The summons was packed into the mailbox of a previous address — two residencies ago, in fact — on a Wednesday afternoon. The hearing was to be on Monday. It was only happenstance that I found out that the organizer of S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind-control And Ritual-abuse Today), Neil Brick, was trying to sue me at all.

As the paperwork, aside from being grossly improperly served, was also dated a couple of weeks previous to its delivery, this seemed like a rather underhanded attempt to avoid my replying to the suit. When I eventually had the opportunity to read over the summons, I could see why this may have been the tactic.

The case was weak. In fact, it was non-existent.

“Defamation” was the claim, and many quotes of mine were pulled from internet sources in an attempt to support it. Even quotes that are not mine at all were included in the summons, though Brick and his lawyer apparently felt confident enough in their origin to attribute them to me. Among these quotes are comments that are no longer online at all! As for the quotes that were written by me… I stand by them, they are founded in fact, and they certainly don’t constitute defamation.

Ironically, this all stemmed from a report I wrote about one of Brick’s conferences where I heard him deliver a speech in which he encouraged vigorous debate with skeptics against his position. It was his own failure to successfully do just that which caused him to seek legal remediation — an injunction to prevent my writing my writing about him or his organization — instead.

Here’s how it went:

Having entered the hotel slightly after the opening speaker of S.M.A.R.T.’s twelfth annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations, and Mind-Control conference began, I was told by a large woman sitting behind the registration table that I would have to wait until I could be properly registered before entering. I took a seat just outside the open door of the conference room where I could observe the full proceedings within. Brick stood at the podium. As I described him later in my subsequent “defamatory” report, he is a “small man in his 50s with a greasy dark curly comb-over, large thick glasses, and a voice that sounds exacly like Elmer Fudd (without the impediment of pronouncing his Rs as Ws).”

He was delivering the opening remarks. He was wearing a button-up shirt at least two sizes too large for his diminutive frame.  (This physical description is important when you consider his claim to have been a type of super-soldier for Black Ops military.)  Reading directly from his notes in a mechanical word-by-word monotone, without once looking up, he emotionlessly railed against skeptics who have sought to discredit ritual abuse as well as the validity of “recovered memories”.

“There is overwhelming scientific evidence that recovered memory exists as a phenomenon”, he asserted. He began to quote at length from sources that agree with this position.

A belief in the historical accuracy of recovered memories, as I had already discerned from their website, is vital to S.M.A.R.T.’s belief in a conspiracy of satanic cults and government mind-control. The theory espoused by recovered memory proponents (and well known in popular culture), is that traumatic memories of abuse may be repressed – relegated to some dark corner of the mind – where they unfailingly metastasize into some type of chronic negative emotions, compulsions, confusion, even physical ailments. Preserved in high-definition, and unerring detail, these oppressive unconscious memories must be drawn out, retrieved, relived, confronted, and reconciled within the conscious mind, before the victim can lead a happy and productive life.

Almost all of the self-proclaimed victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse have recovered their memories of victimization while undergoing some type of psychotherapy. For the most part, these memories are the only type of “evidence” they attempt to present in support of the claim that such victimization ever occurred.

The process of digging for repressed traumatic memories through hypnosis or other techniques is most often employed in treatment of the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now re-labeled as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Due to their almost total reliance upon recovered memory evidence, purveyors of satanic cult stories are often also defenders of the controversial multiple personality diagnosis, a condition that itself is dismissed by some psychiatrists and psychologists as a “behavioral artifact… generated by suggestion in vulnerable people.” (See below: Concerned Psychiatrists’ and Psychologists’ letter to the APA’s DSM-V Task Force.)

Critics of Recovered Memory Therapy point out that the act of digging for memories assumed to be repressed can have a subtly coercive effect on clients who – knowing what they are supposed to be “remembering” – are at least as prone to confabulating false memories as they are to recalling anything with historical accuracy. Given that such critics of recovered memory therapy often point directly to highly improbable claims of satanic cult abuse as evidence of false memories, it was no surprise that Neil Brick breezily dismissed skeptics as conspirators: “There is [...] a lot of evidence that those attacking the theory of recovered memory may have ulterior motives. For example, they may have been accused of child abuse crimes or may have been connected to mind control research in the past.”

Using “child abuse” interchangeably with “ritual abuse”, Brick attempted to further bolster a position that those who doubt the existence of an international brain-washing coven simply despise tykes: “The media turned on child abuse survivors in the early and mid 1990′s and began to in essence support those that has [sic] perpetrated crimes against children, believing unfounded stories about so called ‘miscarriages of justice.’ Due to the extreme nature of ritual abuse crimes and the psychological need for the public denial of these crimes, it became an easy sell to spin these crimes against children for the public to believe the misstatements about falsely accused perpetrators. After ritual abuse was discredited, then other child abuse crimes could be more easily discredited.”

There you have it. You’re either with Neil Brick, or you’re with the Satanists. You either believe every outrageous claim of demonic doings, or you’re part of the cover-up. At best, you’re simply in “denial”.

Suddenly, the woman at the registration table, who had also been watching Neil Brick through the open door, began to lightly sob. She grabbed a nearby tissue, dried her eyes, and blew her nose.

I stared uncomfortably down at the program in my hands. I came looking for the reasons, the so-called evidence that compels this continued belief in satanic cult crimes… of mind control… to see the self-proclaimed byproducts of the brutal puppet masters said to control the highest reaches of the world governments with an inhuman disdain for life and liberty. Instead – with scheduled lectures entitled “Dissociation and Time Management” and “The DID RA [Ritual Abuse] Family: An Attachment Perspective on a Forensic Relationship” – this conference appeared to be primarily adapted toward defending the DID diagnosis.

According to his biographical synopsis on the program, Neil Brick describes himself as a “survivor of alleged Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA [the CIA's covert mind-control and chemical interrogation project of 1950s - 60s]“. The disclaimer of the word “alleged” in his own biographical description is perplexing…

I mulled over this as Brick eventually concluded his labored lecture. What did it mean?

Brick came out to the registration table during the break following his presentation gripping a briefcase. He scrutinized me momentarily.

I checked out. Given the nod, my attendance was then officially approved.

I stationed myself anonymously in the second to last occupied row at the far left side of the room.

Never, it occurred to me, have I heard anybody describe oneself as an “alleged victim of a mugging”, nor would I expect one to tell me, “I was allegedly harassed by a drunkard last night”. Considering this, I wondered if perhaps Neil Brick himself is uncertain as to whether or not he was a victim of the CIA or Masonic abuse. In fact, despite a veneer of confident assurance that the satanic conspiracy is an unquestionable item of fact, the conference was rife with inconsistency and an undercurrent of doubt…

Anyway, it was the inconsistent, and wildly incredible, content of the conference that I focused on in my writing. And this was no mere point-and-laugh tactic for the amusement of those who cultivate an air of superiority with smug disbelief toward any outside notion. The conference wasn’t merely absurd, I saw it as harmful and exploitative to the attendees — many of whom seemed to imagine it as therapeutic — as well as some of the speakers… some of whom are unfortunately licensed therapists.

It is natural to laugh at absurdity. It would have been difficult to write about the sales booth within the conference room hawking electromagnetic transmission blocking hats without sounding humorous. But I was outright horrified when a 78 year-old woman, who referred to herself as Julaine, sat before the attendees — unable to stand for any extended time — to explain that she had suffered some type of negative diabetic reaction earlier that day, and that her rheumatoid arthritis was causing her no small amount of discomfort. She attributed both of these conditions to a conspiracy of evil. Rheumatoid arthritis and Satanic Ritual Abuse, Julaine posited, are “almost partners”.

Clearly, this woman needed real medical attention. To allow her to delude herself — or worse, actively feed her the delusion — that her ill health is a side-effect, and evidence of, satanic conspiracy is beyond irresponsible. Worse, these delusions have apparently encouraged the aged and infirm Julaine to sever ties with the family members who may have been most willing to help her now… You see, Julaine’s family, she believes, is a multi-generational satanic cult. “My sister thinks I’m bi-polar”, she explained. This, of course, is seen as mere denial. “She is lost”.

That Julaine is highly impressionable seemed apparent at the conference, but it was after the conference that this became quite clear.

I was perusing the website of another speaker, deJoly LaBrier, when I came across the transcripts of a lecture she had given at a much earlier S.M.A.R.T. gathering. In it, she told a familiar tale: “[My father] would draw a dot on the wall, and [my siblings and I] would stand at attention with our nose on the dot on the wall, until he told us that we could leave.”

I clearly remembered hearing the story at the conference I had attended, for it struck me as odd… Rotten though this nose-to-the-wall experience would be for any child, I couldn’t help but feel such punishments would be quite over-shadowed by the compulsory initiation into sadistic cult rituals and child prostitution that LaBrier claimed had also taken place… So much so that being made to stand in a fixed position felt rather unworthy of mention.

But it wasn’t LaBrier who told this tale at the 2009 conference. It was Julaine.

Had it occurred to Neil Brick (who is a licensed and practicing “Mental Health Counselor” in Massachusetts), or any other attending therapist, that Julaine may not in fact have been victim to “Moriah, Illuminati… whatever you want to call it” (as she referred to “Them” in her lecture), but rather an incredibly suggestible and vulnerable old woman who has difficulty distinguishing stories she has heard from her own autobiographical memory?

Apparently not.

To allow any such questions to encroach on any one of the delusive narratives told would cast doubt on them all… and they all had their own ludicrous tales to defend with nothing more than shallow assertions of recovered memory accuracy.

For this reason, not even the most impossible of claims were met with so much as a raised eye-brow or embarrassed cough. Nobody showed a hint of doubt when a speaker going by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stood before us to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele. “My experience with Mengele”, Royal explained in a lecture (the gist of which was that Satan uses abortion as a means of traumatic mind-control), “involved much of the trauma-based mind control involving core programming (such as End-Time programming) that is connected to the global take over. He used the Psychic/Spiritual dimensions using, what I have come to call ‘demonic harmonics’, which involves using musical tones and quantum physics to open up portals into the spiritual realms. I also have core programs set up that were created using abortions as a means to develop them and more.”

Despite all this, Neil Brick imagines that my use of the words “paranoid”, and “delusional” are vicious defamations. Further, in his affidavit attached to the summons, Neil Brick states: “His actions have caused me a loss in business, as it appears our conference attendance will be much lower this year due to attendees being afraid someone like him may infiltrate the conference again.” On this, as with everything else, the suggestion that I might even owe an apology is obscene. Take the consumer advocacy view: If I’ve shown the product to be faulty, I owe nothing in compensation for a loss in sales.

Following the publication of the report, Brick went all to pieces, leaving angry comments, penning a “rebuttal”. Oddly enough though, none of his objections confronted my outrage at the absurdity of the very conspiracy theory that underlies the entire narrative framework of the conference, and of S.M.A.R.T., itself. Though claiming I misrepresented the entire affair, he failed to explain how. He failed to answer any questions regarding his own experiences as an “alleged” victim of “Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA”. He failed to answer any questions directly aimed at elaboration upon his belief in a massive satanic conspiracy. He failed to confront any questions regarding the content of the conference to instead assert, again and again, supported with lists of journal article citations supporting the view, that recovered memories are a real phenomenon.

This made it incomprehensible that Neil Brick would actually ask to take this court, where he might have no choice but to face those very questions.

Interesting, I thought… Even if I weren’t being summoned, I’d want to watch this court-room comedy.

Alas, it was not to be. Whether they experienced a moment-of-clarity, or the whole thing had been a mis-guided and ineffective measure meant to spook me away, neither Neil Brick nor his lawyer actually showed up to the hearing. Neither did I, for that matter (as I wasn’t actually legally summoned). But my lawyer did.

The case, not surprisingly, was dismissed, but my lawyer was heard anyway. The Judge, I am told, was nonplussed by the Plaintiff’s actions.

I’m nonplussed, too. But there was, it turns out, one item in Neil Brick’s affidavit that, if true, moves me to outrage on his behalf. He claims that: “To the best of my knowledge, everyone in my field knows about [Douglas Mesner’s] attacks against me and many have avoided contact with me due to the fear that he will attack them also, as he has done to several already.”

