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Thanks as always for everyone’s participation.

- 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

“Scientific research has clearly demonstrated that when one per cent of the population of a city or town practices Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation Programme, the crime rate significantly decreases. Similarly, when groups of individuals practicing Maharishi’s TM-Sidhi programme with Yogic Flying equal at least the square root of one per cent of a population, there is a significant reduction of crime and accidents, as well as an increase in stock prices, decreased pollution, decreased unemployment, and decreased hostilities between nations.”

This crime-reducing by-product of TM™ is a phenomena known as “The Maharishi Effect”. During the Summer of 1993, 4,000 faithful, trained in the peaceful art of Transcendental Meditation™, gathered in crime-ridden Washington, D.C. with a mission: to scientifically prove the Maharishi Effect. And, if you ask those minds from the prestigious Maharishi University who were responsible for the study, the experiment was a great success… A success, that is, despite the fact that “during the weeks of the experiment Washington D.C.’s weekly murder count ‘hit the highest level ever recorded.’”

So where was the success? I childishly ask in my negativity-induced ignorance.

Ah… you see, though homicides peaked in this TM™-increased field of peace, crime was in fact reduced 18 percent from what it would have been had the meditators not been present!

No doubt about it. Maharishi University’s own physicist, Dr. John Hagelin worked out all of the variables. The Maharishi Effect is proven… But I have my doubts. When I published an article questioning the validity of TM™ science, a commentator and TM™ practitioner tried to set me straight:

“[...]You get the facts all wrong because you see it through a negative belief system. Lighten up. I’ve been doing TM for years. It’s given me more happiness & energy for success in my work, gotten rid of stress that I see dragging others down & making them sick. Friends whom I’ve gotten to do TM, I’ve watched meditation change their life. It’s ridiculous to try to reason or explain the facts to people enmeshed in an unhealthy, negative mindset. This article’s not even about the research. It’s not about TM. It’s about a world view threatened by the possibility that TM really has the effects claimed for it. It’s about a rigid belief system that needs to convince itself & others that the all-positive, life-changing effects of TM are not possible, because that would mean your beliefs & your defense mechanism would collapse. TM is a totally cool, edifying experience – a fact you cannot change.”

Worse than my failure to appreciate the science of the Maharishi Effect, is the fact that I’ve dismissed out-of-hand, as absurd, TM™’s Yogic Flying – the claim that TM™ meditators may achieve levitation. “Stage One is generally associated with what would best be described as ‘hopping like a frog.’ Stage Two is flying through the air for a short time. Stage Three is complete mastery of the sky.” The very idea proved altogether too much for the defense mechanisms I’d constructed in preservation of my negative world view, and when I learned that TM™, through the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, was attempting to insert itself into public schools, I went on the offensive, publishing the following article on Examiner.com… an article that the General Counsel for Maharishi University would deem “defamatory”:

Transcendental Meditation in schools, the David Lynch program

Expel from your mind the stereotyped image of the robed, bearded yogi. Forget the worn image of the unkempt, hash-headed, lotus-seated hippy listening to sitar music in an incense-filled room behind a beaded curtain. This is not the Transcendental Meditation [TM] we are talking about. This is Science!

“Hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted on the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation program at more than 200 independent universities and research institutions worldwide in the past 35 years,” explains the TM-promoting David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace website. Among the positive side-effects of the TM program, we find: increased focus, decreased hostility, reduced anxiety, even a reduction in cardiovascular disease among practitioners.

Surely, with this in mind, no reasonable person would argue against teaching the TM method in public schools.

And this is exactly what the David Lynch Foundation – founded by the cult film director of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive – proposes: implementation of a TM teaching program “in public and private schools and in after-school programs across the U.S. and around the world, with thousands of students enjoying its benefits.”

This past April, the foundation held a large benefit concert in New York – including performances by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Ben Harper, and Moby – which, according to USA Today, raised an estimated $3 million toward funding the TM-in-schools program.

But, despite the attributed benefits and celebrity endorsements, some worry that the teaching of a TM-based program in public schools constitutes another breach across the ever-eroding church-state dividing line. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reports, “Slowly but steadily, TM seems to be gaining a foothold in public schools across the country. The trend has alarmed some advocates of church-state separation, who point out that the practice is based in Hinduism and that the federal courts removed it from New Jersey public schools on church-state grounds in 1979.”

In regards to funding being offered by the David Lynch Foundation in support of the TM program, “Americans United is urging school officials to turn down the money, reminding educators that TM in the schools can spark litigation. In 1976, Americans United and other groups joined with Roman Catholic and Protestant parents to bring a lawsuit against the use of TM in five New Jersey public schools.” […] “A federal court struck down the TM classes in October of 1977, a decision that was affirmed by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February of 1979…Ruling in Malnak v. Yogi, the federal appeals court declared that TM is grounded in Hinduism. Students, the court pointed out, were assigned the name of a Hindu god to chant, and even went through a type of religious initiation ceremony called a puja.”

Indeed, though the David Lynch Foundation seems keen to express that TM is just a technique, with real estate holdings, schools, and clinics—even a town, Vedic City, in Iowa—“worth more than $3 billion in the late 1990s,” TM is clearly something more. Some go so far as describe TM as “a cult that ultimately seeks to strip individuals of their ability to think and choose freely.”

Therapist John Knapp, specializing in providing help to ex-cult members and people entangled in “cultic relationships” left TM after 23 years of involvement. “I married somebody who was not involved with the group, and part of my group experience was that I was asked to lie about a number of items. And living every day with someone and having to lie to them was extremely difficult… It caused what you could call a cognitive dissonance. It really caused a bifurcation in my mind. It was really difficult to live with. And I’d also gotten very far away from my family, which is not uncommon for people who are in these kinds of [cultic] relationships. As my mother was getting older I wanted to re-establish my ties with her and the family. These kinds of things led me to begin questioning my relationship [with TM].”

Upon deciding that he would leave TM, Knapp reports that he suffered a good deal of harassing behavior from the group. “It was difficult for me, because I had believed so strongly in this group [TM]. My spiritual and emotional life was really bound up completely with this group, so when they turned on me it was very confusing and very difficult for me…”

Worse, Knapp reports negative effects derived from the meditation technique itself, from addictive behavior to increased feelings of dissociation. He claims that many clients of his that come from TM have experienced the same.

TM was founded by a man known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1956 in India, and the revered guru himself had once been accused of using “fear and intimidation” in order to work to prevent a disciple from leaving the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The disillusioned student, Robert Kropinski, and six other people sued Maharishi’s University for $9 million on the grounds of “fraud, neglect, and intentionally inflicting emotional damage”. Kropinski stated that none of the promised TM benefits ever surfaced during his time as a student, and he was awarded $138,000 by a Washington D.C. jury. Maharishi did not appear in court, as he was never available to receive summons.

Admittedly, all of this sounds most unpleasant, but what of the scientific data supporting theindividual benefits of TM?

There are problems with TM’s data. While the David Lynch Foundation endlessly promotes the “unique” benefits of TM, there is a conspicuous shortage of comparative analytical studies that measure TM against other relaxation techniques. Surprisingly, studies measuring the effects of a simple mid-day nap report many of the same “unique” benefits touted by TM.

In fact, a study published in the journal Science in 1976 found in studying “five experienced practitioners of Transcendental Meditation”, that they “spent appreciable parts of meditation sessions” merely napping.

