Montreux clinic tale a grim read

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This article was published 09/06/2002 (8493 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Untold Story of Peggy Claude-Pierre and the Controversial Montreux Clinic

By Barbara McLintock

HarperCollins, 288 pages, $33

Reviewed by Laura Robinson

BARBARA McLintock, an award-winning journalist with the Vancouver Province, has written an exhaustive expos of Victoria’s Montreux Clinic for eating disorders.

In 1982, Peggy Claude-Pierre’s teenage daughter Kirsten, who was 5’9″, weighed 84 pounds. Because she believed all eating disorder clinics were behaviourist in approach, a psychological strategy Claude-Pierre (who hadn’t finished her psychology degree) didn’t believe in, she devoted her days and nights to her daughter, getting her to talk about her “thoughts and feelings.”

But not long after, Nicole, Claude-Pierre’s younger daughter, showed signs of an eating disorder and depression as her sister began to recover. This experience made Claude-Pierre become a missionary for her treatment of eating disorders, a disease she called Confirmed Negativity Condition or CNC.

Ailment

This ailment stems, not from sexual abuse (which is a high correlating factor among eating disordered girls), nor from living in a world that tells females to disappear, nor even from girls wanting to control something in their lives.

No, this ailment stems from a personality malfunction that is deeply embedded and present at birth, according to Claude-Pierre, which mainly convinces girls they have no self-worth. Her remedy to CNC is 24-hour unconditional love.

The live-in clinic Claude-Pierre opened never did meet B.C.’s minimal medical, safety and labour standards. But this facility was where girls, young women, and even a few boys, would miraculously start to love themselves and learn how to shut off the negative voice from within.

Claude-Pierre and her followers declared clients were “totally recovered” and had been saved from death’s clutches time and time again.

This book gives great insight into the nightmarish life anorexics and bulimics create for themselves and their families and the way in which Claude-Pierre created a cult-like following within her Promised Land.

Eating-disordered girls and women read our culture correctly. Women and girls learn how to “disappear” in order to gain approval as they stay quiet and small, never overshadowing male greatness.

Cheeky

Anorexics give back a very cheeky response. “Yes, I will start to disappear,” they say through their actions. “When you see that my willlingness is killing me, then I will have the upper hand — not you.”

After a couple of false starts, B.C. only recently closed down the Montreux Clinic as a residential facility. In order to avoid the standards required by B.C. law, Claude Pierre now runs an out-patient counselling program that requires no licence from the government.

Reading the profiles of the clients at Montreux is fascinating. Families had to put on hold all plans for the future and devote everything to their daughters. The situation was frequently life or death. Then they received the enveloping hug of the angelic Claude-Pierre and her smothering love (yours for only $500-$1,000 a day).

Yet investigators found many clients were literally prisoners at Montreux. When they tried to leave, they were physically blocked. If they wrote letters asking for outside help they were read and destroyed. And contrary to a supply of unconditional love, some were held down and force fed.

McLintock’s description of what really went on at Montreux makes for grim reading. This book is an important contribution to understanding how deeply problematic the pleasure and nourishment of food is for females.

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Winnipeg-based writer Laura Robinson’s latest book is Black Tights: Women, Sport and Sexuality.