If by “attack” he means “directly confront them with their own incredible narratives, question their defense of such narratives when told by others, while asking clarification on where the demarcation between recovered memories and delusions can be found (unless we are to unquestioningly accept all stories of satanic conspiracy, alien abduction, and past-life regression)”, then this fear is well-founded. But if these people, this “everyone”, within Brick’s “field” agree with his notions of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control, and if they feel that this is a position that is evidence-based and rational, then my scrutiny should not be an object of fear. It should be welcomed, and the answers to any such questions should be forthcoming. If instead, they choose to distance themselves from Neil Brick only to conceal a position that is not supported by evidence, can not be justified by facts, only so that they may hide their delusions behind the professional veneer afforded to repressed memory theory by way of poor retrospective surveys and bad data… then they are a craven lot indeed, and would be fully deserving of Neil Brick’s scorn…

If only he’d acted any differently himself…

* * * * * * * * *

Concerned Psychiatrists and Psychologists Letter to the DSM-V Committee

A Group of Concerned Psychiatrists and Psychologists

c/o Dr. Paul McHugh, MD

Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry

Johns Hopkins University

April 11, 2009

Dr. David J. Kupfer, MD

Chair of DSM-V Committee,

Dr. Thomas Detre Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry

Professor of Neuroscience, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic

5811 O’Hara Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15215

RE: Dissociative Identity Disorder and DSM-V

Dear Dr. Kupfer:

We are writing to you to express concern with respect to the continuation of Dissociative Identity Disorder as an approved diagnosis within the forthcoming DSM-V. We believe that the identification of Multiple Personality Disorder, and later its name change as Dissociative Identity Disorder, has been harmful to the good sense and reputation of psychiatry, not to mention the cause of grave ill-effects to large numbers of patients and their families. In the attached document we maintain that the diagnosis should be removed from DSM-V and we provide the basis for our request. If either the Task Force or Council is unable to agree on removing DID completely from the 5th Edition we suggest that at the very least it should be placed in Appendix B as an experimental criterion set requiring further investigation.

Respectfully,

Signatories

(Please see Appendix A)

Attachments

To: DSM-V Task Force &

Work Group on Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum,

Posttraumatic & Dissociative Disorders

Statement on:

The need to remove Dissociative Identity Disorder from DSM-V or place it in Appendix B

The evidence supporting this diagnosis as a distinct mental disorder is modest whereas much suggests it to be a behavioral artifact equivalent in nature to pseudo-epilepsy generated by suggestion in vulnerable people. Its identification as a special, separate diagnostic entity in DSM has harmed the practice of psychiatry and undermined its scientific credibility. Although it is important for us to provide evidence to support these statements, we wish to avoid excessive detail, given that such evidence has been documented widely in the published literature.

Origins

The notion of dual personalities was founded upon cases of bipolar illness (1) and was followed by the idea of extra personalities. This expansion first occurred with the hypnotically-induced introduction of a second personality and the deliberate naming of those personalities as if they were separate entities (1).

Prevalence

Taylor and Martin (2) recognized a total of 76 cases occurring between 1816 and 1944—slightly more than one every two years; they thought a similar number might be unreported. In 1954 Thigpen and Cleckley (3) reported their case, which was published as “The Three Faces of Eve” in 1957. After a film was made of this case, the numbers of reported cases increased steadily; there was a further dramatic leap after the film of “Sybil”. By 1990 thousands of cases were being diagnosed; some authors identified more cases in their personal practices than had been described in the literature over an entire century.

Twentieth Century Suggestion

As is well known, Sybil, a patient of Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, was fully aware that her therapist wanted her to create extra personalities (4). In 1973, Dr. Wilbur gave tape recordings of Sybil’s interviews to Schreiber [the journalist who reported Sybil as a case of multiple personality disorder (5)]. Schreiber made the recordings available to Ronald Rieber, a professor of psychology, who amassed evidence showing that at least some of the personalities were artifacts overtly created in treatment (6).

Etiology

Dissociative Identity Disorder is often alleged to result from repressing an experience of childhood sexual abuse. This claim has not received adequate scientific validation. For example, Piper and Merskey (7) reviewed all the studies that claimed to corroborate DID patients’ abuse recollections. These authors concluded that “no evidence supports the claim that DID patients as a group have actually experienced the traumas asserted by the disorder’s proponents” (7).

Proponents of the DID diagnosis assert that horrific, repeated childhood physical and sexual abuse is the primary cause of DID. Victims supposedly develop their multiple personalities as repositories for traumatic memories that the “host” personality is unable to tolerate consciously. The DID diagnosis thus relies on the concept of traumatic Dissociative Amnesia (DA or “repression”): the notion that the mind protects itself by banishing terrifying memories from awareness, rendering them inaccessible until the person feels psychologically safe to recall them, often years later. There is no convincing evidence that victims can become incapable of recalling genuinely traumatic experiences, as the trauma theory of DID requires (8). Indeed, an extensive survey of the historical literature, including both fictional and non-fictional written works in multiple languages, found no written example of “dissociative amnesia” prior to 1786 (9). Thus the notion of “repressing” a memory itself, like DID, appears to represent a recent culture-bound phenomenon, rather than a naturally occurring human psychological process.

In a comprehensive analysis of studies of people with documented trauma histories, not a single mention of spontaneous amnesia for the traumatic event was found—unless the forgetting was attributable to either organic amnesia or childhood amnesia (10). Finally, an examination of Freud’s original work gives reason to think that the evidence from psychoanalysis for repression is also very unsatisfactory (11, 12).

Harmful Effects

Due to the assumption that trauma is a primary etiological factor, the DID diagnosis has resulted in wrongful accusations of sexual abuse on the basis of recovered memories, not only in North America but throughout the developed world (references). DID has caused mockery of psychiatry, and, for patients, has led to misdiagnosis (13), mismanagement (14) and inadequate treatment of depression (15).

Lack of Consensus

Canadian and American psychiatrists show little consensus regarding the diagnostic status and scientific validity of DID. In surveys of board-certified psychiatrists in the United States (16) and Canada (17) fewer than one-third of Canadian psychiatrists and 35% of American psychiatrists replied that DA & DID should be included without reservations in the DSM-IV; fewer than 1 in 7 Canadian psychiatrists and only 21-23% of American psychiatrists replied that there was “strong evidence of validity” for these disorders. French- and English-speaking Canadians had similar opinions.

Conclusions

There are overwhelming reasons to question the validity of Dissociative Identity Disorder. We respectfully urge you as members of the Work Group and the Task Force to drop the category of dissociative disorders from the upcoming DSM-V: it is harmful to patients and their families, scientifically unjustified, and undermining the credibility of psychiatry.

Signatories

Please see Appendix A.

REFERENCES

1. Merskey, H. (1992a). The manufacture of personalities. The production of multiple personality disorder. Brit. J. Psychiat., 160:327-340.

2. Taylor W.F. & Martin M.F. (1944) Multiple personality. J. Abnormal & Soc. Psychol., 39:281-330.

3. Thigpen, C.H. & Cleckley, H.M. (1957). The Three Faces of Eve. New York: McGraw-Hill.

4. Spiegel, H. (1993) Mistaken Identities: Toronto. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The Fifth Estate, 9 November 1993.

5. Schreiber, F.R. (1973) Sybil. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

6. Rieber, R.W. (2006) The Bifurcation of the Self. The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorders. New York: Springer Science.

7. Piper, A., Merskey, H., (2004). The persistence of folly: a critical examination of dissociative identity disorder. Part I. The excesses of an improbable concept. Can J Psychiatry 49 (9): 592-600.

8. McNally, R. J. (2003) Remembering Trauma. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

9. Pope, H.G. Jr., Poliakoff, M.B., Parker, M.P., Boynes, M.D., & Hudson, J.I. (2007) Is dissociative amnesia a culture-bound syndrome? Findings from a survey of historical literature. Psychol. Med., 37(2):225-233.

10. Pope, H. G. Jr., Oliva, P., Hudson, J.I.: (2005) Repressed memories. The scientific status of research on repressed memories, in Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony—Social and Behavioral Science, 2005-2006 Edition. Edited by Faigman D, Kaye D, Saks M, Sanders J. Eagen, MN, West Group, pp 408-447.

11. Esterson, A. (1993) Seductive Mirage. Open Court: Chicago.

12. Crews, F. (1998) Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York: Viking.

13. Freeland, A., Manchanda, R., Chiu, S., et al. (1993) Four cases of supposed multiple personality disorder: evidence of unjustified diagnoses. Can. J. Psychiat., 23: 245-247.

14. McHugh, Paul R. (2008) Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Chapters 4 &5. Dana Press.

15. Fetkewicz, J., Sharma, V. & Merskey, H. (2000) A note on suicidal deterioration with recovered memory, treatment. J. Affect. Dis., 58:155-159.

16. Pope, H.G., Jr., Oliva, P.S., Hudson, J.I., Bodkin, J.A. & Gruber, A.J. (1999) Attitudes toward DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders Diagnoses among Board-Certified American Psychiatrists. Am. J. Psychiat., 2000; 157:1179-1180.

17. Lalonde, J.K., Hudson, J.I., Gigante, R.A. & Pope, H.G. Jr. (2001) Canadian and American psychiatrists’ attitudes toward Dissociative Disorders diagnoses. Can. J. Psychiat., 46(5): 407-412.

Appendix A

List of Signatories

1. Paul R. McHugh, M.D. Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

2. Harrison Pope, Jr., MD, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont Massachusetts

3. James Hudson, MD, ScD, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont Massachusetts

4. Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor, University of California-Irvine.

5. Richard J. McNally, Ph.D., Professor and Director of Clinical Training, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

6. Harold Merskey, FRCPsych., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario

7. Joel Paris, M.D. Professor of Psychiatry, McGill University, SMBD-Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec H3T1E4, Canada.

8. August Piper, M.D., Independent practice of psychiatry, Seattle, WA.

9. Numan Gharaibeh, MD (MB, BCh), Danbury, CT.

10. Pamela Freyd, Ph.D.

11. Eduard Vieta, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

12. Philip G. Janicak, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Rush University, Chicago, Il.

13. Gerald M. Rosen, Ph.D., Private practice, Seattle, Clinical Professor, University of Washington.

14. Steven Jay Lynn, Ph.D., ABPP, Professor, Binghamton University (SUNY) Binghamton, NY.

15. Sally Satel, MD, resident scholar American Enterprise Institute; staff psychiatry Oasis Clinic, Washington DC; lecturer, Yale University School of Medicine.

16. James M. Wood, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso.

- Martha Ann Tyo v. Colin A. Ross, MD, et al…

Dr. Colin Ross, demonstrating his supernatural eye beams

According to one expert witness, it was the worst case of medical malpractice he had ever seen.  The patient, Ms. Roma E. Hart, had been grossly over-medicated into a prolonged state of deranged confusion, during which time the offending psychiatrist, Dr. Colin A. Ross, had instilled her with exotic and perverse delusions:  To wit, the rather implausible belief that her family was involved in an occult crime-ring dedicated to a supernatural evil, and that Hart herself had been forcibly impregnated by extraterrestrials, birthing a hybrid infant (presumably in the course of a routine alien abduction).  The magnitude of Ms. Hart’s mistreatment during her submission to psychiatric “care” brought her to the precipice of death on several occasions.

During her treatment Ms. Hart gave custody of her 10 year old daughter over to Child & Family Services so as to preserve the girl from clutches of her Satanic cult family. Thus Ms. Hart lost her entire family in one egregiously misguided moment; her parents unable to forgive her for the accusations of sexual Satanic Ritual Abuse, her daughter heart-broken by abandonment.

As you will read in the interview with Ms. Hart below, these are but a few of the annoyances she suffered as result of Ross’s “therapy”.This bizarre malpractice by the hand of Dr. Colin Ross was designed to treat his unfortunate patient of the condition of Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD], a condition Ms. Hart now feels she never had, and many doctors argue doesn’t exist.  It is a condition that Dr. Ross himself has largely helped define and set the diagnostic and treatment protocols of.  The theory of MPD, unsupported by science, is that an individual undergoing trauma “dissociates”, recompartmentalizing the hurtful memories into separate “personalities”, personalities that are unaware of one another.

Dr. Colin Ross’s delusions are hardly concealed.  He is a known conspiracy theorist who helped construct the Satanic cult hysteria of the eighties to mid-nineties.  He has written and lectured regarding nefarious mind-control projects within the CIA, and even – in an interesting case of possible projection – speculation regarding the “iatrogenic [clinically produced] creation of Multiple Personality Disorder” by CIA psychiatrists.  Following Dr. Ross’s own vernacular, it might be appropriate to suggest that Ross has “dissociated” his own crimes of medical mistreatment, projecting them upon a “personality” he refers to as “CIA”.

But Ross can not be dismissed as a marginal fool.  He is a well-respected and dangerous fool.  Indeed, Dr. Colin Ross is an “internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of dissociation and trauma-related disorders”.  He is founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma, which “specializes in the management of psychiatric treatment programs and is currently contracted to provide management and treatment services to Timberlawn Mental Health System, in Dallas, Texas, Forest View Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Del Amo Hospital, in Torrance, California.”  Ross is “the author of over 130 professional papers and past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation”, and acts as expert consultant for the Showtime television series The United States of Tara.  Dr. Ross has acted as therapist for celebrity Rosanne Barr (who now also believes she recovered memories of childhood abuse), and Cameron West, author of the New York Times bestselling First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.

