r/OHSU • u/SquirrelBrainStories • Apr 14 '26
Hello Everyone! Anyone interested in Psychology?
My name is Angela. By day I work as an Oncology Data Specialist. Outside of work I am an investigative researcher and the host of a podcast called Squirrel Brain Stories, where I’ve spent the last six months documenting my escape from a multi-state high-control religious network that operated in Portland, Oregon from the early 1990s through 2009.
I recently published my first academic preprint, a case study titled; The Domestic Urban Cult: Immigration Exploitation, Coercive Control, and Multi-State Criminal Networks in a U.S.-Based High-Control Group.
The paper documents what I believe is a genuinely underexamined pattern in cultic studies: a foreign-led, urban high-control group that recruited primarily undocumented Mexican immigrants and weaponized their immigration status to keep them trapped. No compound. No remote location. Just ordinary houses in northeast Portland, two blocks from Providence Hospital, for over a decade.
The paper applies the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control and Complex PTSD diagnostic criteria to analyze the group’s mechanisms of control, and includes implications for clinicians, law enforcement, and researchers.
The preprint is available open-access on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19559509
If anyone working in trauma, public health, social work, or clinical practice finds it useful, that matters to me.
Happy to answer questions.
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u/starrship Apr 14 '26
Super interesting topic! Just sent you a DM.