And, according to a June 2007 report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that evaluated the quality of the meditation research along an array of standard scientific criteria such as the proper use of randomization and control group techniques, “Overall, the methodological quality of both intervention and observational analytic studies on meditation practices is poor.”

According to Dr. Barry Markovsky, professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, “Poor evidence, even in large quantities, falls short of establishing scientifically the benefits of TM.”

Worst of all, TM makes a series of staggering claims that can be charitably described as “unlikely”. Old advertisements for TM claim that practitioners of TM will develop “supernormal powers” including “supernormal sight and hearing”, invisibility, and levitation! The organization even circulated photos with pictures of lotus-seated students apparently hovering above the ground, but first-hand observations of the “levitations” left many unconvinced. The levitators never managed to levitate for very long; they never really “hovered”. In fact, they sprung up rather abruptly and dropped immediately to the ground again. Really, it was quite apparent that these transcendent hopefuls were merely hopping about from a seated position.

Nor has TM provided any legitimized demonstrations of any of its supernormal powers.

When asked about “advanced techniques” such as “yogic flight” during a press conference promoting his benefit concert, David Lynch replied with some rambling vagaries about a “field of unity”, “bliss”, and the “collective consciousness”.

The David Lynch Foundation has a stated of goal of teaching TM to one million children, which is reminiscent of another supernatural claim of TM: the Maharishi Effect, which states that a certain critical mass of TM meditators can affect change upon the material world.

While John Hagelin of the David Lynch Foundation claims that the Maharishi Effect is a scientifically proven phenomenon, there is no reliable evidence to support this. (Hagelin, it should be noted, is partially to blame for the simple-minded buffoonery of the best-selling book The Secret, which promotes a simpler version of the Maharishi Effect: The idea that one can obtain what one wants through mere wishful thinking.) Hagelin claims that in 1993 crime was reduced inWashington, DC during a two month period due to the collective effort of 4000 TM practitioners.

As Skeptico reports: “There were many problems with this experiment. One was that the murder rate rose during the period in question. Another was that Hagelin’s report stated violent crime had been reduced by 18% (in the film [What The Bleep Do We Know] he says 25%), but reduced compared with what? How did he know what the crime rate would have been without the TM? It was discovered later that all the members of the “independent scientific review board” that scrutinized the project were followers of the Maharishi. The study was pseudoscience: no double blinding, the reviewers were not independent, and the experiment has never been independently replicated. Hagelin deservedly won an Ig Nobel Prize in 1994 for this outstanding piece of work.”

James Randi, famed stage magician, author, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and debunker of supernatural claims, explains that TM has “always maintained this… [the idea] that if a certain critical number of people take up TM, they will protect everybody, and the world will be perfectly safe from then on.”

Randi came to be aware of TM through his friend and fellow magician, Doug Henning. “I knew [Henning] very well as a kid, and later as a mature magician. We were always in touch…” Randi describes a deeply cultic relationship between Henning and Transcendental Meditation that would destroy Henning’s career and eventually take his life. Henning’s career as a television magician was compromised as he strove to hire only TM initiates to work on the set. According to Randi, this was not only problematic for the fact that it was difficult to find people within TM who were talented in television production, but “every so often they went in to meditation and work just stopped…” Eventually, TV executives grew weary of Henning’s professional antics.

Henning became even more deeply involved with TM following his diagnosis of liver cancer, eventually removing himself from contact with non-TM practitioners. “He gave up all medical care… the Maharishi had told him that he could recover from his liver cancer simply from meditating… he meditated himself to death.” Henning died in February of 2000.

“I’m so angry at the TM movement,” says Randi, “for having taken an innocent person.”

John Knapp feels that the drive to bring TM into more schools is destined to failure as any critical scrutiny of the organization will prove its undoing. According to him, “It’s just too damn strange…”

Relaxation – whether by crude napping, or practiced meditation – holds certain benefits that are not the monopoly of the TM brand. It is this author’s hope that schools will continue to seek techniques to aid the reduction of stress and conflict – while increasing health and focus – withoutreducing their curriculum to supernatural philosophies that cross the church-state line.

*********

Not long after posting the article above, I received an email from an Examiner editor informing me that she had received an email from William Goldstein of Maharishi University.

“I received [an] email [from William Goldstein] regarding your recent article regarding transcendental meditation and the David Lynch Foundation. As you should be aware, the Examiner.com Terms of Use and the click-through Examiners Independent Contractor Agreement and License (which you entered into with Examiner.com) prohibit the posting of content that is defamatory or factually inaccurate, as has been alleged here. Accordingly, we have temporarily removed the article from our site pending further investigation and/or modification of the article by you.”

She helpfully made my situation clear:

“Please be aware that because you are an independent contractor and your articles are selected, written, posted or controlled solely by you, you alone would be liable should either of the organizations listed below decide to bring a lawsuit for defamation or otherwise. Accordingly, we strongly encourage you to consider modifying the article[...]“

William Goldstein’s accusatory email followed:

Dear Examiner Editor in Chief

I write this letter as General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace concerning the article in your online publication: http://www.examiner.com/x-20682-Boston-Underground-Examiner_y2009m10d5-Transcendental-Meditation-in-schools-the-David-Lynch-program

I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them [Orme Johnson posted his remarks in the public comments field following the article on Examiner.com]. But there are other false, defamatory and/or misleading statements which need to be identified as such and retracted. The failure to do so continues to damage the reputation of my client organizations which teach and promote these programs, and the individuals involved in those activities.

One court case, over thirty years ago, found a curriculum in the Science of Creative Intelligence which included the TM program to have religious overtones violative of the First Amendment. That “Malnak” case has been mischaracterized and its scope overstated by Mr. Mesner. No court at any time has ever ruled that teaching the TM program alone is impermissible, nor that the student is “assigned the name of a Hindu God to chant”.

What is even more relevant is the fact that, largely in light of the extensive research that has been done over the last thirty years on the Transcendental Meditation programs benefits in removing stress, several thousand at risk students in public schools across the United States have decided voluntarily to learn the TM program. Through sponsorships from the David Lynch Foundation, they have learned the technique in voluntary Quiet Time programs without any legal interference. The Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 US 38 and its progeny have now made it clear that secular or non-secular meditation is permissible under the First Amendment in such circumstances.

Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

John Knapp, who claims to be a licensed counselor, is quoted by Mr. Mesner as saying he was lied to and harassed by the TM organization. But this is not factually supported. However, what is a fact is that Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. Mr. Knapp’s professional ethical conflict of interest seems much more worthy of note than his unsupported claims of lies and harassment.

Further, Messrs.. Knapp and Mesner attempt to attribute the symptoms of mental illness to the practice of the TM program without scientific basis. This may be of great support to his cult counseling practice, but is not supported by the several hundred studies. No one claims that every person who practices the TM technique will be promptly freed of any mental distress. People who practice the TM program may indeed coincidentally suffer from such problems. What the research shows conclusively, however, is that they get noticeably and materially better through this practice — they do not get worse. If Mr. Knapp really and honestly feels otherwise, why has he not undertaken a controlled scientific study which has been published in a peer reviewed journal? In fact, all such studies of the TM program have shown that it only produces beneficial effects. Mr. Knapp’s self serving, conflict ridden unscientific anecdotes are not the evidence recognized as credible by science or his profession and claiming such is unethical and irresponsible. It is also damaging to those who teach and practice those programs and he should be held accountable for such damage. In any event, it should not be published and promoted by this publication or you are participating in this damaging process.