Like all conspiracy theorists, Ross seems to feel he has an understanding of the true cause of all Evil.  Likewise, MPD feeds Ross’s paranoid fiction as, not only a by-product of a sinister CIA plot, but as a medical condition that serves to explain and negate all others.  Roma Hart gives an example of this over-valuation of the MPD diagnosis by Ross in a personal email to the author:

[...]I was regularly in seclusion [whilst an in-patient of Colin Ross], a lovely concrete walled and floored hole where I was locked in for days at a time.  Sometimes [I would be] thrown in, and I’d have the huge bruises to show for it.  [The seclusion room] was often used for “behaviour modification”, I suppose.  You see, when I had seizures from the drugs [Ross had over-medicated],  Ross told the nurses that I was just switching personalities to one called “Blue” that had seizures, so they should throw me in seclusion whenever that happened. One evening when [the seizures were] really bad, Ross had the nurses take me down to the ward below and strip me before they dropped me onto the floor.  That [particular] seclusion room had a bad fluorescent light that flickered really badly.  I laid there until the next day when they put me in a wheelchair to take me back up to my other seclusion room.  Those nurses, as I told you before, followed Ross around like panting puppies and did anything he said. I remember when I had my blood pressure taken my nurse asked me if I knew why my blood pressure was so unstable. I was going to answer “the drugs?”, but before I could say anything she said, “it’s because each of your personalities has its own blood pressure.” And, of course, [there was] the time that I was nearly killed from an overdose on the ward and I barely made it to the nurse’s station, gasping for breath, (respiratory arrest) [trying to] get their attention. The nurses became angry at me and demanded that I go back to my room. I fell to the floor and crawled back to my room still struggling with every ounce of my strength for every breath.  This was extrememly frightening and I was so close to dying. I made it to my bed and the nurse took my blood pressure. She wrote it on my bed sheet as a matter of fact: 190/180. The following day after I regained consciousness another nurse came in and took my blood pressure: 60/50.  Well, she remarked, you MPD patients are fascinating. You see, Doug, Ross had told the staff that night that I had “pulled myself in” and that it was an “MPD coma”, not a real coma.

On the face of it, Roma Hart’s accusations appear absurd.  For this reason, the hyperlinks embedded in this article, showing corroborative sworn testimony and affidavits, are important.  Thus, Ms. Hart’s claim that Dr. Ross actually encouraged her toward suicide seems quite plausible when taken together with the sworn affidavit of Winnipeg resident George Bergen, who testifies that Ross’s therapy drove his sister-in-law and at least four others to suicide, and the statement of Martha Ann Tyo (who also sued Ross for malpractice) indicating an eerily blase attitude, on Ross’s part, toward the possibility of his client’s suicide (see quote from Tyo v. Ross above).  The fact that Martha Ann Tyo, a patient in Texas (Hart was treated in Manitoba), tells also of being implanted with a conviction of Satanic Ritual Abuse and alien abduction does much to affirm that these beliefs were a product of Ross’s mind rather than those of Tyo or Hart. So, though the documents cataloging Dr. Ross’s criminal incompetence are linked throughout, I shall – in the spirit of Ross’s own book, Bluebird, which seeks full-disclosure of CIA malpractice – list an index of some of the more important ones here:

1. Affidavit of Roma E. Hart regarding Ross’s malpractice
   
2. Sworn affidavit of George Bergen regarding suicide deaths in Dr. Ross’s care
3. Martha Ann Tyo v. Ross, et al.
4. Testimony of Thomas Brown regarding Ross’s implantation of false memories in his wife.
5. Sworn affidavit of Robert Alexander Cowan attesting that Ross was fired from a Winnipeg Hospital.
6. Dr. Harold Merskey’s assessment of Dr. Colin Ross’s malpractice upon Roma Hart
7. Petition of the British False Memory Society seeking indictment of Dr. Colin Ross for violations of the Nuremburg Code
8. Dr. Alexander Bodkin’s assessment of Dr. Colin Ross’s malpractice upon Roma Hart
9. Selected quotes of Dr. Colin A. Ross, suggesting a mind disturbed
10. A list of Statutory Declarations attributing ruined lives to Dr. Ross’s clinical techniques

Interview with Ms. Roma E. Hart
by Douglas Mesner (Process.org)

How did you come to be in the care of the genius Dr. Ross?

Before I started seeing him, I was working constantly.  I was a single mom, I had two jobs, I was going to University full-time, and I had hurt my foot really, really badly.  So I got unemployment insurance, which only lasted a few weeks.  One of my friends said, Hey, you know what?  you can get it extended if you apply for stress.  I thought, cool, why don’t I do that?  Extra money, get my unemployment extended. So I was at University, went the the University Student Psych Centre, figured I could get them to fill out the form for unemployment insurance.  I saw one of the master’s students there, who was a student of Colin Ross’s.  She said, what do you do when you get under stress? I said, Well, I just switch to autopilot and just keep on going – I’m a single mom, after all. And she goes, Autopilot??  Do you have a name for this “autopilot”? Her eyes went so big, and she said, My professor Colin Ross is an expert in Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD] and I would just love to work with him.  I’ll bring you to him and he will fill out the form for you. So she put me in the car, drove me down to see Colin Ross, and it was just about 15 minutes before he shook my hand and welcomed me to MPD therapy.  Then I handed him the unemployment insurance form and said, fill this out for me please. And that was it.  I was doomed since.  That was it.

And how in that 15 minutes did he determine that you had MPD?

He had talked to that student councilor at the University of Manitoba – his student.  She had told him that I said that I switch to autopilot when I’m under stress.  He determined that she was absolutely correct, that [autopilot] was another personality.

Aha…

But you and I know that ["running on autopilot" is] just something people have been saying for years.  It just means you just keep on going because you have to.  You just do without even thinking about it.  I had no idea that anybody would ever interpret that as another personality.  But I thought to myself, Well, what the heck – he’s going to fill out the form – what possible harm could come? I had no idea my life would be ruined after that.

To kind of work backward so people have an idea right from the get-go what we’re dealing with:  What are the permanent side-effects you deal with now from having been a victim – or patient – of Dr. Ross?

One of the the biggest problems I have is a permanent record in my medical file that lists me as ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’.  That comes to my face any time I go for any test, any time I have to go to the hospital for X-rays… you name it.  It’s right there.  I’m never taken seriously for anything at all.  It’s on a permanent record for Child & Family Services because Colin Ross decided that my child was interfering with my therapy, so she was put into foster care.  She was put into foster care and hidden from me and from my whole family from the time she was 10 years old to the time she was 18 years old.  She has completely lost her family.  I lost the most darling child.  I was a single mother.  She and I were so close.  It was like we breathed at the same time.  I lost my whole family.  My parents were teachers.  Because when you’re diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, Colin Ross believes that 100% of the time, you have been sexually molested by your parents.  He told that to Child & Family Services.  My parents had to take early retirement from their teaching jobs.  My family hates me.  My parents were almost thrown in jail… And then, of course, there’s always [the fact that] I had to drop out of University.  My career was ended.  I lost my home.  I lost my friends.  I lost every cent I had… Then, of course, there’s the drug experiments that he did.  He did massive and illegal drug experiments on me in the hospital.  And I nearly died several times.  I was in comas, I was in wheelchairs.  I got down to like 55 pounds at 5 foot 5.  I was so, so sick.

Which Drugs?

The main one was Halcion, although he combined a whole bunch on top of each other just very recklessly. No regard for human safety whatsoever.  But Halcion: He had me up to 52 milligrams per day¹
Four hundred times the maximum dosage. He explains that – he justifies that – in one of the court transcripts I sent you – it’s really quite appalling – he justifies that amount by saying that I was a drug-user.  He has told the hospital – Saint Boniface Hospital, where he treated me – that I was a heroin addict.  And of course, that is why he had to use so many massive amounts of drugs.  Now, I most certainly wasn’t [a drug-user].  Just a few weeks before I saw him, I got up at six o’clock in the morning and I spent all morning, until 12:30 at the University, because I was a full-time student.  Then I worked all afternoon until 6 o’clock at a daycare.  Then I went home and took care of my child.  On the weekends, I worked as a maid at Holiday Inn.  I had two jobs, was a full-time University student, and I had a child to take care of.  I had no time to be a heroin addict!  I was a Pentecostal Christian fundamentalist.  I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t allow it in my home.  My brother and his wife were living with me.  They weren’t allowed to drink or smoke in the home.  And yet, Colin Ross says, I gave her all these drugs because she’s a heroin addict. What a crock!  But there it is, on my medical record.  And he keeps on saying that.

So you didn’t feel particularly mentally disturbed when you first went to see Colin Ross, but felt a definite worsening of your condition after therapy began?

The only thing that bothered me was my foot.  I just needed an extension of my unemployment insurance because my foot still hurt real badly, but the unemployment insurance had run out.  I thought, well this is really easy.  I’ll get it extended based on stress.  So when I saw Colin Ross, the only actual problem I had was a very sore foot that had been injured.  There was nothing wrong with me mentally.  I was definitely stressed, but that’s because I was still working a part-time job.  I was still going to University full-time, and I was still a single mother, and I had almost no money to live on.  So, that was why I was stressed.

So clearly you were an out-patient.  How often did you see [Dr. Colin Ross], and what was the “therapy” at that point?

I saw him twice a week for an hour to two hours.  It was hypnotherapy.  He made some tapes for me to listen to all day.  He had me do ‘dream-imaging’, where at the end of each session he’d ask me to think about whether certain things had happened to me.  My homework was to go home and dream about these things.  I’d come back the next session and say, I dreamed about those things, and this was what I was dreaming. And he would always say, Those dreams you had are actually flash-backs of real events in your life. So it proceeded very quickly into insanity.  So about two months after I started seeing him, I was committed into the hospital’s Psych Ward.

So then you were an in-patient at that point.

I was committed, I was forcefully given injections of drugs, yes.

And for how long were you an in-patient?

I was an in-patient for two weeks, and then I went back in-and-out, in-and-out for several years.

What was your drugs regimen at that point?

I was given antidepressants, I was given tranquilizers of various kinds.  At the end it was almost exclusively Halcion.  The last year I saw him, he switched me off of Halcion onto 320 milligrams of Valium per day²

And all the while he was telling you to recall your dreams as memories?

He would give me something to think about.  I had homework to do.  He would plant the thought in my head that this is what I was supposed to try to see if I could remember.  Of course I would dream about it, because what else are you going to do when you’re deep in therapy?  When somebody tells you to think about this, you’ll go home and you’ll dream about it, you come back and you say, I had this terrible nightmare about what you said.

Ah, well, that’s a flash-back.  It really did happen.

And I would say to him, I don’t remember that happening. The first time I saw him – the first visit, I told him – he asked, were you ever abused as a child? I was raised in the sixties by military parents, because my father was an aerial cartographer.  They were very strict.  I said, what do you mean by abuse?  I mean, they were strict, but they never abused me. I made it very clear to him that my parents never, at any time, ever sexually abused me, or anybody.  But he said it was normal to deny it.

So eventually you were made to come to agree that you had been sexually abused?

I was told by Colin Ross that I fit the description of somebody who was sexually abused… Even though I swore it never happened.  He said, you fit the description.  All people with MPD have been sexually abused [according to Colin Ross].

I know about Colin Ross.  He has written [several conspiracy theory books].  How specific was his story for you?  Did he develop a specific narrative for you that fit his conspiracy theory [and explained your supposed MPD]?

Oh, absolutely.  As I said, my father was in the military.  This was when I was a tiny little girl, he was in the Air Force.  And for Colin Ross, for anybody who’s ever been in the military, he just makes the immediate leap into CIA, for crying out loud.  He asked me if the words – what was it? – ‘beta’… ‘gamma’… and, um… ‘omega’, I think it was [meant anything to me].  Those three.  He said that children were put in to CIA experiments where they used goggles on [the children's] eyes and hypnotized [them].  [The CIA programmed personalities] were either one of those: beta, omega, alpha, one of those.  One [of these designations programmed the child so that they] would commit suicide, one would be given the job to dispense disinformation, the other was [...] an assassin.  I just thought ‘gamma’ sounds too stupid, ‘alpha’ sounds like alphabet soup, for crying out loud, I think I chose Omega, or something like that.  I chose the one that sounded the least stupid to me, because I was just trying to cooperate with him.  There was just no way you could argue with him.  He’d always just twist things around.  You couldn’t possibly argue with him.  He’d always just say that you fit the description, absolutely fit the description.  It has to be this.

So in his mind, you had to be Omega, or Gamma, etc.  You couldn’t be None of The Above?

No.  Not at all.  No.  He was very much involved in [the idea of] CIA mind-control nonsense.  And then he would give you jobs to do, homework to do at home.  You were supposed to close your eyes and you were supposed to visualize different parts of the city so that you could leave your body and travel around the city.  Then you’d come back for your next appointment and he’d say, So did you go anywhere?  Did you see anything for these out-of-body experiments he was putting you into?  I would say, I don’t think I did.  I don’t know. I tried the best I could.  You’d just try to please him so much because he just had this charisma, and you’d want to please this guy.  He was very affectionate with all of his patients.  He would give hugs, he’d rub your back and rub your legs.  In those days he was just so charismatic.  He was such a good-looking young psychiatrist.  All the nurses would just pander to him like puppies… So here we were: young women as MPD patients trying to please this handsome, young, charismatic guy who was giving [us] all of his affection.

So did he ever give any indication of where he was getting his ideas of government mind-control projects that were bringing patients in to him?

He never told me where he was getting that from.

But he seemed to have a pretty specific idea of what [he felt] was going on?

He told me that he was the only MPD expert in Canada.  That he knew more than anybody else.  That they didn’t understand him.

And eventually he denied having ever given you drugs at all?

