalizing instruments, they found shackles and a brown leather whip. One nurse said she had treated numerous bruises from chains. Von Hilsheimer told TIME Correspondent Joe Kane that his young charges were “miserable, hateful, violent bastards.” The school’s former headmaster, Ronald E. Nowicki, could also be violent. In a fit of anger he punched a female student so hard that he ruptured her eardrums.

Allergy Treatment. At the hearings, former staff members testified about Green Valley’s various treatments. They said that Dr. William Philpott, a consulting psychiatrist who practices in South Attleboro, Mass., believed that mental disorders stem from allergies. He tried to treat the allergies by having students inhale carbon dioxide gas. (Two of his former patients in Maryland died following carbon dioxide inhalation therapy, and Philpott was acquitted of manslaughter in 1966.) According to the former head nurse, Esther Johnson Snow, another consultant, Dr. Sol Klotz of Orlando, Fla., told her to inject a student with his own urine as a test for allergy. Klotz also made a serum of dirt, dust, and other substances and told the nurses to inject it into students as an allergy treatment.

Von Hilsheimer insists that he is being persecuted. In response to his critics, he claims that 86% of his students go on to live normal lives in the outside world, though he has done no follow-up studies. He is also proud of the fact that there was “only one” suicide at his school. In 1968 a disturbed boy named Michael Waker, 18, killed himself with a pistol Von Hilsheimer had allowed him to purchase; later the boy’s mother was billed for the gun. Another boy, depressed to the point of suicide because his mother had just written telling him how peaceful it was at home without him, was also handed a gun by Von Hilsheimer, but he decided not to use it.

Green Valley is not the only school to be scrutinized by the committee. During the hearings, Senate investigators charged that at the University Center, a residential psychiatric-treatment center in Ann Arbor, Mich, (it has no connection with the University of Michigan), students who continually misbehave are locked for days or even months in a “seclusion room.” The school, which has received more than $1 million in CHAMPUS funds since 1969, is also accused of being lax about widespread drug use; students who enter the institution with problems other than drug addiction quickly become hooked.

Such revelations may improve the situation at Green Valley and the University Center. But the real problem spreads much further. Senate investigators feel that there are countless private psychiatric facilities round the country that exploit their charges and even use government funds to do so. State and local agencies, which generally have the responsibility of supervising and licensing these facilities, frequently lack the funds and manpower to do an adequate job. Until something is done to change this, the nation will continue to have what Senate investigators call “commercially operated jails.”