Mr. Mesner’s misrepresentations continue by his claim that Kropinski received a $138,000 jury verdict for claimed injuries from the TM program. What he omits to mention is that it was reversed on appeal. Kropinski v. WPEC, 853 F.2d 948 ( 1988) .

These falsehoods, defamations and omissions compel me to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.

Thank you very much for your anticipated co-operation.

William Goldstein
General Counsel,
Maharishi University of Management and
David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace

Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

William Goldstein
General Counsel
Maharishi University of Management
Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

*******************

And so, my article was pulled, and I was being given the opportunity to amend and correct all defamations. I re-read my work carefully….

No, no defamations there. As Examiner claimed no legal responsibility regarding the article, I decided to take the liberty of re-posting it in full, exactly as it was but with this preface:

This previously posted article has been updated with appended material following a letter received from the General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, William Goldstein, under the subject heading “Retraction of Defamatory Article”. Upon reviewing Goldstein’s criticisms, the author has decided that there are no grounds for labeling this article “defamatory”. An open reply to Goldstein’s letter follows the article below:

As promised, the updated post of the article was appended with my reply to the claim of “defamation” as follows:

On October 13 editors at Examiner received an email from William Goldstein, General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace. The email’s subject heading was “Retraction of Defamatory Article”, and it ended with strong words claiming that the “falsehoods, defamations and omissions [in the article above] compel me [Goldstein] to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.”

And what were these “falsehoods, defamations and omissions”? Goldstein opens: “I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them.”

I had read Dr. Orme Johnson’s criticisms and found them less than compelling, some of them nonsensical. For instance, this comment – “To Knapp’s statement that TM is “too strange” for America, one has to ask, strange for whom, the narrow minded and ethnocentric? I think our nation has gotten past a lot of that.” – left me to merely wonder what in the world ethnocentricism might have to do with any of this if TM is not to be viewed as an Eastern practice rooted in Eastern beliefs and traditions?

Dr. Orme Johnson made comments suggesting that James Randi was incorrect regarding Henning’s situation: “Maharishi’s advice was always to seek medical attention when one gets sick, not “just meditate” as Randi alleges. Studies of medical care utilization that I conducted on Blue Cross statistics found that 2,000 TM subjects over a five-year period had on average 50% less hospitalization and doctors visits than the norm or matched controls, with reductions in all categories of disease.”

This comment would be laughable if the ramifications were less grave. When the criticism is that TM discouraged a sick man from seeking medical attention, the statistic of 50% less hospitalization amongst TM practitioners hardly makes that claim seem less credible. But, just the same, if Randi’s comments are “falsehoods, defamations, or omissions”, that is problem that must be taken up with James Randi. He is accurately quoted in the article above.

Likewise, the claim that TM is a “cult” is attributed, and Goldstein must take any disagreement with that label up with those who use it to describe his… “client”. In my favorite part of his email, Goldstein writes: Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

This shameless name-dropping is pointless, as it can be worked both ways. “Jerry may laugh”, and Al Gore may be a humorless bore. Or Jerry may in fact cringe in disgust if presented with the idea that TM practitioners may learn to levitate, or that the Maharishi Effect is a proven phenomena. Al Gore may laugh at such nonsense. We really don’t know, do we? Were Jerry Seinfeld, Al Gore, or Paul McCartney asked to give an opinion of my article? Is it just too remarkable to imagine that such celebrities might be involved in a “cult” or cult-based practices? Do Tom Cruise and John Travolta find it remarkable that many accuse Scientology of being a cult? For that matter, isn’t Scientology’s Dianetics “auditing” practice nothing more than a therapeutic technique? As such, perhaps it too should be welcomed into school rooms.

Goldstein goes on to question the credibility of John Knapp: “Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. ”

While I’m not exactly sure what is meant by this, it seems to imply that counseling ex-TM practitioners has proven lucrative for Knapp which would also imply a consistent client base of TM disaffected. But, again, if Goldstein takes issue with what is said by Knapp, he must take it up with him. Knapp is accurately quoted in the article above.

The one helpful item mentioned in Goldstein’s email was the fact that the Kropinski finding was over-turned on appeal – though this would better have been mentioned in the comments, not in a full letter claiming “defamation”.

Most other comments regarding this article, by Dr. Orme Johnson and others, take exception to the criticisms regarding the Maharishi Effect. I have no intention of being ambiguous about this: the Maharishi Effect is not a proven phenomena. I seriously doubt it can even be considered a valid hypothesis. It’s failed hippy mysticism, and it has no place whatever in public schools.

I said it.

Go ahead and sue me.

Speaking only for myself,

Douglas Mesner

www.process.org

*********

Anticipating summons, though believing the claim of “defamation” to be entirely unfounded, I contacted organisations and institutions I felt might be of assistance should TM™ in fact attempt to sue me.

So it was that sometime in early December, somebody with copies of the Goldstein-Examiner emails posted them on Wikileaks so as to demonstrate TM™’s descent into Scientology-like litigiousness. The public posting of Goldstein’s letter further agitated the TM™ apologists. The comments on the Wiki page questioned the purpose of posting such an item. One Commenter asked, Is Wikileaks serving a noble purpose here?:

“WikiLeaks needs to carefully discern documents such as this to determine if the material actually poses a threat to “A just and corrupt free world.” If the document is benign and the legal notice by the TM people was justified because the Examiner article actually is defamatory, then WikiLeaks is just letting themselves be used for destructive purposes by self-serving people with ill intentions.

After reading the letter, and being aware beforehand of the positive nature of TM, it appears to me that WikiLeaks, in this case, is itself acting in opposition to a fair and corrupt-free world. Just because someone claims to have a “secret document” revealing unfounded threats doesn’t mean that promoting that person’s accusations is noble and progressive.

But I think you’re actually doing TM a favor by publishing the letter and showing people the rational, fact-based response of the TM organization to Mesner’s attacks, whose article in the Examiner (for anyone who actually does research or knows the facts) was replete with false accusations and defamations.

I urge WikiLeaks to consider this: If TM is actually a good thing, and the organization is actually justified in their request that Mesner adjust his article, then are you really serving a just cause to allow yourself to be instrument of further defamation?

By reading through your files on TM, one gets the impression that your organization is not neutral, fair-minded or inclined to value scientific research and objectivity, but is predisposed to accept negativity and rancorous attacks against TM just for the sake of providing more so-called “leaked material,” regardless or whether or not the “leaker’s” context and explanations are justified.

Wiley, USA”

Odd though it was that the publication of Goldstein’s letter should provoke a defensive reaction from those who claim to feel his criticisms of my article were justified, it was a different comment entirely that infuriated me and demanded my correction:

[...] I think this is a complete non-issue. There was a basis for the claim (erroneous defamatory information being posted in the article). That was then corrected and the article was reposted with the correction and no further complaint. Totally legit (as would also be the case if it happened to wikileaks or anyone else – removing false statements)

This statement was posted anonymously. Of course, I had not “corrected” the article before I had reposted it. The claim that I had done so, supposedly conceding to having posted erroneous and defamatory information made me feel… defamed as a researcher and freelance writer.