Yes, he did!  One of the last times I saw him, I asked, Why did you give me all those drugs?  And he looked at me, and he said with a straight face, I never gave you any drugs.  I lived about a mile away from the hospital where I walked all the way home thinking, I must be so crazy, so completely delusional.  Why would I think this if he never did [it]? I got to the drug store, and I went up to the pharmacist and I said, I know this is going to sound weird, but could you tell me if I’ve ever been given any drugs? He looked at me, because he recognized me, of course, and he said, I’ll print off some pages for you. He printed off reams and reams of pages for me.  Oh my goodness.

Why did he deny it?

I think he’d have to because it was – when I talked to a police officer a year later [he told me] – what [Colin Ross] did was criminal.  The amount of drugs Ross gave me was criminal.  [The officer] said if they could bring him into court they would charge him with administering noxious substances and endangering my life.  I never could get him into court though.

And you have long-term effects from the addiction?

I did have – I talked to Peter Breggin about that – I suffered with Halcion withdrawal, really seriously bad Halcion withdrawal for 10 years.  My family doctor, the neurologist, they’d all say, That’s impossible.  You can’t be suffering from withdrawal for that long.  It only lasts two weeks.  And then Peter Breggin gave me a copy of his Prolonged Benzodiazepine Withdrawal Syndrome paper that he sent to the AMA.  It’s not as bad now as it was before.  This has been like 20 years.  Most of it is gone.  There is some side-effects: Loss of memory, loss of concentration, and if I get really tired I’ll start having seizures again.  And I do have fibromyalgia as a result of an accident: falling on the ice when I went to pick up my daily prescriptions.  The Pharmacist wouldn’t let me have more than 320 milligrams of Valium per day.  He wouldn’t do that.  I had to go all the way to the pharmacy, walk over there to pick up one day’s prescription at a time.  It was very icy.  Up here in Winnipeg, it’s very icy.  I started having a seizure, and I fell on the ice, and I injured myself very badly.  I had to have several operations and I have fibromyalgia – constant pain for that.  One of the problems I have is I have a morbid fear of drugs now.  Just a horrible, morbid fear of drugs, so while the pain clinics and my family doctor want to give all sorts of pain medication, I won’t take it.  I’m just too afraid.  So I’m just going to be living in terrible constant pain for the rest of my life.

I was looking at the affidavit you submitted to The Queen’s Bench – as it’s called in Canada – and it mentioned a…  sexual assault… in the hospital…

Yes.  Isn’t that disgusting?  I think I already mentioned that he did illegal medical experiments on me.  He likes to do experiments, this guy.  He likes to do research.  Well, he knew.  He knew darn well that he was admitting into the hospital a dangerous sexual offender.  He knew who that man was because he came to me and told me, after I had been sexually assaulted… It was Christmas, and, um, I’d gone to a funeral.  I came back from the funeral, and I was terribly upset because my child’s father had died.  I couldn’t go to sleep, so I just sorted magazines just to calm myself down.  Everyone on the ward was a woman.  That ward was totally women, except for that evening, while I was at the funeral, Colin Ross admitted this sexual predator – offender – onto the ward.  He didn’t tell the nurses.  Didn’t tell the Hospital.  Didn’t tell me, that’s for sure.  I came in from the funeral   and I was sexually assaulted on the ward.  The next morning, Colin Ross says, Oh, I’m so sorry. Yes, I have 5 video tapes of this guy, and all the information about his sexual offenses. He said, But I never thought he’d do that in the hospital.  I didn’t think he would.  [note: Following the interview Ms. Hart would amend this statement to say that Ross, in fact, did not apologize - rather, he told her that he believed her when she reported she had been assaulted]

…Well, I just – I’m claiming.  This is just my claim [speculation].  I’m claiming that this was an experiment. Let’s just put this sexual offender on a ward of totally female [inhabitants], not tell them anything, and see what happens.  Well, I’ll tell you what happens: He sexually assaulted me!

And I went to the press after that, when Colin Ross left my room.  I phoned the police and I phoned the newspaper, and then they contacted the hospital.  Later – it was a couple days later – there was a front page news article about it.  President of the hospital confirmed that Yes, the man was prone to sexual assault, yes he was a dangerous offender.  Yes, that was all true. And Colin Ross came in [my room].  He was furious.  He was absolutely livid.  He was just beat red.  He came into my room and he yelled at me and said, Get the Hell out of here! But, you see, I was on such high levels of Halcion that if he had thrown me out that day, I would have died.  So, he had to take me off just enough so that I could get down to 320 milligrams of Valium instead.  And then I was kicked out of the hospital.  On my own… Just to see if I’d live or die…

With no referral to go elsewhere?

Oh, no.  Not at all.

And as I recall, it took you a while to find a psychiatric assessment after that.

After he [Colin Ross] left Winnipeg, I tried, and no one would take me on as a patient because – apparently… I did go into the hospital to have a cardiac test done.  When I was in the room with the cardiologist, he took my medical files on his desk – like a foot high – turned them around to face me so that I caould see them.  Then he left the room for about 10 minutes.  So I thought, Well, okay – just out of curiosity. I looked at the top paper, just at the top of the pile, and it was a letter from Colin Ross warning everyone not to treat me.  I have copies of all my medical records, but I don’t have that paper.  When I had all my medical records copied from the hospital, I paid about $700 dollars for all the papers, all the transcripts.  They wouldn’t copy that one.  I know it exists, because a cardiologist turned around so I could see it.   So, no, I couldn’t get anybody to help me.  And then after [Colin Ross] left, down to Dallas, and I filed a lawsuit against him, no one would see me at all.  So I went to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, talked to Pope, the guy in charge there.  He said he couldn’t force anybody to see me.  So I went to my family doctor who contacted the Minister of Health, Chomiak.  Now Chomiak arranged for me to go to London Ontario, because there was a psychiatrist out there who had formally debated Colin Ross – Known all about him.  And he had agreed to do a psychiatric assessment for me.  So I did have to get politicians involved, and there were arguments, during question period, on the floor to get me this kind of psychiatric assessment.  That’s how difficult it was to have done.

And it was Harold Merskey who did see you after that, right?

Dr. Harold Merskey.  That’s right.

You decided to file suit against Colin Ross after he left for Texas?

That’s right.

So what compelled him to leave for Texas?  I was looking at some of his [court] transcripts and I had fallen under the impression that it was a malpractice suit that had compelled him to leave for Texas when he did.

I sent you a copy of a Winnipeg Free Press article.  In that Winnipeg Free Press article – this was 1991.  It says that there was quite a lot of hostility against Colin Ross.  The doctors in this city hated Colin Ross.  There’s this one time when I came out of one of my comas in the Victoria hospital.  Colin Ross worked at the St. Boniface hospital.  He wasn’t allowed to work at the Victoria hospital.  I was up in the ward and Colin Ross stopped by to visit me.  The doctor who was taking care of me came in and that was the first time in my life I ever heard two doctors yelling at each other out in the hall.  He just wanted Colin Ross to leave, and drop off the face of the Earth.  He was so angry.  There’s a lot of doctors who just can’t stand him up here.  They’re embarassed to say they even know who he is.

And that’s what compelled him to leave for Texas?

Yes.  Because he couldn’t get any funding.  Now, the Grey Nuns owned the St. Boniface Hospital.  Sister Jean Ell is a Psychologist, and she’d done a psychological assessment of Dr. Colin Ross – there were an awful lot of complaints – and she told the board at St. Boniface Hospital that it was her opinion that he should be let go, but that they told her – the board at the Hospital – that he was bringing in a lot of research money.  So, in spite of everything – they agreed he was crazy – he was bringing in so much money.  It was only after the research grants dried up and he couldn’t get any more money, that’s when they told him to get out.  And that’s when he left.

And he still seems a bit crazy… to say the least.  In a personal correspondence with James Randi, Randi tells me about Colin Ross’s eye beams, and how they were set to experiment this to either prove or disprove [Colin Ross's assertion that he can project energy from his eyes].  Colin Ross backed out [of the experiment], said he’d get back to Randi, but never did.  So maybe he has sense enough to back out of such an experiment, but to have made the claim [that he could produce eye beams] at all – you really have to wonder -

He has such a big ego though.  He doesn’t say that he’s wrong.  He just says that he needs to adjust his test for whatever the problem is.  He doesn’t admit he’s wrong.

Dr. Colin Ross, heating a burrito with his eye beams - by Alethea Jones

Right… Right.  And he would never retract his MPD diagnosis of you.

Never!  Never!  He won’t retract it.  The Hospital – St. Boniface Hospital… The president, Dr. [Michel] Tetreault, wrote me a letter last year explaining that the hospital no longer endorses that, that diagnosis.  So nobody would be diagnosed with that [MPD] today.  But because Colin Ross won’t retract that diagnosis, they won’t take it off [my records].

I Don’t understand why it would have to be Colin Ross who would do so.

Because it has to be the doctor that was treating you at the time that you were diagnosed.

That seems like a bit of an insane policy itself…

Well, Dr. Harold Merskey, who certainly believes that I’ve never had MPD, ever – he certainly explains that in his psychiatric assessment [of me] – what he wrote [in my psychiatric assessment] is that my [request] to have Multiple Personality Disorder removed should be granted.  And that was the best he could do, because that’s just the way hospitals work.  It has to be the doctor who treated you, the doctor who diagnosed you, that’s the one who has to take the diagnosis off.

There was a point also where you went into Emergency in the same hospital you were receiving psychiatric care in, and they remanded you back to psychiatric.  How did that happen?

This is when I was just a few days away from dying.  I was so terribly sick.  My blood pressure was down to 50 over 40, and there’s a walk-in clinic just across the parking lot from the psychiatric center that is at the St. Boniface Hospital.  Dr. Colin Ross wouldn’t allow me to see any doctors – the residents, the students that would come to the ward.  He wouldn’t let anybody see me, and he told the nurses to ignore me.  But I had passes.  I was allowed to leave.  So I almost crawled.  Part of the way, I did.  I crawled to the walk-in clinic and I saw a doctor there who told me, You need to go to emergency right away. I told him, I’m already in the hospital.  So he contacted the nurses on the floor, he sent me back, and half-way across the parking lot, a doctor stopped his car, put me in his car, and drove me up to the ward.  Colin Ross still refused to let the nurses treat me.  So I called the walk-in clinic doctor and I said, You know, you called over here, and the nurses won’t help me.  So he had to call Dr. Colin Ross himself.  Otherwise I would have died.

Did Colin Ross encourage you to take action against your parents under the assumption that they sexually abused you?

Yes.  When I was at my most insane, under the most drugs, he encouraged me to get a rifle and go up and shoot them. He also encouraged me to kill myself constantly, saying it would be quite understandable.  He would phone me late at night – and he did that to other patients too, because there was an MPD support group, and we’d all talk to each other and visit each other – he’d send us home with lethal amounts of drugs, phone us up at night, and encourage us to kill ourselves.  One of the reasons I figure he did that was because he had this interest in the ‘white-light’ Near Death Experience.  So after we’d come out of comas, or what-not, from drug over-doses, the first thing he’d ask us was, Well, did you see the light? That’s all he was interested in.  Some of the other women died though.  But he really didn’t care about that.  He just said it was fate.

Some of the patients did die?

Yes.  12 of them.

12 of them?!

12 of them died in Dallas, too.

I did not know that.

Yes. Laura Pasley used to work for the police department, she also sued him down there… no, she sued one of his colleagues.  But she was in the police department, and she said, yes, it was the same number that died down there too.

Well, beside encouraging you to shoot [your parents], did [Colin Ross] encourage you to take legal action?

Absolutely.  Oh. yes.  He also wanted me to sue one of my old family doctors from when I was a child who was the Governor General of Manitoba at the time… George Johnson³ , the Governor General who was a friend of my parents, because Colin Ross told me that he had other patients who claimed that the Governor General had sexually assaulted them when they were children.  And [Colin Ross] said, You really ought to sue.  I’ll help you.  And I said, I will if somebody else will.  Nobody else would, so George Johnson fortunately got away with not having to be dragged through the court system, the poor guy.

Did [Colin Ross] just have a grudge against George Johnson?

Yes.  Governor General.  I guess [George Johnson] just wasn’t helpful with the research grants.

Well… I guess you have that latitude [to falsely accuse your enemies] when you’re the Witch-Hunter General.

Sure.  You don’t want to make Colin Ross mad at you.

I think that’s inevitable for me pretty soon.

(Laughs) Okay.

So – your malpractice proceedings: You didn’t end up even getting a settlement, did you?

No.  Because I am on welfare disability, the only money I could raise for lawyers was just through begging people that I was given contact numbers for.  [I would be told] This lawyer hates [Colin Ross], this doctor hates him.  And this other man – his daughter died under Colin Ross’s care, and he helped me with some money too.  So I did manage to drag it through the system for 11 years with 4 different lawyers.  But, because my second to last lawyer did such an atrociously bad job – and he admitted to his negligence to the Law Society – it was dismissed due to delay.  And then Colin Ross’s lawyer managed to have the costs awarded against me.  So I owed Colin Ross something like 100 to 200 thousand dollars – something astronomical.  So I had to appeal that.  So I had to raise another 5 thousand dollars to appeal that, and then the Law Society threw in another 20 to 30 thousand dollars to pay the lawyer to help me appeal that, so I would have the costs removed.  And that was Judge Sinclair’s order that I sent down to you.  It says that, reason for dismissal due to delay, fault of my counsel.  And the costs were taken off.  I didn’t have to pay the costs.

