Strangest of all, the former employees alleged that young David Bruce had been living at the facility for over a year—he was often left in the care of a patient with a history of self-mutilation, and allegedly deliberately kept from his mother—despite the clinic only being licensed to house adults.
Eventually, Montreux was summoned to licensing court. The clinic pursued an appeal for a while; staff also discussed the possibility of the clinic reinventing itself under a new name. This new iteration, however, was not to be. I got in touch with Margaret Bruce years later, when she emailed me after reading a short blog piece I wrote in which I asked what had happened to the little boy I saw on television many years earlier.
At the time of my posting, I mused, he would have been in his mids. Had he actually had anorexia nervosa, unheard of in a child of that age? Indeed, in the past few years, researchers like Simon Baron-Cohen and advocates like Sharon DaVanport have publicly spoken about the comorbidity of anorexia and autism. Or was Margaret Bruce unfairly maligned by a narrow-minded medical establishment insistent on its self-created categories, and David soothed to health by a misunderstood, prolific empath?
To my great surprise, Margaret commented on the post and asked me to write to her. In early , Margaret and I met at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. With voluminous dark hair and a gravelly voice, she is brash, yet warm in person. David, she told me, was now 23; he worked part-time and had a steady girlfriend. She said sometimes at barbecues, when David brought his own food along, her friends would look at her pityingly.
But David is alive, has never been re-hospitalized, and actually wants to bulk up his still-wiry frame. He had recently tried pistachio ice cream with tiny pieces of nuts in it, a huge step for someone with a limited palate and texture aversions.
To Margaret, these were miracles. The mother in her balked, but she did nothing. Most people associated with Montreux fall into one of two camps: Either they feel it was a utopian place of rebirth that was unfairly persecuted, or it was a torture chamber run by a very soft-spoken Svengali.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative coverage during the hearing, many people, including Margaret, still fall into the first. Now in her 40s, Courtney Lange arrived at Montreux in after she met Claude-Pierre when they were both guests on Oprah.
By that time, Lange had been suffering from anorexia for three years. Carolinda Towsley had been in almost 40 hospital programs by the time she went to Montreux in , when she was Others feel the criticisms of Montreux were warranted. An early admission, Shelley Lane started treatment with Claude-Pierre in For two years, Lane, then in her late 20s, was torn between accepting the trademark Montreux affection—she is disabled as a result of the abuse she suffered as an infant, and spent most of her childhood in foster care—and feeling deeply unsettled by what she felt was a lack of staff professionalism.
Dead silence on the other end of the line. From all accounts it seems that Claude-Pierre did a good job of persuading these young women to eat. But, as she explains, the number quickly grew to , and she converted a Victorian house into a residence for her clients, somehow assuming that the provincial government would pay the bills. That never happened and, out of necessity, she began charging the sort of fees which her critics suggest are exorbitant although they are in line with similar clinics in the U.
Busy, overextended, distracted by the attention of media icons like Ophra Winfrey and basking in international popularity, it would seem that she did what countless others heralded as "healers" have done. She created a new persona, one of an "innovative therapist" who has found "the cure," written a bestseller The Secret Language of Eating Disorders about it, packaged the method, and now teaches it in workshops and training seminars.
This "angel" had become a psychological entrepreneur. Whatever it was that made her successful, I'm pretty sure it wasn't this psychologized formula. I suspect that Peggy just had the "knack" - some personal quality that made her good at her work, something that put her in the same category as my favourite aunt who could bake the best apple pies I've ever tasted or the man who has a way with fixing old cars or the woman down the street whose roses grow better than mine A knack according Webster's Dictionary is "a special ready capacity that is hard to analyze or teach.
When you try, it loses its power, dissolving into that mixture of sugar and water that's called Snake Oil. Digital and Marketing Assistant Toronto. View All. Contact Us Use our anonymous tipline Report a book deal Contact us via email. The image shown on two U. Oprah Winfrey called her "an angel on Earth. She died last October.
Much of the coverage focused on Samantha Kendall, a British woman who came to the clinic as a last resort.
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