I replied under the subject heading of “Maharishi Spin”:

Amid what appears to be an attempt by TM to re-spin this story, I want to make it abundantly clear that I did not, in any way revise the article on Examiner.com – except to add a brief introduction mentioning Goldstein’s letter, and an addendum replying to that letter – before reposting the article on that site. The claim that the article was “corrected” before being re-posted is a flat lie, and I would challenge anybody saying otherwise not to do so anonymously, and cite what exact corrections are imagined to have been made. In reality, what seems to have happened is, Goldstein attempted to intimidate both me and the editors at Examiner.com with the threat of legal action on the base-less claim of defamation in hopes that we would fold and remove the article. That did not work, the article remains as is, and Goldstein’s failure to sue me since is perhaps a tacit confession that there is, in fact, no case for defamation to be made.–Douglas Mesner 20:41, 15 December 2009 (GMT)

And that’s where we stand… for now….

David Lynch by Alethea Jones

-American Medical Association, Council on Scientific Affairs, Scientific Status of Refreshing Recollections by the Use of Hypnosis, 1985.

“The evolution of pseudomemories is clearly demonstrated in the case of Jeannette Bartha v Hicks Richard and Friends Hospital in Philadelphia. In September 1994, this former patient sued her treating psychiatrist and hospital for negligence and reckless treatment beginning in March 1986. For the six and one-half years she was under the care of the defendant psychiatrist, the plaintiff’s condition deteriorated, according to her complaint […] the defendant psychiatrist failed to monitor the course of treatment and used hypnosis and prescribed medications, increasing the plaintiff’s tendency toward suggestion, coercion and manipulation. Over time, this caused the plaintiff to experience and display symptoms of supposed multiple personality in conformity with the defendant’s expectations, when in fact no such illness existed.”

“As a direct result of the negligence of the defendant, the plaintiff alleged, her ability to rationally function was destroyed. Moreover, she became convinced that she had hundreds of alternate personalities as a result of extended and repeated sexual and other traumatic abuses as a child. These experiences – which, in fact, did not occur – included participation in ritual murders, cannibalism, Satan worship and torture by members of her family, among others. The plaintiff alleged that these memories were the product of
coercion and suggestion […] The complaints led to a settlement, the amount of which is undisclosed.”

- Harold I. Lief, M.D., Patients Versus Therapists: Legal Actions Over Recovered Memory Therapy, Psychiatric Times. Vol. 16 No. 11, November 1, 1999

In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of “past lives”, [professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Chief of psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Dr. Fred H. Frankel] notes that therapists can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can “remember” their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as in regression or in [alien] abductee hypnosis. “These people are not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,” Frankel says. “They cannot distinguish their confabulations from their experiences.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1996

So – to start at the beginning: you turned yourself in for psychiatric treatment?

Right. I had suffered from depression for years. It was voluntary admission.

Was this on the recommendation of anybody?

The therapist I was seeing at the time. She was getting to know this doctor in Philadelphia – whose pseudonym I use as “Stratford” – because I have to be clear that I have a gag order through the court that prohibits me from saying who did it and where.

Because ultimately you won a settlement, but that gag order was a condition of the settlement…

Correct. They wanted to keep me from writing or talking about it completely, but I waited and got the permission to do what we’re doing right now.

So you’ve written a book, but it’s told with pseudonyms?

Everyone but me. That’s also for the privacy of certain individuals. The book is supported by volumes of hospital records, doctors’ notes, nurses’ notes, my personal journal that I kept at the time, and legal documents through litigation, through the discovery process. I was able to obtain all that information.

You are able to say which hospital it was, right?

I can not say that, however it’s easily accessible through the internet… like everything else is…

When you turned yourself over [for treatment], you must have signed away a certain degree of your freedom. To what degree was that? To what degree were you an autonomous individual, and to what degree were you held by hospital rules?

I learned, I would say, within six hours of the severity of what I had done. I would bet within the first two hours I said, Wait. What am I doing? I don’t want to be here. I made that clear to nursing staff, and they told me that I was on a seventy-two hour hold, that I had to stay. What they failed to tell me is that I could have gone against medical advice. I thought I had to stay, and it snow-balled from there.

To the point in which you felt you were not allowed to leave?

Well, I believed that when I was told I had to stay that first day, while the reality was that I could have left against medical advice, but I did not have that information. So I thought, yes, I had to stay.

But beyond that point, what was your situation in whether you wanted to stay or go?

Once I met the doctor, I believed he was very benevolent, very kind. I very quickly thought, maybe he can help me get through this depression. I rather quickly allied myself with him and… treatment began.

How long did it take him to determine that you had Multiple Personality Disorder?

I think that he had already decided that before he had ever met me, quite frankly. He had what I would loosely call an agenda, in that he had his beliefs of why women become depressed. He believes it is because they are repressing memories of sexual abuse. He did not disclose any of that – his expertise, if you will – to me.

His expertise in Multiple Personality Disorder?

Right. He was considered an expert. He actually stated that in his deposition: that others considered him an expert before he himself did. He was not a garden variety psychiatrist. He was a colleague of Bennett Braun, Colin Ross, Cornelia Wilbur, who is deceased and was the psychiatrist for “Sybil”. He used to meet with them, and they devised a way to “help” women –

Based on a diagnostic criteria that consisted almost entirely of depression and its surrounding symptoms?

It was broader than that. They basically determined that a lot of symptoms women were having – largely women – [were indicative of MPD]: inability to hold a job, etc. I think looking into the history would be better than me trying to recall it off the top of my head.

How long was the process of history gathering and interviewing before Multiple Personality Disorder was concluded?

Not long at all. There was a history taken, and that was in the admission process. However, I believe, and I do know that there were things like having a history of depression in my family were disregarded. That should have been a red flag. He just pushed that aside and went in what direction he wanted to go in.

Well, genetic histories of depression seems to be an inconvenient fact for the entire [Ritual Abuse] movement. That’s probably part of the reason they’ve developed a story of multi-generational Satanic Ritual Abuse within family lines, illuminati bloodlines, etc. How far did that go with you? Did your doctor develop a detailed story of your background based on conspiracy theory? Or was it kind of a general idea that you were somehow abused –

You’re talking about Satanic Ritual Abuse? Well, we need to back up a bit. For me it started with MPD. That went on at least a year or so before any Satanic Ritual Abuse started to be focused on.

How many years were you in?

I had 100% insurance coverage, so I was in 2 years straight. Then, I was in and out on public funding, so I was in the hospital for a total of 1,040 days – which was over a 6 and ½ year period of time.

Okay. Sorry, go ahead and describe the evolution from MPD to Satanic Ritual Abuse…

That’s where it went: coerced “memories” of what happened. I think this doctor had an insatiable appetite for detail. For example, what happened during cult meetings? How did they abuse you? The more detail he got, the more he wanted.

I was reading some of your work today on the S.M.A.R.T. conference. Most people, in my experience, that claim to be satanically abused, they are pretty high up in the [cult] hierarchy. For example, they are priestesses, they were abused by high-level government officials. You don’t ordinarily find SRA people who are just, you know, average people who go to meetings and go home.

(Laughs) That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.

But had you noticed that? I don’t know how a group exists with that many high priestesses and that sort of thing.