I didn’t get too good of a chance to look over the [courtroom] transcripts [of a different suit brought against Dr. Colin Ross] you sent me today, but [from what I see, during the trial] somebody from an outside jurisdiction was saying that these charges brought against Colin Ross would certainly have his medical license removed.  I wasn’t sure what case that was.  There were several pages missing.

That was Elizabeth Carlson.  She sued.  It was a 12 week trial in Minnesota.  She was the first to sue in any type of case like this.  And that was Christopher Barden.  Christopher Barden has his doctorate in Psychology, and he has a Law degree from Harvard.  He was the one who said that.  He read all of my hospital records.  The doctor who was an expert witness, Bodkin,sent the affidavit that said that it was grossly inappropriate the amount of drugs that Colin Ross had given me.  It’s just amazing.  It’s just amazing that he wasn’t charged.  It was very odd the way the police said it.  They said they wouldn’t charge him criminally until after the civil suit.  I don’t understand that at all.  I would just think that if someone would do a crime like that, they would just charge them.  But they said they wouldn’t do it until after the civil suit.

I saw somewhere – I believe it was online, and not one of the documents that you sent me – that you were at a proceeding saying that your case [against Colin Ross] had carried on 8 years as you were trying to extend the Statute of Limitations in your case due to your [previous] lawyer’s incompetence.

I went 4 months over the Statute of Limitations.

Is there still hope for you getting any satisfaction out of this.

None.  No.  All I can do is spend the rest of my natural life hounding him as much as I can, so I can expose him for the fraud that he is, and hopefully save the lives of as many people as I can.

I was going to ask you about that.  How do you feel about those documents [relating to your malpractice proceedings against Dr. Colin Ross] being posted publicly?

I’d put them on a billboard.  I don’t care.  I don’t want him to think that I’m ashamed of what happened, because I wasn’t responsible.  I was under an immense amount of hypnosis and drugs.  He is responsible.  I have no shame.  It seems so silly to say.  I am not going to be blackmailed into being quiet, or anything.  This is what he did, and he should be held accountable.  And he is just such a lying dog, I can’t stand it.  So, I make sure everybody knows what happened.  My lawsuit was never completed, unfortunately, but my hospital records still exist, and they’ve been used in other lawsuits for other people to have successful outcomes.

I’ve talked to a few other recovered memory detractors who seemed to feel a sense of loss from leaving their support group [of MPD patients or Ritual Abuse survivors].  It sounds like you dealt mostly with Colin Ross, or did you have anything like a support group that talked about experiences with Satanic Ritual Abuse, or whatever conspiracy theory was being held onto?

He set us all up in an MPD support group called the MPDers, and he tried to get us registered as a charity so we could go and raise money for him.

That’s inventive!

We were supposed to approach businesses, and he told us which ones – nice big ones – and we were supposed to approach businesses to raise money for his research.  And he was going to have us registered as a charity.  So that’s what his MPD patients were doing for him.

And what exactly did he say his research was?

Multiple Personality Disorder and [that research into alleged] mind control experiments with the CIA – and Satanic Ritual Abuse, for crying out loud!  He explained this to me the first month I started seeing him.  There was a sign above the planetarium, and I saw it on my way to see him.  It was the silliest thing.  It was going toward Christmas and they were talking about the star of [Bethlehem], and that made [Colin Ross] start commenting about aliens.  The star [of Bethlehem, according to Colin Ross] wasn’t really the star of Jesus – it was an alien ship that they were really seeing.  So then he explained that lots of people had been abducted by aliens, and that women had been abducted by aliens and impregnated by aliens, and they have these alien babies.  Now, I think I already said to you that at that time when I started seeing him I was a Pentecostal Christian Fundamentalist.  I belonged to Church, was a Sunday School teacher.  All I could think was, How horrible!  How could God let that happen?  And what about the baby?  Would it have a soul? So, in my mind, I was horrified.  Completely horrified.  I wouldn’t even talk about it.  I couldn’t even talk about it.  I just didn’t want to talk with anyone.  But then, a few years later – I think it was 1990, somewhere around then – he came up from a conference in Chicago.  He’d seen [infamous MPD therapist] Bennett Braun and the International Association of Dissociation and MPD, and that.  He came in the hospital to see me and he said, Oh, I have great news for you! He was so excited, so happy and bubbly.  I looked at him and thought, Good.  Great news.  What is it? And he said, You know that baby that you had?  The half alien baby?  It didn’t die! Thinking that it had died was [according to Colin Ross] the only way that I could resolve it in my mind, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the soul.  So he thought for me, telling me that it didn’t die was going to be some good news.  I looked at him absolutely horrified.  I said, What are you talking about? At the conference he’d just been to, it had explained why all of the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases that they’d always talk about, where women give birth to these babies and they kill the babies – but nobody can ever find the bodies of these babies – [the conference Colin Ross attended explained that] the reason they can’t find the bodies of these babies is because the bodies of these babies are beamed up into spaceships, and they’re raised in the spaceships until they’re 18 years old.  Then they’re beamed back down to earth and given jobs with the CIA.  This is all to form a New World, and all that.  So it’s really the aliens who are impregnating the women, while they’re CIA mind-controlled, and then they give birth at Satanic rituals.  It’s a big circular thing.  It’s the craziest circular thing I ever heard in my life.  But I was horrified.  I burst into tears.  I couldn’t believe he just told me that my alien baby was alive.  But he was so confused.  He didn’t know why I wasn’t happy.

I’m horrified now! I went to a conference of self-proclaimed – or therapeutically proclaimed – victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control, and I wrote a report about that, I don’t know whether you read it or not – oh, no, you did.  You quoted from it [on James Randi's website].  That’s right.  When I argued with [the attendees and organizer of the conference] that recovered memories bring about tales of alien abduction, despite the crazy shit these people were [otherwise] saying, they were mortified by that comparison.  But Dr. Colin Ross goes the limit.  He believes it all.

In the transcripts from the Minnesota trial – there’s only a couple pages that I sent you today – Dr. Humenansky, she gives sworn testimony that Colin Ross told her that there’s a connection between the CIA and Satanists and Satanic Ritual Abuse.

Well, he kind of denies it, doesn’t he?  There’s pages missing after they bring up the issue, but it sounded like he was going to backtrack on that in the court of law.

He’ll deny everything to his dying breath if he thinks there’s a court reporter around.

But he has put out books and done conferences where he’s pretty open about [his delusions].  It’s amazing to me that he’s still taken seriously.  I’m sure you realize that he’s written the foundational papers, really.  Him and Richard Kluft, and a few others, really defined Multiple Personality Disorder, and its treatment.  And, In fact, it was Richard Kluft and Colin Ross who were the two doctors consulted as experts for the formation of the storyline for [the Showtime series] The United States of Tara.  The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation had them on a panel to discuss The United States of Tara just last year [at their annual conference].  So the whole movement [of therapists who hold to the myth of multiple personalities] still rallies around this fool.

Absolutely.  And they think he’s so special.  In his book Bluebird, he gets all these CIA documents and he puts them in the back.  He thinks he’s so special that he can get those documents.  You know, anybody could get those documents [through the Freedom of Information Act].  Anybody could.  There’s nothing special about him.  He’s just a shameless self-promoter, really.

It’s easily pointed out that just because there are secrets in the case of International Security, or whatever, it doesn’t give Colin Ross a carte blanch to decide what those secrets are or exactly how they work.

This is what Dr. Richard Ofshe from Berkley told me back in 1994: If – and it’s not true of course, but if – everything Colin said [regarding his conspiracy theories] was true, it would still not excuse anything that he did to me.  What he did to me was the worst case of medical malpractice that he had seen.  Really, he can’t excuse what he did by saying, Well look over here, look what they did in the CIA.  Well, what they did in the CIA is the same thing [Colin Ross] does.  All the experiments, all the drugs, all the hypnosis, mind-control.  All the things that he says look at what the CIA did [about], they’re the very same things he did!

I do find it funny that he actually wrote an article about the iatrogenic creation of Multiple Personality Disorder within the CIA, and I also see articles by people like Corydon Hammond, who was trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, talking about how not to lead people to believe things that are not true.  They seem to be doing just the opposite, or exactly what they describe or proscribe to other people doing.

The tapes he had me listen to – he made me hypnosis tapes – I’m walking around the University listening to these hypnosis tapes, and I’m taking these drugs, and of course I couldn’t complete my courses, I had to drop out.  And it just made me completely crazy, all this mind-control, all day long, all night long, this constant mind-control.  The constant visits to his office.  It was just ridiculous. That is mind-control.

…And the drugs, and the hypnotherapy.

I don’t know how he got away with the amount of the drugs he used.  He claimed it was okay, because I had questioned him about that.  I said, Are you sure this is safe?  I wasn’t completely stupid, I wanted to be sure it was safe.  He said, Oh, yes, yes, it’s perfectly safe.  Now, I’ve learned since then that he’s said the same thing to other patients: Oh, yeah, sure, it’s all safe, I checked it out.  Very same words to them.  But then I find out later, no, it was never checked out, no one ever approved it, no one ever did this before.  It was never safe.  He was just lying.  So any consent he ever got from anybody for any drugs he gave them was never informed consent.  So he’s violated the Nuremburg Code.  He’s violated the Nuremburg Code automatically by not getting informed consent, by doing illegal medical experiments on people with no informed consent.

So I’m still having trouble understanding what was it he believed was the therapeutic part of this?  You had your drugs, and you had your ‘homework’ to remember things, but what then?  What, after remembering it?  Where was the effort to try and bring you back into unity with your ‘core self’, or your ‘real personality’, or whatever is they call it in the vernacular [of Multiple Personality Disorder]?

There was no desire to help anybody.  There was only a desire to see how far you could get away with doing whatever you wanted to do.  It was treating us like white rats.  Some of the patients died.  With me, I got so completely insane, because of him.  So he had tried to have me locked up in a permanent psychiatric ward outside the city limits.  And that’s where you go when you’re like criminally insane.  He had tried to do that, but they wouldn’t take me.

How did you come to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [FMSF]?

I was listening to the radio, and I heard that there were a couple of support group members on the radio, and they were talking about False Memory Syndrome.  It just sounded so much like what I had.  This was about a year after Colin Ross left, so… 1992.  Two years after he had left.  FMS wasn’t even formed as an idea of a syndrome until 1992, there were no support groups until 1993.  So it was ’93 when I heard the radio program.  By the time that I’d found lawyers and doctors who could explain it to me, it was four months after the statute of limitations had expired.  So it took that long for me to understand that this was what was wrong, that this was what happened to me.

It sounds like you had a falling-out with Colin Ross before you had a chance to revise your thinking about what had actually happened to you.  What was the process there?  How did you come back to reality?  What were you thinking?

I had lost my child to Child & Family Service issues – put in foster care and hidden away from me.  Hidden away from her whole family, because Colin Ross had told them our whole family was involved in satanic ritual cults, killing children.  And my parents were supposedly high priests of this murderous satanic cult.  So CFS was hiding her from the whole family.  I was desperately trying to get her back.  I was doing everything I possibly could.  I went back to University, I tried to ween myself back off of drugs.  I told Colin Ross that other doctors had told me that I was addicted to the drug he was giving me, Halcion.  He said, No.  It’s impossible.  Can’t be addicted to Halcion. I tried to get off Halcion, tried to get off Valium, best I could, all by myself without any help.  And I had a court case coming up, and I didn’t want to be under care.  I just wanted to go to court looking as fit as I possibly could.  So I told Colin Ross that I couldn’t continue with the MPD therapy because I was fighting a custody battle, and the MPD therapy was making me too sick to fight my custody battle.  And he agreed with me!  That’s basically how it came to an end:  He agreed the therapy was making me too sick to fight for my child.  He was fed up with me as a patient anyway.  I was causing him nothing but trouble.((Note: After Ross’s infuriated reply to Roma Hart’s making public her sexual assault in St. Boniface Hospital while in his care, Hart was discharged from the hospital, but continued to see Ross on an out-patient basis. It was later that Ms. Hart sought to end her MPD therapy, and Ross, leaving Manitoba, failed to refer her elsewhere for psychiatric evaluation. This should clear up confusion that might be caused by what might otherwise sound like more than one permanent break made from Ross by Roma Hart.))

So you didn’t come to a sudden realization that all this about Satanism and alien abduction was crap?  You kind of always had that feeling in the background to begin with?

