The Most Dangerous Idea in Mental Health - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

Troublingly, 43 percent of practicing clinical psychologists still think it is possible to retrieve repressed memories. Those therapists are profoundly out of step with the thinking among research psychologists.

Reading this was a bit like walking down memory lane. Not so much for me personally, in regards to actual treatment, as I have never had a treatment provider go to the extremes cited in this article.  But I did "suffer" with a diagnoses of MPD'DID concurrent with my Bipolar.  I now believe that misnomer was applied because I am a cutter and back in the day, self injury was not well understood.  But I did and still do have friends that are "caught" in this morass, I got sucked into the "belief" of alter-personalities to the point where I began to question my literal sanity.  If not for the excellent care from my last therapist, who knows where I'd be today; probably still locked in one of the nut houses I was a visitor too.

(To be clear, I say that in jest.  There are some excellent facilities helping many individuals.  But there are some not so good ones as well.  I experienced both, the initial 3 years after experiencing my first psychotic episode, I spent 18 months in and out of hospital.  I am crazy and I have the papers to prove it.  Both the good and the bad is part of who I am and  I have no problem making light of it.)

My interest with this article besides the obvious concerning Castlewood, is Cara's reference to belief in "cults [that] roam the country, ritualistically traumatizing children."  In other words the "Satanic Panic" that led to this travesty as well as this one which I prefaced with this comment:

For those that may not remember, it began in 1983 (my sophomore year of college) with the McMartin Preschool case out of California.* Fuel was added by the likes of Mike Warnke, John Todd, Jack Chick, Michelle Smith and of course my buddy Bob Larson; the list is an endless whose who of Christian fundamentalism. Though the flames began to die down in the 90s, the 'San Antonio 4' was one of the  last big cases to sweep the nation. About damn time that some true justice has come for Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh and Cassandra Rivera. Now all they need is a declaration of innocents to complete the process.

Some may think that Cara is being hyperbolic, or that my interest is a bit over the top.  But when one considers the rise in popularity of demons, deliverance ministries and of exorcisms, I don't think neither of us are delusional in our reporting.

It has been two years since Tom Mitchell last saw his 20-year-old daughter, Anna. “She was planning to come stay with us right after she came back,” he says, gesturing toward her bedroom in his Craftsman style home in New York on a recent afternoon. “We’ve kept everything the same, except for the boy-band posters.”

Nearly four years ago, Tom and his ex-wife sent their daughter to an eating-disorder clinic called the Castlewood Treatment Center, outside St. Louis. In her five months there, Anna grew to believe she had recovered memories of a deeply abusive childhood that she had previously banished from her conscious mind. Since then, Mitchell has lived in the shadow of a horrific accusation: that he sexually abused Anna for more than a decade.

Child sexual abuse is, of course, a serious and widespread issue in America. Researchers agree that it occurs far more often than official statistics indicate, because children so often decline to report their abuse out of embarrassment, a desire to protect members of their family, or in an attempt to avoid the memory altogether. But the idea that people can immediately banish abuse from their own consciousness, lock those memories away for years, and then recover them through therapy is one with far shakier empirical grounding, and a deeply problematic history. The therapeutic vogue for memory recovery in the early 1990s fueled a nationwide moral panic over ritual sex abuse, satanic cults, and other supposedly repressed traumas. Today, for most of us, the fad seems like a strange, self-contained, and very much closed chapter in recent cultural history.

But for Tom Mitchell, who denies his daughter’s accusations, the controversy is very much alive. He believes his family has suffered from the fact that the mental health establishment has never really purged itself of a thoroughly discredited idea—and arguably lacks the basic mechanisms necessary to self-correct.

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But the tide really began to turn when former patients started to doubt their own recovered memories. In dozens of lawsuits, patients described coercive therapeutic techniques including hypnosis, guided visualization, and dream analysis, and the pressure of group therapy, often used on them when they were at their most vulnerable. Some former patients related terrifying experiences of being confined in mental health wards stocked with people who believed they had dozens of personalities. Therapists, some of the lawsuits claimed, both encouraged these beliefs and accused patients who expressed doubt of succumbing to programming they received from a cult. Some settlements from the lawsuits reached into the millions.

By the end of the 1990s, many of the trauma clinics that had specialized in recovered memory therapy had shut down. The daytime talk shows about satanic abuse and multiple personalities became less frequent, and the courts became wary of testimony based on recovered memories. Richard McNally, the director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and author of the book Remembering Trauma, put it bluntly in a friend-of-court brief: “The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry.”

The Most Dangerous Idea in Mental Health - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society