I never got into Illuminati – I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I was sequestered a lot. I think once I got into Group Therapy and Art Therapy specifically with other women who were claiming to have multiple personalities and Satanic Ritual Abuse, things expanded quite quickly by hearing their stories [causing me to think], maybe these things happened to me.

I imagine that with the environment you were in, with the medical authorities around you, your own submission to their expertise, as well as your own acknowledgment that you were under mental distress and needed their help – I believe this would all make it easy for them to convince you that you were repressing memories from yourself…

Not only that, Doug, I think a large part of it was drugs — for example, getting me addicted to tranquilizers. It is indoctrination. If you look at any, say, religious cult – I read the work of Robert Jay Lifton and was appalled at the parallels [between Lifton's criteria for thought reform (indoctrination), and what was taking place in therapy]. For example, having a charismatic leader: that would be the psychiatrist. A controlled environment: I was told when to eat, when to sleep, when to shower. The heat was controlled in the room. It would get hot and cold, hot and cold, hot and cold. Information from the outside by TV, mail, magazines, newspapers hardly existed at all. If there were magazines, they were so outdated. If there was a TV show that seemed to relate to the subject, we were not allowed to view it. Sleep medication, sleeping pills, were given out freely, and I also experienced sleep deprivation. There were sedatives, sleepers, truth serum drugs. Physical restraints: four-point leather restraints, or more, to a bed for – could be – 2 hours to 15 hours at a time, at which point I would also be injected with more medication.

And there is what I would call coerced confessions of childhood sexual abuse, Satanic Ritual Abuse. Separation from family and friends… I can go on, but those are the largest things. I lost my job… I lost my apartment… I lost everything…

And they were utilizing sodium amytal during the interviews?

It was probably only a couple months into it, we were using sodium amytal interviews. Are you familiar with those?

Yes, I’m familiar with the experiments done in attempts to develop a Truth Serum during the early years of the Cold War which made it apparent by – when were you in, the late eighties?

’86 through ’92, yeah.

So it was well documented by then how unreliable so-called memories surfaced through a sodium amytal interview really were. It’s difficult for me in this case to determine how deep the actual belief of the doctors were in this program. To what level was it just incompetence, and to what level is it…

Well, you’re raising a good point. I think it’s what made doctors like mine dangerous, if you will. They did fully believe in what they were doing. That made them “incompetent” because they were not listening to their governing bodies – the APA, AMA, etc. – when [those governing bodies] started to, years later, question the techniques. [The doctors] chose to disregard not only those facts, but in my case they disregarded how I was physically and emotionally going down-hill [after treatment began].

I went to that S.M.A.R.T. conference just this past August. This is well past the prime of the Satanic Panic and the MPD movement. So it had a lot of people who got into this during the peak in the ‘80s to early ‘90s, and I think at that point they may have truly believed in it, but since then, they’ve had a lot of difficulty believing it, and they have to work to maintain this belief. This is where I lose sympathy for them. At their talks during the conference there were some very nearly candid confessions of how they feel it is a matter of choice as to whether they maintain this fiction or not. For example, there was a woman there – goes by the name of Dejoly LaBrier – she said that while she was going through therapy she “had to trust what other people were telling me, whether I believed it at the time or not.” There was a criminologist by the name of Hal Pepinsky – a very nice guy, but a purveyor of this rubbish – he seems to struggle with all this now, and he said: “You need at least another human being to affirm your reality and bring it to consciousness, but that’s your reality.”

It seemed to me, by what I was hearing, that these people were trying to work through this idea that reality is strictly a matter of personal choice. They seem to be so taken with this sense of identity [as SRA advocates and survivors] that nothing you tell them now can possibly change their minds about it.

I agree. And the important word in that to me is: identity. Their whole identity is wrapped around them being a survivor of Satanic Ritual Abuse, or that they’re “multiples”, even though MPD is now called DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder]. In my view, all they’ve done is changed from going through the front door to going through the back door. While they used to say, you have too many personalities, now they say, you have a failure to be one.

Right. I think the leading proponent of DID today is Richard Kluft, and when I look through his material, he takes this moderate tone, essentially saying that obviously some of these stories of Satanic Ritual Abuse are over-the-top and probably not true. But there is something there, he’s saying. He doesn’t indicate any way in which we can distinguish a true recovered memory from confabulation, and if you don’t have that, the technique isn’t good for anything, as far as I’m concerned. Especially when you still have people taking blame for abuse that may never have happened.

If you look into confabulation, it’s why you get – like why in my case – [Recovered Memory Therapy] was able to work. It’s how I was convinced and coerced into believing in abuse that never happened… wasn’t true.

The lies were sprinkled with truths. For example: I was abused by an uncle. Okay, the uncle exists, but I can produce records from the United States Armed Forces that put him in another country during the time at which I was saying he’d abused me. That’s the kind of thing that had happened repeatedly. [The partial truth] made it more difficult to say, this didn’t happen, this is so bizarre. If you sprinkle facts in the fiction… that’s the way it works.

Yes. Maybe I’m misinterpreting Kluft, but it seems to me that if it sounds plausible enough, it works for him.

It goes back to a couple of things. You can’t really determine whether anybody really was abused or not. I’ve had people say, tell me if I’ve been abused. I can’t! I can’t do that to anyone. I can’t tell you that – whether your memories are true or not – what I can tell you is what some red flags are, where you might want to ask some questions.

Remember, all these big [MPD/DID] theorists have been sued. So they’ve dampened down their opinions… in my view.

How deeply did you believe the memories they were creating in you at any given point?

I actually wrote in a journal [at the time] that I believed 99.99%. But I did hold out for that .01%, and that’s the small hair-line that pulled me out of it. I wanted to make sure that in my own mind and in reality that if any “abuse” occurred, I wanted no question in my mind, and I was not going to accuse anybody unless I could prove it emphatically. And that’s why I held out that small percentage. That’s the part that saved me, if you will.

So you began looking for corroborative evidence?

Oh yeah. The doctor and I even took a trip to Fort Dix, New Jersey. An Army base, I think it is, where he wanted me to show him where this abuse and prostitution had taken place. It was a town I really didn’t know, and I couldn’t come up with anything. The event was never spoken of again, and it was the only time corroboration was attempted.

You have to understand, Doug, too, that there were so many instances where I would say – particularly under sodium amytal – this is not true, this didn’t happen, I’m making this up. It’s sprinkled all throughout the medical records throughout those 6 and ½ years. I would say it to a therapist, I would say it to a nurse, and no one ever followed up on that. No one. The doctor disregarded it every time I said it.

There is one thing about this [recovered memory] “therapy”: there is nothing you say or question that they don’t have an answer for. If you say, I don’t believe this ever happened, they say, that’s because another personality has it, you don’t have access to it. There was always an out, which at the time I didn’t realize.

So did you feel that you were encouraged to develop new personalities to access memories that were repressed?

Oh yeah. There were times I would say something and he’d ask, who am I talking to? He wanted the name of a personality. If I said Jeanette, that wasn’t good enough. And then there were times when a personality might split off into another one, and then split off into another one. When I wouldn’t remember what personality I was supposed to be half the time – that’s because it split off. They had an answer for everything.

How many personalities did you end up with?

That’s something I couldn’t even tell you, really. It’s not something – it’s in records he kept, I could have cared less.

You sent me transcripts from a session wherein you were clearly saying, this is bullshit.