Well, I had read a magazine article where a woman said she thought she was MPD but really wasn’t, it wasn’t true.  I thought, Hmm, I wonder.  I read it and threw it away.  It wasn’t something I was using as evidence.  You know, I don’t still have it.  I read it and threw it away.  So there was that little thought in my mind.  But I was still worried my parents were going to kill me.  I was still quite certain that they belonged to a satanic cult, and they were going to murder me.  So I wasn’t out of the grip of this nonsense still.  I was still very fearful.  When I was sitting in my living room, in the apartment I had downtown, if lights flashed from the traffic, and they would flash on the windows, my heart would jump because I would think it was an alien spaceship or something.  I was still completely, totally crazy.  But there was still that one ‘maybe’.  So I would go back and forth thinking, Am I?  Am I not?  Am I crazy?  Am I delusional? I was very confused.  So desperately confused.

But you eventually grew more skeptical of those claims.  Was it a slow process, or a realization?

In 1993 when I heard that radio program with the FMS support group – I contacted them, and they gave me a bunch of stuff to read.  I put it on top of my microwave.  I probably had a foot-high pile of stuff on my microwave.  I never read it.  I just put it in a pile, and I would never read it, because I was not quite sure that they weren’t a part of the satanic cult or not.  I didn’t know what was true and what was not true.  I was open-minded, but I was scared.  I was very scared.  Scared of my own shadow.

Now you work with [the FMSF], don’t you?

I do.  I do.  One of the few retractors that they have there.  Think they’ve got, maybe, a few hundred retractors.  So I’m open to anybody who’s been falsely accused, or wants to retract, or is interested at all.  I’m open to talk to anybody who wants to talk about it.

1. “The recommended dose for most adults is 0.25 milligrams (mg). In some patients, a lower dose may be prescribed and the maximum daily dose should not exceed 0.5 mg.” – From the Physician’s Desk Reference [PDR] online (http://www.pdrhealth.com/drugs/rx/rx-mono.aspx?contentFileName=Hal1192.html&contentName=Halcion&contentId=265
2. “The usual dose, depending upon severity of symptoms, is 2 milligrams to 10 milligrams 2 to 4 times daily.” -http://www.drugs.com/pdr/valium.html .
3. Correction: Dr. George Johnson wasLieutenant Governor of Manitoba, not Governor General

As a “victorious survivor of incest, RA [Ritual Abuse], and Govt. MC [Mind Control]“, the aged and infirm “Julaine” understands how it is that They break into our minds.  “Moriah, Illuminati… whatever you want to call it”, this collective Satan “oversees information” through mass media, and it is a scientific certainty that while watching television “the cognitive part of the mind goes dead”.

Julaine addresses the conference from a seat behind a folding table at the front of the room.  Diabetic and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, the 78 year old conference speaker is unwell both physically and mentally.  Both dysfunctional states, she believes, are attributable to a conspiracy of evil.  Rheumatoid arthritis and Satanic Ritual Abuse, Julaine posits, are “almost partners”.

“My sister thinks I’m bi-polar”, she admits.  “She won’t talk to me.”  This refusal of Julaine’s sister’s to recognise that their family is a multi-generational satanic cult is seen as mere denial.  “She is lost”, Julaine explains.

(As Juliane begins to describe her own history as a mind-controlled military sex-slave, a slight, fragile, middle-aged woman directly in front of me pulls her knees up to her chest, buries her face in her hands, and quietly begins to weep.  Her “support person” reaches out, gently touches her back, trying to comfort her.  Soon, the scarred emotions of the woman are soothed and she reciprocates the affectionate caresses of her guardian.  The woman turns in her seat and slips one bared foot under the man’s bottom while deftly rubbing his thigh with the other.  The man is flushed with arousal…)

Juliane expresses gratitude to former S.M.A.R.T. conference speaker Brice Taylor (after expressing disdain for “The Media”, and the requisite loathing of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [FMSF]).  I can’t help but involuntarily raise my eyebrows as I look around the room to determine if the attendees are generally comfortable with the association.

Brice Taylor’s book “Thanks for The Memories” details her personal recovered memories of satanic sexual abuse within the highest levels of the United States government – from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, To Ronald Reagan.  Claiming to have been owned as a mind-controlled sex slave by late comedian Bob Hope – who later passed her off to Henry Kissinger – Taylor is a favourite in the mentally fractured fringe, her book a classic in the folk genre of delusional conspiracy theory literature.  A twistedly prurient work describing outrageous paedophilic orgies among the famous and affluent, Taylor’s work has been described as “porno for paranoids” – its claims so far-flung and unlikely that, as far as I know, nobody has seen the need to disprove it.  But then, this lack of a definitive debunking puts Taylor’s book in a class above several of the RA/Satanic Panic movement’s foundational texts.

First among the Satanic-Ritual-Abuse-concealed-by-Multiple-Personality-Disorder books was Michelle Remembers, published in 1980.  Though not much less apparently absurd on its face than Taylor’s “Thanks For The Memories” (Satan and Jesus themselves make guest appearances in the book, The Lord conveniently removing Michelle’s accumulation of physical scars), Michelle Remembers was an international best-seller, prompting the journalistic investigations that would ultimately debunk it in every major detail.

Satan’s Underground by Lauren Stratford similarly described the recovered memories of a victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse, in this case those of a “breeder” – a woman used to produce infants for use in sacrificial ceremonies.  An investigation by the Christian magazine, Cornerstone, debunked the story, finding that Lauren Stratford was, in reality, Laurel Rose Willson, a mentally disturbed woman with a history of making false abuse allegations. 

Willson would later abandon her claim to satanic victimization, but not her claim to victimhood, moving on to an identity as a jewish survivor of a nazi concentration camp under the alias of Laura Grabowski.

Even the foundational text for the Multi-Personality Disorder (MPD) craze, Sybil, turns out to have been a work of fiction.  Dr. Herb Spiegel, a psychiatrist specializing in hypnosis, was consulted during the treatment of the patient who would come to be known as Sybil.  Spiegel diagnosed Sybil as “a wonderful hysterical patient with role confusion, which is typical of high hysterics.”  According to Spiegel, MPD therapists were “taking highly malleable, suggestible persons and molding them into acting out a thesis that they are putting upon them.”  Nonetheless, Sybil’s therapist, under whose care Sybil had come to reveal sixteen identies, insisted upon MPD.  “If we don’t call [her] a multiple personality, we don’t have a book!  The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!”

But perhaps the greatest blow to the SRA/MPD movement was the investigation into the irresponsible quack antics of an MPD therapist from Rush University Medical Center by the name of Bennett Braun.  As the head of a “Dissociative Disorders” Unit, Braun took one Patty Burgus under his care treating her for severe and prolonged depression, the resistance to treatment of which was quite enough to convince Braun that a satanic cult was somehow involved.  Burgus would suffer continuous treatment at the hands of Braun and his troop of clowns for two years.  Hypnotized, sedated, and reminded that the only way to achieve healing was to recall the memories of satanic ritual abuse that were surely hidden in the compartmentalized recesses of her mind, Burgus would come to believe that she contained over three hundred personalities, had been involved in cannibalism, infanticide… all the standard satanic unpleasantness.

Eventually, Burgus herself began to doubt her own “recovered memories” and began seeking corroborative evidence for the cult activity that her therapists had lead her to believe existed.  As the drugs and hypnotherapy wore off, Burgus came to recognize that it was all a sham.  Seeking legal remediation for the malpractice she suffered, Burgus was eventually paid a settlement of $10.6 million, and Braun – perhaps the most widely recognized expert in MPD at the time – had his medical license suspended.

Soon, plainly false convictions that had been obtained on the evidence of recovered memories began to be over-turned, and retractor stories from patients who began to recognize their recovered memories as false memories began to accumulate.

A particularly disturbing tale of false conviction was that of daycare operator Gerald Amirault, a man convicted of twenty-six counts of child abuse which included, according to an article published by The Nation in 2002, following Amirault’s denial of parole, “accusations of extravagant and flamboyant sadistic behavior: children being anally raped with butcher knives (which left no wounds), tied to trees on the front lawn while other teachers watched, forced to drink urine, thrown about by robots, tortured in a magic room by an evil clown. One child claimed sixteen children had been killed at the center. Obvious questions went unasked: How come no kids who went to Fells Acre in previous years had these alarming experiences? Why was an expert witness permitted to testify about a child-pornography ring when no pornographic photos of the Fells Acre kids were ever found?”  The article ended with a damning comment against the politics of the state that, at the time, still incarcerated Amirault: “…Massachusett…is the only state in which people convicted in the 1980s wave of ritual child abuse cases are still in prison”, “…Will it take another 300 years for the state to acknowledge that Salem was not its last miscarriage of justice?”  Ultimately, Amirault wasted eighteen years of his life in prison.

Eighteen years.

I only find one mention of the Amirault case on the S.M.A.R.T. website.  From issue 79 of the S.M.A.R.T. newsletter dated March 2008: Commonwealth vs. Gerald Amirault. – October 9, 1996 – March 24, 1997 “All nine children testified in a broadly consistent way…The children testified to numerous instances of sexual abuse. Some of the children testified that they were photographed during this abuse, describing a big camera with wires, a red button, and pictures which came out of the camera. The children testified that the defendant threatened them and told them that their families would be harmed if they told anyone about the abuse….The Commonwealth also presented a pediatric gynecologist and pediatrician who examined five of the girls who testified…She made findings consistent with abuse in four of the girls.”

No mention from S.M.A.R.T. of any of the counter-evidence or actual details of the bizarre testimony given by the pediatric gynecologist.  As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Testifying with regard to a child who claimed that Gerald had penetrated her anally with a knife, Dr. Jean Emans offered a supporting statement–namely that an object could “touch the hymen on the way to trying to find the anus” without penetrating the vagina. The object in this instance was a butcher knife.”

But what’s eighteen years, or even a life-time, more-or-less when Neil Brick and his self-sympathizing followers have their victim identities, their sense of purpose, to defend?  As Brick wrote in an angry comment upon my first half of this article, “who are you to decide what people remember?”

Indeed, who am I?  As Lauren Stratford said of the decision to become a holocaust survivor without having actually suffered the holocaust, “I think only the individual can decide if he/she is a survivor.”  And as the co-author of Michelle Remembers, therapist Lawrence Pazder said of his patient’s (and later wife’s) unlikely “memories”: “For her it was very real. Every case I hear I have skepticism. You have to complete a long course of therapy before you can come to conclusions. We are all eager to prove or disprove what happened, but in the end it doesn’t matter“  [italics added].  By these standards, self professed victims are given a carte blanche to re-write their biographies at will.  Thus, Neil Brick may re-imagine – as he does – a past in which he was a top secret Cold War assassin, and sexually repressed housewives may place themselves in the midst of deviant orgies in which they had no choice but to participate. In this context, it is bad form, even pointless, to question the validity of the claims put forward by the conference speakers.

Julaine gives evidence anyway.  In a slide-show presentation we see pictures of her father in military uniform looking surly.  “There’s no love in his eyes.”  We are shown a picture of Julaine as a little girl holding a doll.  “I hated dolls,” she explains to us, “So I always got a doll.”  Julaine assures us that she could continue to present us with “evidence” for hours on end, but time constraints demand that she limit her presentation.

Evidence may not be necessary, but it is certainly appreciated.  For this reason, Anne Johnson Davis is the silently recognised headlining act.  Davis, it turns out, has one thing that none of the others have: corroboration… Signed confessions from her stepfather and mother.  Unfortunately for Davis, once one looks beyond just this bare-bones description, her story raises more questions than it answers.  Like the others, Davis recovered her memories during therapy, coming to accuse her parents of subjecting her to satanic abuse.  At first they denied everything.  Deeply religious, Davis’s parents went to their minister claiming that Anne was “hallucinating and possessed.”

The Church, it seems, preferred Anne’s story to that of her parents, sending three members of the clergy three separate times to Anne’s parent’s house in an attempt to extract confessions.  On the third attempt, Davis relates in astonishment, “they confessed everything!”  Recognizing that a confession from her parents made little sense on their part, innocent or guilty, Davis can only imagine that they did so because they were “stupid”.

Despite these confessions, Davis decided not to press charges.  Deciding that between Media slander and the FMSF, she’d “never get a fair judge and jury”, Davis opted “just to get on with my life” by doing talk tours promoting her book.  Davis relays some valuable lessons learned during her speaking arrangements to the conference attendees.  “If we assume that [people] are going to believe us, a lot of times they do!”, adding, “Sometimes I’m surprised at how many people believe me!”

The attendees at the conference, whether out of politeness or sheer credulity, seem prepared to believe anything.  Nobody shows a hint of doubt when a speaker by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stands before us to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Four practising mental health professionals give speeches during the course of this conference, each praising the “courage” of the “victims”, asserting the validity of recovered memories, and even sharing their own stories of encounters with the sinister Them.  Adah Sachs, Lowell Routley, Shamai Currim (or Shamai Currim PhD as she likes to refer to herself, apparently believing – judging by comments she submitted to me regarding my first half of this report – that her academic credentials, such as they are, allow her to create truth in the absence of facts), and Eileen Schrader.

And the litany of absurdity continues.

The lachrymose Schrader closes the conference with a turgid, drawn-own speech regarding “Programming and Relationships – The Mind Control of Shame”.  Wrapping up her talk, and choking back tears precisely on cue, Schrader reminds us all, “You… are worthy of being loved!”