I have 15 audio tapes of sodium amytal interviews.

You acquired those during the legal process?

Right… I did.

How did you eventually disentangle yourself from all this?

I was an elite athlete when I was in college. I was a fencer, and a high level one at that. During treatment I had gained a lot of weight and couldn’t do anything. Quite literally. I would go to therapy and take prescribed drugs, and he went away for vacation, as all good psychiatrists do, in August. While he was gone I decided that while I didn’t have any control over my mind, I did have control over my body and what I eat. I made a promise to myself that I would exercise for half an hour every day. Doing that – and I did it – I remember that I would walk to the store thinking, okay that’s about half an hour, and I would decide I’d jog it for a bit, and that would be about 30 seconds. I’d have to walk the rest of the way. I used to able to fence for hours and hours and days on end during a major competition. So that’s how much I’d lost. The more I exercised, the more I didn’t need medication to calm down. I started losing weight, and my mind started to clear. Difficult as I remember that time being, forcing myself to go out in sub-zero weather, jog in the snow through the streets of Philadelphia, It was worth it. I kept doing it, and doing it. I told him, and he said it was just another personality that probably wouldn’t last long.

He was wrong.

And ultimately you decided to leave his care?

That didn’t happen till at least a year later. When I started exercising I gave myself a year. Having been so out-of-shape, and so drug-addicted, I figured it would take me at least a year to get my body where it needed to be, and it didn’t really take as long. I still remember – I think it was the Summer of ’91 or ’92 – I was an outpatient, and I was in his office, and I said, look, this uncle I told you had abused me wasn’t even in the United States at that time. That couldn’t have happened. To this day, Doug, he still has not responded. He totally ignored me. And I recalled thinking, Oh my God, he doesn’t believe what I can prove to be true! Why? Why is it that he can remember all these new memories, but something I am telling him absolutely is true, he doesn’t believe me? That’s when I think things turned for me, when I started thinking there was something real wrong here.

Do you have your own idea as to why he cannot accept that?

It didn’t fit in with his theory.

Did you ever recover any memories that were of any value at all?

No.

I mean, I even have – I’m so happy that I have all of these medical records, personal journals, so that I can reconstruct what really happened. It’s not just my recall. For example, when my family and I started to get back together, I would start visiting, I saw them during my father’s birthday, and we had fun. Then I came back to the hospital, told the nurses about it, and in his notes he would say, is amnesiac about father’s birthday.

And that is in my book. That’s how I present the story in the book, in narrative form, my recollections. I started writing this way back in the mid-nineties when I first got out of therapy, so things were still fresh in my mind. I use the excerpts [from my journals] to show, this is what was going in on my life, and this is what was being written about me [in the doctor’s records]. [The doctor] had no regard for reality. Even if one of the nurses would disagree with him, or say that there was no evidence of dissociation, he would assert just the opposite on the very same day.

When will we be able to buy a copy of your book?

When a publisher decides to publish it. I put it back on the market. I would say that for a good 10 years it was politically incorrect. I got some of the best rejection letters saying, good story, great writing, can’t publish it. I used them for inspiration.

Way back when I was trying to find [legal] representation [to bring a claim against the doctor], members of the feminist movement were saying, you’re trying to silence our voices, we’ve been abused. That was not what was happening at all, but it wasn’t understood at the time. I think now people in the general public are considerably more educated. And with the increase in the popularity in memoirs, now may be the time.

You had trouble finding legal representation?

That’s in the book as well: that whole struggle, and how I would go from law firm to law firm and it seemed like the more money they had, the more reluctant they were to get involved. It was still very controversial at that time. If they said, well, there may be evidence that you have this [MPD], I would stand up, demand my records back, and move on to the next person.

I ended up with Richard Shapiro in Philadelphia who was a one-man firm with moral values, who saw this as a horrific thing that happened to me, and was hell-bent on helping me right along.

You have written a few essays for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, have you experienced any angry backlash from those who still maintain identities as survivors of Satanic Ritual Abuse?

None. Absolutely none. And that could be because they don’t have access to me personally. You’d have to ask the foundation if they’ve heard anything. If so, nothing was forwarded to me. I don’t know if it’s just because they haven’t been able to locate me. I find it a curious question.

Just wait until your book is published. For a group of so-called “victims”, they are a very mean-spirited and victimizing lot. [1]

Oh, I know. That’s another book I’m writing: there’s a whole underground society of people who believe that they have multiple personalities that has really dipped off the radar. I have done extensive research on these people and what they believe.

I think that the controversy is a good thing. Let’s get it out in the open. Let’s talk about it.

At this point, you have to understand that these women – and the vast majority of these [MPD cases] are women – they’ve been indoctrinated into this lifestyle, at this point, for a good 20 years. It’s their identity. That’s how they see themselves. I think that’s very difficult to give up. What do you have when you take that away?

I think that’s what I witnessed them trying to work through at that conference I went to.

I think you were. But say these women say, okay, my therapist is making me believe this, this didn’t really happen…? Well, what are they left with? They’re left with years of figuring out what the heck happened. They are going to lose their entire support system, which consists of other women who believe they have MPD. They are going to lose the attention of a devoted therapist.

It leaves a big hole in their lives. And then – like me – you have to figure out, now what do I do? How do I get my life back together? How do I get my life back?

Beyond that have you suffered any long-term effects from your psychiatric abuse?

Yeah. I still have PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome] from it. Sometimes it arises from the most innocuous thing. The one that hits me the most is my dog’s leather collar. If I smell that, I remember being strapped to a bed. I think there are health issues related to having been under a severe amount of stress. Unrelenting stress for over 6 ½ years while in therapy. Then I had to go underground in order to get away from him. So then there was that stress. I came out to Colorado and had to consider, okay, now what do I do? I had to get back on my feet. So after 6 ½ years of stress in therapy, there was an equal amount of stress 6 years later in trying to get my life back together.

Sounds like you’re doing well now, and I can’t wait for the book to come out.

Thank you. I’m anxious for it to come out, and to get the word out there. There are a lot of families, a lot of people, who have gone through this, and they have nothing to read – nothing to identify with – they have nothing to hold in their hand and say, see, this is what happened to my family. This is why, you know, my husband is in jail. This is why I’ve been saying there is something wrong with my sister. They have nothing.

Thank you very much for chatting with me…

• If you or somebody you are close to has had a similar experience to that of Jeanette Bartha regarding MPD, false memories, or psychiatric abuse, please contact Douglas Mesner at memory.abuse@gmail.com.

1. It seems that most everybody who has questioned the legitimacy of “recovered memories” has felt the wrath of the of those whose victim identities are threatened by the idea that hypnotically extracted scenarios might be confabulatory creations rather than inerrant recall. Susan Clancy was compelled to re-focus her own research, which had been exploring the creation of false memories in subjects claiming past sexual abuse, to alien abduction memories created in the same way, because of a frightful deluge of hate-mail and threats the former had brought upon her. Following the publication of my own S.M.A.R.T Conference report on Examiner.com, editors there were shaken by a number of apparently unbalanced and threatening phone calls. One Examiner editor went so far as to call me and suggest that I might be concerned for my own personal safety. Unfortunately, due to unrelenting phone calls, particularly from S.M.A.R.T. conference organizer, Neil Brick (who claims to be a former mind controlled Masonic/CIA assassin!), Examiner pulled the article entirely from their site, and even changed my beat from that of ‘Boston Skepticism Examiner’ to that of ‘Boston Underground Examiner’ in hopes that S.M.A.R.T. would lose track of me. No such luck. Within 24 hours of being re-assigned – and after nearly a month of inactivity – the first angry complaint against my even being on Examiner at all was registered, even though nothing posted had anything to do with Ritual Abuse. The ill-advised decision to pull my article did nothing to quell the uproar, and it only gave Neil Brick the opportunity to make the false claim that the article had been pulled for “defamation”.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1904334,00.html?iid=digg_share

This is all very interesting to me because I ride an electric bike and it’s made in China.

Giant Lite with Extracycle extension

I originally built this bike as a camera car. I was shooting the Marathon de Medoc in Bordeaux and wanted to shoot the host of my show in amongst the marathon runners. This is strictly forbidden for motor vehicles but my production manager talked the race organizers into allowing a bicycle on the course. So I built this Giant electric with an Xtracycle back end. The bike carried a rider, myself and all of our camera and sound gear for the whole marathon, just under 400 pounds or 200kg. I was sold. When i returned home with the bike it pretty much replaced my car and keep in mind that I live in Los Angeles. My Giant with two batteries has a range of about 60miles and a top (assisted) speed of about 28mph. It can easily carry two people and a weeks worth of groceries. The bike all in cost me around 2,500 USD. Of course the bike uses a bit of generated energy but according to what I’ve read (sorry no footnotes) it works out to over 800 mpg. If you are really industrious you could invest another $600 in a rooftop solar kit and your bike would be completely off the grid.

I find it kind of astounding that the electric bike or electric scooters haven’t become popular in North America. I think it’s partially due to the fact that electric vehicles are not considered to be a practical form of transportation here. An affordable electric car is definitely a ways off (unless you have 90k burning a hole in your pocket to buy a Tesla Roadster…drool). But here’s the thing, electric bike technology is totally capable of providing us with low cost zero emission transport right now. Especially for those of us who live in warmer climates. The only thing that’s really holding back the manufactures of e-bikes are the laws governing the bikes themselves. Most countries require that the top speed of any assisted bicycle be around 17-19mph. I think that’s ridiculous considering the fact that anyone in reasonably good shape can pedal a normal road bike a lot faster than that. Now, I’m not suggesting that legislation should allow unlicensed e-bikes an unlimited top speed, but something closer to 30 mph would be more reasonable and way more practical. That’s about as fast as your average rider would want to go on a bike anyway and is a totally reasonable speed for urban transport. Fortunately there are ways around these limitations and that’s what this article is about. Hacking the electric bike!

Disclaimer:

O.K. This is the part where I need to cover my ass. During the course of this article I may be giving you advice that would allow you to make or build your e-bike in such a way that it may go faster than your local laws allow. If you do this and have some kind of horrifying accident where you are dismembered, maimed or in anyway injured. Don’t come crying to me. Also if you are not completely comfortable on a normal bicycle, I would not recommend going this route first. Buy a nice slow stock e bike and ride it until you’re really ready to speed things up a bit.

The important thing to understand is that any bike can be made electric and it’s not a difficult process if you are using a ready made kit. I would argue that an e-bike that you construct for yourself will not only be a far superior ride in terms of stability and speed, but way cooler. Off the rack e-bikes are dork-mobiles for the most part, and those that aren’t are far too expensive for the level of performance they deliver.

O.K. Step one HACKING THE GIANT LITE

The Giant Lite was by far the best e bike built in it’s time. It still stands up pretty well next to what’s out there right now. Granted the motor at 350 watts is a bit underpowered but on the whole it’s one of the lightest and most efficient off the rack bikes that has ever been made. You can still find new ones on line and they usually about USD $1000. Which is a STEAL compared to other off the rack e-bikes bike out their today.

If you’re going to try a mod like mine try to find a step through model. The step through makes more sense if your going to extend the back end and make it a two seater. Throwing your leg over the back of a bike that’s 7 feet long isn’t so easy. Also I think the step through model is easier to find.

If you are truly in need of step by step advice on how to covert a Giant Lite to a faster viable urban transporter then send me an email and I’ll send you detailed instructions. I’m not going to post them here. I’ve had great success with this bike but I think there are better and cheaper alternatives that have developed since I built it. There are some links to said alternatives at the end of this article.

Batteries:

The Giant uses NiMh batteries and like all rechargeables, they have a finite life-span. The good news is they are easy and inexpensive to refurbish. The even better news is that when you refurbish your batteries you can buy new ones that have a higher storage capacity and will give you more range. The process of upgrading your batteries is called re-celling them. You can buy the kits on-line. The original battery packs for the Giant are around $400. The re-cell kits are half that price.

For any other kit avoid old school led acid batteries. They are cheap, but can’t be recycled and have a very poor power to weight ratio. There is a good on-line distributor for battery tech:

http://www.batteryspace.com/?SSAID=297581

I’m currently investigating LifePO4 batteries as the power source for my next bike. Lithium seems to be the way to go now.

Currently I think the best and also the easiest option is to go with a high output hub motor combined with some advanced battery technology. Just make sure you match the battery voltage to the motor your are powering. Most e-bike systems are either 24 or 36 volt technology. Hub motors can be configured to drive either the front or rear wheel and can be fitted to pretty much any standard bike.

http://www.falconev.com/E-Bikes.html

http://www.wildernessenergy.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=1

For an in-depth DIY concept and overview

http://www.electricycle.com/ebike2.htm

To be fair, what Cantor exposed for us does, on first blush, seem to make no sense, at best, and be contradictory, at worst. In this article we’re going to look at just a small sliver and, in that, find something bigger than the universe in which we live.

We’ll be using something you first saw in elementary school: the number line. Here’s one i’m referencing from the Wikimedia Commons:

For the moment, this has more information than we need to bother ourselves with, so just pay attention to the numbers -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3. In math-ese, these are examples of what are frequently called the integers – but you may have also heard “whole numbers”. So how many of these integers can we imagine? Well, yes, an ‘infinite’ amount of them.¹ The better questions are things like How big is this infinity? and Can this infinity be compared to the infinity of some other group of infinite stuff?

To improve the former ‘better’ question, we’ll start using a funky word for ’size’ which is the math-ese word “cardinality”; so we could more formally phrase the former² as What is the cardinality of this infinity? Now, to answer the latter ‘better’ question, and thereby the former, first we need to round up some other groups of infinite stuff. To start to do this, we’ll define a group of numbers that you grew up with knowing as “fractions”; in math-ese, we call these “rationals”. All of the numbers in this group are a number gotten by dividing any integer by any other integer that is not 0.

Cantor came up with an ingenious way to lay out all fractions in a 2 dimensional matrix such that for each integer, there is one listed fraction. Because we can do this “one to one” pairing³ between the integers and the rationals, this means that the integers and the rationals have the same cardinality, or size. This will be where we find the first bump in the weird world of the sizes of infinities, because the astute reader will notice that all of the integers are included in this list of rationals (2/1 = 2, 12/4 = 3, etc.) — and compounding that: more than once (6/3 = 12/6 = 5200/2600 = … = 2) — and yet the infinity which captures the rationals is the same size as the infinity which captures the integers.