The conference is so self-evidently full of bullshit that exposing it may seem no more productive than pulling the false beard from a shopping mall Santa Claus.  But, absurd as the premise of the S.M.A.R.T. conference is, and deranged as the speaker’s tales clearly are, there are practising, licensed therapists who, to this day, will defend the legitimacy of the “recovered memories” that have revealed the machinations of the Satanic Conspiracy discussed here.  These therapists will be the first to cry out that Multiple Personality Disorder, now re-branded as Dissociative Identity Disorder, is listed in the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), thus it must be entirely legitimate.  But as Johns Hopkins University professor of psychiatry, Dr. Paul McHugh notes, “symptoms alone are [the DSM's] diagnostic criteria”, so while symptoms of MPD may be categorically defined in the DSM, the condition itself “exists in relationship to the generative powers of the therapist that produced it. It exists just the same way as the Salem witches existed. It does not exist in nature.”

Indeed.  Multiple Personality Disorder and the Salem witches:  Where you find either, you’ll also find witch-hunters.  Let us hope, with the APA now planning to release a new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) in 2012, that this mistake is soon corrected…

]]> http://www.process.org/discept/2009/08/31/report-from-the-s-m-a-r-t-ritual-abusemind-control-conference-2009-part-2/feed/ 8 http://www.process.org/discept/2009/08/25/report-from-the-s-m-a-r-t-ritual-abusemind-control-conference-2009/ http://www.process.org/discept/2009/08/25/report-from-the-s-m-a-r-t-ritual-abusemind-control-conference-2009/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:08:03 +0000 doug http://www.process.org/discept/?p=495 On the weekend of August 15-16, journalist Douglas Mesner (process.org) attended a conference for alleged victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. This is the first of his 2-part report:

The crude sales booth at the far end of the conference room marketing a more advanced species of tin-foil hat does nothing to allay the suspicion that this is to be a congregation of raving delusional paranoiacs.  The hats – an aged, slightly hunched, and shifty-eyed woman quietly explains – are made from a type of metallic fiber weave.  They are effective in blocking the transmissions that They use to get inside your mind.

…And the attendees of S.M.A.R.T’s (Stop Mind control And Ritual abuse Today) twelfth annual  Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control conference are all too aware of exactly who “They” are.  They may be your neighbors, minister, parents, or co-workers.  They might be known as Freemasons, the Illuminati, or Rosicrucians… but they are all Satanists.  They covertly trade slaves, organize secret sex rings, brainwash victims, and work insidiously toward a one-world Luciferian empire.

The S.M.A.R.T conferences are an opportunity for the victims of the satanic conspiracy to exchange their horrific tales, offer support to one another and, most importantly “just be believed”.   Victims are encouraged to bring an accompanying “support person”, as much of the material covered in the 2-day series of talks is considered to be “triggering” (that is to say, it may cause flashbacks in the similarly traumatized).

The organizer of the conference, Neil Brick, stands about 5’6″ with a greasy dark curly comb-over, large-thick glasses, and a voice that sounds exacly like Elmer Fudd (without the impediment of pronouncing his Rs as Ws).  He describes himself as a “survivor of alleged Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA [the CIA's covert mind-control and chemical interrogation project of 1950s - 60s]“.  The disclaimer of the word “alleged” in his own biographical description indicates a type of half-belief that was conveyed from most speakers at the conference, some of whose lectures were startlingly candid accounts of how and why they came to manufacture their paranoid fictions.

Most striking among these was a woman known as deJoly LaBrier, who claims to have learned – through recovered memory therapy – that she suffered childhood abuse at the hands of a cult of satanists in a “military sex ring”.  Remarkably, she also learned, after attending an Al-Anon meeting[an organization that offers "strength and hope for friends and families of problem drinkers"], that her father was an alcoholic, though she “never saw him take a drink”.  But her speech rather glossed over these amazing facts, concentrating instead on her “spiritual evolution”, and standing out within the lectures as among the more revealing of inadvertent confessions.

“We could all decide [Satanic Ritual Abuse] isn’t really true”, LaBrier announced, provoking no real discernible response from the crowd.  She admits that she could pass off her “recovered memories” as “hallucinations”.  But then, “the events [of the past] are not important to me anymore”.  Their only significance is in “what they mean to me in my evolution as a human being.”  Indeed, she will conform reality to her beliefs rather than the other way round.  As she recalls warning possible skeptics at a talk she delivered to an Indiana University class, “Don’t you ever question my reality!”

This rather postmodern perspective suggests a near total disregard for Objective Truth, and its conciliatory effect on LaBrier can’t be expected to offer any comfort to her family, who LaBrier has implicated in her accusations of heinous crimes committed in the name of Satan.  Whether Labrier’s parents are still alive or not is unknown to me, but the question of whether or not her parents actually sexually abused and prostituted her is one that ultimately has an absolute and objective answer.  When LaBrier declares during her speech, “I can talk about the memory of my truth, and it doesn’t matter if you believe it”, she suggests that she can have her own personal “truth”, regardless of what the reality is.

Almost all of the self-proclaimed victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse, like Labrier, have “recovered” their “memories” of these alleged early traumas while undergoing psychiatric therapy.  Though common sense and research both indicate that traumatic events are less easily forgotten than mundane or non-traumatic events, a certain school of psychotherapy still maintains that extreme trauma can lead subjects to so rigidly compartmentalize their memories that they develop multiple personalities.  These personalities (known as “alters”) operate independently of each other and fail to retain any knowledge of what the others are up to; thus the gaps in memory – repressed in buried personalities – that are necessary for a therapist to draw out by achieving contact with the various alters.  Following the popularity of the 1976 television movie, Sybil, a so-called true story about a woman with sixteen personalities created as a result of savage childhood abuse, Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) became a rather fashionable diagnosis.  The number of diagnosed MPD cases went from about 75 before Sybil to 40,000 after Sybil.

During the MPD craze, therapists are reported to have often diagnosed patients with symptoms no more outrageous than depression or anxiety with repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.  They would then set about seeking the alters they knew to be present in the subject.  Patients who refused to play the role of a “multiple” were accused of being difficult, or resisting treatment.  Eventually, many patients would begin to subscribe to the belief that they had been abused, and work to recall the memories of these events that they had been convinced must have happened.  The patients learned to become multiple under the coercion of therapists who would continually ask to speak to the personality that maintained the memory of the trauma.  Thus, as Psychologist Nicholas P. Spanos explained, “patients learn to construe themselves as possessing multiple selves, learn to present themselves in terms of this construal, and learn to reorganize and elaborate on their personal biography so as to make it congruent with their understanding of what it means to be a multiple.”

Recovered memories of abuse and torture, cannibalism, necrophilia, and infanticide at the hands of satanic cults grew to such a level during the 1980s to early ’90s, that it sparked a minor modern witch-hunt, referred to by some sociologists today as the Satanic Panic.  Irresponsible hack reporters like Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jesse Raphael fueled the phenomena with sensationalist “exposes”, tittilating to the midwest masses for their implicit appeal to the righteousness of true bible-believing Christians, and for the salaciousness of the God-less, savage acts they described.  The whole thing began to come undone when serious investigations concluded that their was no evidence to support the claims of massive satanic cult activity.  More and more, the reliability of recovered memories was shown to be nil, and it came to be recognized that some innocent parents had been imprisoned for crimes only imagined.  Instrumental in demonstrating the role of fantasy in recovered memory was the work of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), an organization comprised of “families and professionals affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore” that was founded “in 1992 because they saw a need for an organization that could document and study the problem of families that were being shattered when adult children suddenly claimed to have recovered repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.”  ( http://www.fmsfonline.org/about.html)

To Neil Brick, the the FMSF is nothing more than a group of “pedophile sympathizers”, the executive director of which – Pamela Freyd – serves as the oft-cited arch-villian of the conference.  There is Satan, and there is Pamela Freyd.  Without them, the world would be okay, and no children would ever get hurt…

This is the first of a 2-part report.  Read part 2 here…

The world population has a subset comprised of people who, for one reason or another, demonstrate an online desire to constructively expand and, at least in their view, build a better society around them; this phenomenon is repeatedly demonstrated through public knowledge repositories such as those backed by a wiki format. Concurrently, 2008 draws to a close with live web presence being broadcast in increasingly better quality, and with content of every day slice-of-life views.

Using the editors of Wikipedia as an example, we can see that there is a core of people¹ spread around the world who patrol the encyclopedic content watching for forms of vandalism and misinformation. It does not seem outrageous to claim that this behavior satisfies something within individual editors which is akin to the fulfillment of justice and the maintenance of a world view. Similarly, it is unlikely that, for the majority of these individuals, there is something peculiar to encyclopedic bodies which restricts this desire; instead, it is reasonable that this motivating desire could be applied to other arenas were they available.

The other ingredient to this cake, web cams, have had sort of a milk-jug-being-slid-across-the-kitchen-counter existence. Historically, development would occur to a certain resolution quality which was bounded by how much data could be transmitted upstream, during which relative-lull widely available upstream capabilities would surge ahead; rinse and repeat. At present, the quality of web cam broadcasts, thanks to both increasing resolution of cheaper cameras and the decreasing cost for wider upstream bandwidth, has become quite good. Getting an amount of general media exposure recently, there are two good quality example streams from the Tenderloin in San Francisco² at “Adam’s Block”³ — we’re not at the quality of license plate resolution at this distance, but it is generally sharp and with a spry frame rate.

So we have a world population of desktop vigilantes and an increasing population of good quality live web broadcasts of slice-of-life happenings. Further, thanks to the world-wide nature of the internet, observation can occur continually, 24 hours per day, without any one observer needing to perturb their sleep nor social schedule. The last, minimal and non-essential, ingredient would be an even easier way to contact law enforcement local to the geographical area for the camera feed. All of which leads to the prediction that 2009 will see criminal activity being reported by geographically truly remote observers.

The SF Chronicle is reporting on recent developments with Adam’s Block.

1. the Huggle whitelist lists over 30,000 editors, for example
2. simply the best city in the world
3. for those not familiar with the Tenderloin, it’s one of the more squalid neighborhoods in San Francisco; so, the likelihood of witnessing something dodgy from the stream is decent

Here’s a thought experiment to do with a second person. Find someone who is remotely capable of having a 10 minute rational conversation. Take that person into a quiet, safe room where you’re both at ease and obviously not in ear-shot of anyone else.
Once you’re both relaxed, pick a plausible middle ground at which to start describing a prototype of a person who has difficulty caring solely for themselves as an adult in the world. For example, let’s pick “Hasn’t held a job for longer than a month in their entire adult life.”
Now start adding further attributes to the prototype, each making it even less possible for the person to care for themselves, like:

• Addicted to a drug.
• Regularly in trouble with the law.
• Relies on friends and acquaintances for shelter.

Once you’ve found a line at which there is absolutely no doubt in the other person’s mind that the prototype couldn’t be trusted to assure their own welfare in any shade of light, then posit:
…and now what if they decided to have a child.
I have a finf that says that your second person will agree that this is simply a bad idea: bad for the hypothetical kid; bad for the prototype — bad all around.

If we’re still on the rails then, at this point, the conversation is a bit jocular since there’s common agreement on a point between two people (which always seems to lighten the mood); further, it’s common agreement on a situation which is far worse than either you or your friend has likely had to experience — so there’s probably also a flavour of ‘good that it’s not me’ adding to the mood.
Now — while the mood is still floating along, suggest that there should be legislative efforts to prevent that scenario.

I have an easy sawbuck riding on the notion that your second person flinched and stammered, and an uneasy miasma has settled over the room.

A good question here is ‘Why have you become uneasy about making concrete something with which you just agreed?’ Often when people are asked the Why question, the response will invoke the evil intents of the Third Reich, early twentieth century efforts in a number of countries toward eugenics, and other inflammatory-but-ultimately-orthogonal bombasts.
I’ve heard less inflamed responses such as:

• “We already have mechanisms in place in which to rescue children from bad parents”¹ but this is willfully turning a blind-eye to the poor job done at fixing broken children in general, and especially fixing ones that are generally not-adoptable (whether it be due to degree of broken-ness, race, or other factors).
• And the much weaker, “I am [or a person I know is] the product of what would be considered [a] bad parent[s] and I [or my friend] turned out fine.” To which, rather than drill down into the idea of citing exceptions as rule foundations, i’d instead choose to quote the oft-sagacious Chris Rock, “you could drive a car with your feet if you want to — that don’t make it a good fucking idea”.

I’ve also heard responses such as, “It’s an inalienable human right to procreate”. For two people living forever stranded and alone on an island (and if no concern is given for welfare of a previously non-existent sentient being), this is an idea worth purchase; however, once you start introducing a society into the equation — the impact of the parents on that produced being, and of that shaped produced being on the surrounding society and members of it — the idea of how this is the discretion of simply the individual begins to get weathered.
Nearly all societies already legislate that a person is not allowed to torture or inflict bodily harm on another human being; we even have mechanisms in place that prevent conspiring in plans to create future damage to others (bombings for example). Despite this, and despite that even granting that one can likely get a clear majority of the population to agree in private on standards of invalid potential parents, nobody wants to stand up and say this in public – we are unwilling to even discuss, let alone legislate, this in open society.²

I don’t think there’s a rational person on earth who can’t define a person who shouldn’t have children. I just wonder why we don’t get out of our closets and address this in public.