While we casually refer to an infinity of this size as “countably infinite”, Cantor decided to start labelling the cardinality of different infinites using the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph — — and he labelled the cardinality of the infinity which captures the integers, and the rationals, as – spoken as “aleph null”. The grand scheme being that subsequently bigger sizes of infinity would have an increasing subscript — so the next biggest infinity would be labelled as (”aleph one”) and so forth.

Now let’s talk about the “real numbers”; the real numbers can be roughly thought of as any number which can be written as a decimal representation (like 3.500…)⁴. How big is the set of real numbers? Well, if just the integers are infinite, then the real numbers (which contain all of the integers, and rationals, and more) must also be infinite; but how infinite? It turns out that there is no way to do our ‘one-to-one’ trick from the integers to the reals. Cantor (again) presented a robust proof of this which is known as “Cantor’s diagonal argument” – which ultimately means that the real numbers must be of a greater infinity than the integers, et al.
This size of infinity is often referred to as “uncountably infinite”; Cantor, who was unsure whether there was some size of infinity that existed between the infinity of the integers and the infinity of the reals, could not label this infinity and so adopted a convention utilizing the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet (’beth’) and called this infinity (”beth one”).
Not only is it still unknown whether (a problem which is known as the “Continuum hypothesis”), it appears logically evident that we can never prove it nor disprove it.⁵

If you’ve become somewhat settled with the idea that the rationals, which contain all of the integers, and the integers themselves are groups of the same size infinity, then it shouldn’t be too much of a stunner to learn that the size of infinity of the group of all real numbers is actually the same size of infinity of a group for any continuous range of real numbers. What i mean by ‘continuous range’ is any continuous flow of real numbers between two points; using the number line above as reference, we can consider the group of every real number between 0 and 1 to be a continuous range [between 0 and 1]. Since this equivalence of infinity size is true for all continuous ranges of real numbers, we could then grab a continuous range within that 0-1 range and it, too, would be a group of the same size infinity as all of the real numbers.
This doesn’t translate at all well to what we experience in our physical world and so is often difficult to digest. For example, it would be pure Alice-world were you to operate a power shovel; dig your shovel into the ground and remove a basket full of dirt; rotate and dump that dirt into a pile; dig your shovel into just the center of the pile removing that; find that even though some of the pile is still on the ground, your basket is completely full again.

Ok. So if the real numbers are ‘bigger’ than the rationals (which contain the integers) what else is that stuff hanging out in the real numbers – that stuff which is so numerous as to make the real numbers uncountable? This is the stuff which we call the ‘irrationals’; the irrationals can be thought of as roughly being composed of ‘algebraic’ numbers and ‘transcendental’ numbers. It turns out that our ‘one-to-one’ tool works with the algebraic numbers and not with the transcendental numbers – so here is our real stuff.

Now that we’ve finally arrived at our station, what are transcendentals? Well, we know what some of them are – there are the famous ones shown on the above number line image, like , and – but, truth be told, it can be quite hard to prove that a given number is transcendental and only a small zoo exists. I suppose you could think of them sort of as the ‘dark matter’ of the real numbers.

As an aside, when was finally proven to be irrational in 1882, it sounded the official death knell for a problem more than 2,000 years old called, ‘Squaring the Circle’. The earliest attempts to solve this was first described by the famously named Plutarch 500 years after it was done by Anaxagoras (who was cooling his heels in jail for one thing or another⁶ ). It was a welcome toll as squaring the circle had become such the past-time of math-crackpots that the Paris Academy (Académie des Sciences) had to take an official stand in 1775 and declare that none of its officials would be allowed to review papers claiming to address the solution of this (this, and two other favourites of the time: the trisection of the angle and the duplication of the cube).⁷

We can now finish here with pondering what all of this means when we talk about an “infinite” universe. In what we experience in the physical world and in terms of reality, the concept of an uncountable infinity definitely doesn’t correspond to our idea of physical space as we drill down. From every indication, there is indeed a smallest possible unit of physical space (quantum foam, for example, bumps down to an eensy weensy length of space referred to as the “Planck length“); since there is a smallest definable unit, and if we assume that the universe does expand out “forever”, we can pull out our “one-to-one” tool and see that the group of every smallest definable unit of physical space within the existing universe is countably infinite – its cardinality is .

Rephrased more loose and fast: what this means, in a final twist a weirdness, is that on our above number line the group which contains the continuous range of real numbers between only 0 and 1 has a greater cardinality than the group which is the entire physical space of the universe.

1. A sloppy quick proof would be to pick the largest possible integer you can think of; now just add 1 to it and you have one even bigger. Repeat endlessly.
2. mmmm, consonance
3. math-ese: ‘mapping’
4. where, technically, there are an infinite number of digits after the decimal point; it could be an infinite number of 0s, in which case 3.00… would represent the same item as the integer ‘3′
5. This statement is too general, there are specifications which the reader can discover reading up on the CH…
6. where the ‘one thing or another’ appears to have been that he attempted to explain to people that the Sun was not a deity but rather some physical entity
7. “L’Académie prend en 1775 la resolution de ne plus examiner aucune solution des Problémes de la duplication du cube, de la trifection de l’angle, & de la quadrature du cercle…” — The last entry on page 2 in Volume 9 of “Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences”, published 1786, freely available here (archive.org rocks)

The idea of the cone is to give an easy visualization as to whether two people, who sit at the base of their own cones, are able to exchange information at any given time. While this is technically a depiction of an evolution of a 4-dimensional surface, it might be more helpful if you think of the cone as a circle on the surface of the earth, which radiates outward from you evenly with time – like a rock dropped in a pond. As i sit here in San Francisco, starting at any given instant the radius of my light cone grows with time; in under 2 milliseconds, it has grown to cover Los Angeles; less than 10 milliseconds to encompass Mexico City; under 13 milliseconds to Washington D.C; below 22 milliseconds and there’s Reykjavik; after 30 milliseconds and Paris is part of the union; before 45 milliseconds it’s taken Mumbai…

If i should be lucky enough that a person in one of those locales is looking to exchange information with me, then our light cones need only grow for half the time until they meet — ~in the middle, per se. Should my friend’s cone not intersect my cone until 2 seconds from now, there’s no way i can know anything about my friend for another 2 seconds. Adding another turn to the situation, the information which i’ll hear in 2 seconds is actually ’stale’ information. In much the same way, but on a harshly smaller scale, that our telescopes which spill forth pastorals while trained to night sky reveal not what is, but rather what was: so too will the information received from my friend not represent what is, but what was.

While we still find ourselves inhabiting just planet Earth, the impact of our separated light cones pales in comparison to the impact of our separated time zones, separated continents, separated hemispheres and slow notification systems; the meaningful events of one person’s day occurring while the other distantly wrestles through fitful sleep serves to sever. It’s only when we’ve gone far off-world that our light cones will define our existence; more than 1.2 seconds to the moon, 180 to more than 1330 seconds for Mars, and on and on.

Now or later, we find in either case when we sit in muted silence looking out on to depthless monochrome skies, midst that lack of information and contact, we begin to infer and make up data where none now exists and we’re left only to imagine the world without you.

1. When discussing what governs our ability to exchange information, i’m blissfully ignoring “spooky action at a distance” without qualm until we have become such masters of our domain that we can employ this in our daily lives

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/ 0 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…