1. For example: ‘child welfare services’ or ‘social services’ in the US
2. Though there can be found ~legitimate related discussions of controlling procreation rights.

Dr. Hammond stressed his own bravery in “coming forward” with his information – “Myself, as well as a few others that I’ve shared [this information] with, were hedging out of concern and out of personal threats and out of death threats. I finally decided to hell with them. If [the Satanists are] going to kill me, they’re going to kill me. It’s time to share more information with therapists.” [Applause]. He described a savage, blood-thirsty cult operating at the highest levels of society and in the United States Government. It is a cult that has converted millions into brain-washed sex slaves.

But why?

“My best guess is that the purpose of it [the satanists] is that they want an army of Manchurian candidates — tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, all sorts of lucrative things and do their bidding. And eventually, the megalomaniacs at the top believe, [they will] create a satanic order that will rule the world.”

The details are eerily specific, and a good number of Conspiracy Theory’s usual suspects play a role. It’s like this: A secret U.S. military operation initiated immediately after World War II secretly recruited Nazi doctors (who were all, apparently, Satanists) to continue their sinister experiments in mind control. Today, Hammond explains, the head of the whole operation is a Jewish man who “is known to patients throughout the country.” His name is withheld, oddly, to protect the guilty.

The methods by which these Satanists achieve total subjugation of their slaves are also detailed. Prolonged torture, Demerol, and confusion techniques make a victim susceptible to re-programming: “[The victim] will hear weird, disorienting sounds in [one] ear while they see photic stimulation to drive the brain into a brainwave pattern with a pulsing light at a certain frequency not unlike the goggles that are now available through Sharper Image and some of those kinds of stores. Then, after a suitable period, when they’re in a certain brainwave state, they will begin programming, programming oriented to self-destruction and debasement of the person.”

This method of mind control sounds strangely similar to a hypnosis technique utilized by therapists versed in a communication protocol known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). In NLP texts, a hypnosis technique is elaborated in which two therapists – one speaking mostly at random in one ear, while the other gives specific instructions into the other ear – confuse a subject’s conscious mind into “shutting down”, thus bringing the unconscious mind to the fore in a state of trance.¹

With Hammond’s background in clinical hypnosis and, particularly, the subtle coercive communication techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, an obvious question arises: Did Dr. Hammond simply make up the material in the Greenbaum Speech based on his own conception of plausible “brain-washing”² techniques?

“That guy’s a legitimate nut-job…” a Floridian lawyer (who prefers to remain unnamed) drawled out in response to the question in a phone interview I conducted. He had taken a deposition from Dr. Hammond in the early 90s when engaging in a discovery process for charges of fraud leveled by one of Hammond’s former patients. “He wouldn’t face the camera during the deposition because he was afraid that the tape would fall into the hands of Satanists. So he sat in the corner facing the wall. He saw evidence of Satanism everywhere. Somebody was wearing a tie that made him suspicious that the guy was a Satanist.”

Dr. Hammond claims to have based his “findings” on information he had compiled from various patients in his care who had “recovered” memories of the abuse that Hammond had “come forward” to describe.

A common criticism that skeptics have put forward against cases of “recovered memories” of trauma is that the therapist often seems to be unwittingly “leading” the patient toward a preconceived notion. For instance, the question, “What color t-shirt was the man wearing?” presupposes a t-shirt over a button-up, sweater, or whatever else. If the person being asked isn’t attentive, he or she may then picture a t-shirt in a freshly created “false memory” without realizing that the idea was planted. Once believed, a False Memory becomes “fact” to whoever was implanted with it. Often, it is difficult to convince the person that their “memory” is indeed false.³

In the Greenbaum Speech, Hammond seems to be aware of the risks of leading. Addressing therapists, he specifically implores, “Do not lead [the patient].”

Eventually, many of the claims put forward by Dr. Hammond and his coterie of Repressed Memory Therapists were investigated by a Utah Task Force. 250,000 dollars later, the task force found nothing, and questions regarding Hammond’s credibility suddenly became quite pertinent.

While some of Hammond’s peers in the Repressed Memory movement appear to have mis-treated their patients with a far more damaging level of irresponsibility than Hammond ever achieved⁴ , Dr. Hammond is of peculiar interest to me specifically because of the Greenbaum Speech, and the fact that in the speech he implicated The Process Church:

“Remember the Process Church? Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by the Manson Family who were associated with the Process Church? A lot of prominent people in Hollywood were associated and then they went underground, the books say, in about seventy-eight and vanished? Well, they’re alive and well in southern Utah.”

Dr. Hammond mentions a “thick file in the Utah Department of Public Safety” that documents The Process’s activities within Utah as witnessed by covert law enforcement. The State of Utah knows of no such file⁵ . The interesting thing, of course, is that – in this instance – Dr. Hammond was right. By the time he had delivered the Greenbaum Speech, a collection of Processean luminaries had established an animal shelter in Utah. How did he know?

In an email exchange Dr. Hammond and I had in 2004, he replied to the question:

“A law enforcement officer in the state of Utah told me in about 1990 about them [the Process] having a complex in southern Utah and showed me aerial photographs that had been made of the complex. I’ve never heard anything since and really don’t know anything about them. I haven’t been associated with anything associated with cults in the past 12 years.”

Perhaps conveniently, Hammond could not remember the name of the law enforcement officer in question.

The good doctor’s new distance from the topic of Satanic Ritual Abuse follows a long series of litigation and accusations. Several Ritual Abuse therapists lost their licenses to practice after ruining the lives of their clients and their client’s families by instilling them with the belief that their own friends and relatives were part of a conspiracy to control their minds. Following these revelations of therapist quackery, I find myself wondering, Were some of the Ritual Abuse therapists willfully leading their patients? Were they, in effect, engaging in some form of the very coercion they decried? Was the Satanic Conspiracy a type of projection of their own cruel practices? Understandably, Dr. Hammond is reticent to comment on this episode of his career.

“I never really did cult research,” Hammond wrote to me, “but simply worked with some patients and consulted with other therapists who were working with them. By the latter part of 1992 I could see that it was becoming controversial and possibly an area of liability. It was exhausting, difficult work. Since it had never been more than a small part of my practice, I decided, why am I working this hard for the money when there are several other areas of specialty that I have where the work is much less gut-wrenching and the problems have a much more favorable prognosis than persons with extensive abuse histories?”

Despite Dr. Hammond’s dismissal of his Greenbaum stand-up comedy, many elements of the lecture still surface today among occult crime conspiracy theorists, and a popular conspiracy book, Mass Control, by author Jim Keith, cites Hammond’s Greenbaum material as a presumably accurate source for information.

“Occult crime investigators”, still certain that there is an international satanic conspiracy, have assimilated Hammond’s cult research into their ever-growing mythology, thus making the Greenbaum Speech something of an underground, deeply-rooted, cultural false memory.

1. The link describing Confusion Techniques above fails to mention induction by means of separate simultaneous auditory messages. A good book that details this technique, for practice by more than one therapist, is Handbook of Hypnotic Inductions by George Gafner and Sonja Benson
2. some my wish to quibble here about what hypnosis is or is not capable of, or, indeed, if there is such a thing as hypnosis at all. I am aware of the criticisms and varied definitions of hypnosis. Note that I do not credit the technique Hammond outlines as an effective method of brain-washing. I merely state that this would appear to be his conception of a plausible brain-washing technique
3. This exact example quite possibly originates from some other source I have read in the past, but my memory has currently repressed its full recall
4. Most notably Dr. Bennett Braun. I highly recommend the linked article to anybody interested in False Memory Syndrome
5. I called and asked

Let’s make up some nomenclature before proceeding much further; for the remainder of this article, we’ll refer to an object, whose technical workings are too complex for the randomly chosen person-on-the-street to comprehend, as a ‘complex object’.
Let’s further sub-divide the set of complex objects into two groups: those of use strictly in the workplace and/or research environments, and the rest. We’ll ignore the objects in the former group, since there is usually already a strict framework imposed by a government, as well as the business itself in the interest of marketplace image, which results in the education of the users in the usage of those objects.¹ As a result, all references to ‘complex objects’ will refer to non-business-place-only complex objects.
Lastly, as you’ve just seen, there will be occasional lapses and a person who uses a complex object will be referred to as a ‘user’.

1. the user of an object is sheltered from having to know about the complex mechanisms working to provide the functionality of the object
2. the user of an object is heavily discouraged, if not outright prevented, from mucking with the complex mechanisms of the object
3. the user of an object is protected from performing an action with the object which would cause damage to the user or people immediately around the user

It is item #3 which is of the most interest to us here. This protection, on any item, can only do so much. A user intent on circumventing the protection could, for example, rig the door latch mechanism on a microwave so that the oven is able to radiate even with the door open, allowing the user to microwave their own head, foot, or what have you.
It’s relevant to note that, historically, the great majority of these complex objects could not be used to inflict damage on people other than the user, or others in the user’s immediate physical vicinity — existence of #3 or not. For objects in which this isn’t the case,³ when the user has caused harm to others society has, at least through the 1980s, uniformly sided with the ignorantia legis non excusat principle.⁴

Then along came personal computers with the 1990s. To be accurate, personal computers came along more than a decade before, but through the 1980s these devices were basically the sole bailiwick of the nerdy, the scientists and the academics. It is not that people of this ilk are infallible concerning the operation of their computers, but rather the personal computers themselves at that time were generally not largely networked nor capable of easily running processes of which the user was unaware.

What the 1990s brought for personal computers was more user friendly interfaces to their operating systems and access to the internet, and with those things so came the general public. Unfortunately both the user interface of the computer and the underlying internet failed our above-item-#3 — what neither the user interfaces did adequately, nor were the internet protocols which facilitate things like email and web traffic designed to do, was to protect stumbling users from themselves.
So then, circa 1998, we had a burgeoning mass of average folk who had enough knowledge of computers to allow them to write documents, play games, and dial-in to the internet for their, albeit slow, fix. Late, but ever welcome, to the party came the final ingredient: always-on-connectivity to the internet, in varied guises like DSL and cable.⁵ Recapping the guests at our 1998 party, we now had:

• average shmoes in possession of
  • complex objects with
    • user interfaces that did not protect the users from accessing the underlying complex mechanisms
    • the ability to be continually interconnected to other complex objects with similar user interface defects

The more nefariously shrewd people realized that by exploiting a user’s naiveté (“here’s an email with an attached hot movie of Angelina Jolie topless – i’m going to double click it!”) and/or those user interfaces which were not properly maintained by the user (“what’s a Windows update?”), that they could gain remote control of other people’s computers. Out of this, it wasn’t long before the world was introduced to both botnets⁶ and rampant personal financial data theft.

It is here, finally, that we’ve reached the place where our standards of culpability have gone awry; whether the problem is that the user clicked on a link to “re-verify their online banking login information”, or they double clicked on an email attachment which set up their machine as part of a botnet, or they forgot to patch their user interface against a long ago discovered vulnerability – a misstep which led to a key logger being unknowingly installed on their machine – all of these actions share one common theme, one common defense: the users claim of “I didn’t know any better.” What is distressing about these situations is that here we have, seemingly the first time in modern legal history, a free pass based on this claim.

• The user’s computer is one of a large botnet involved in making a government network useless via a DDoS attack? That poor user was a victim too!
• The user’s credit card information captured via a key logger is used to defraud several online shopping sites? That poor user was a victim too…

• it sends a message that it’s ok to be a legal participant of society but still callow
• society, at the same time, appears to be making no efforts to curb the acquisition of the complex object by its members (this is an admittedly crappy and unfeasible solution to this particular situation which i wouldnt favour, but it would be at least an action of some flavor – as opposed to inaction)
• it seems likely that the complexity of objects available to the average person is going to continue to increase at a pace which the user interfaces of these objects can not match – making this scenario reoccur with greater frequency
• in those societies whose legal systems weight the notion of precedent, it potentially introduces reduced culpability in other situations

Whatever the underlying reason, we, as a society, need to reflect on whether we really want to endorse the concept that a person’s ignorance absolves them of their actions which inflict damage on others. Should we choose to endorse such a thing, it likely won’t be long before ignorance is advocated over intelligence as a general theme to individual existence.

1. For example: a nuclear reactor.
2. An example would be the modern automobile; in an automobile, a wealth of data which needs to be interpreted and acted upon is generated each second however the user interface of the car weeds out the information which needs to be definitely delivered to the user (ie. present speed) from the information which would befuddle the user (ie. oxygen content in the post-combustion gases).
3. Our favourite example again: the automobile.
4. For example, a defense of “I didn’t know that attempting to start my manual transmission car while it was in gear would make it lurch forward running over that child.” does not fly.
5. Yes, yes.. ISDN was available before this – but it was the price-point, and wider availability, of DSL, and then cable, which was the flash moment.
6. Groups of computers which were infiltrated to the extent that people could remotely command the computer to perform a given task.