Back before Christmas, I read an article by Richard Noll, psychologist and scholar [one of those…], in the Psychiatric Times and flagged it for a later blog. But when I went back, it wasn’t there. How come? How come indeed! The Psychiatric Times unpublished it for reasons that sound pretty flimsy – liability issues they claimed. Gary Greenberg [Book of Woe] has the whole story [Mistakes were made, Part 2]. So what was that all about?
You may remember that at the end of the 1980s, about the time that my wife was crushing on him, the country was riveted by accounts of Satanic Ritual Abuse. In a word, there was a sudden outbreak of people, mostly children, claiming to have been forced by Satanic cults to witness and/or participate in heinous acts, like cutting out babies’ hearts and eating them, often in day care centers. The stories were disturbing and implausible, but they could not be refuted, because it is impossible to prove a negative. They were perfect fodder for a moral panic, and that is indeed what happened. The results included the jailing of over 100 day care providers [some of whom remain imprisoned], the sundering of some communities, and children unalterably confused about what had happened [or not happened] to them…
… Just 25 years ago, American psychiatry was infected by a psychic pandemic that originated outside the profession. In 1983 it broke out of a reservoir of religious, legal, psychotherapeutic, and mass media mixing bowls. Children in US day care centers and adults in psychotherapy told 2 distinct versions of their malady. By 1988 some elite members of the American Psychiatric Association [APA] were making it worse. They had become its vectors. Then other elite psychiatrists stepped in to quarantine the profession. Eventually, just like the last wave of the influenza pandemic, after 1994 it ended as suddenly and incomprehensibly as it had started.As our medical schools and graduate programs fill with students who were born after 1989, we meet young mental health professionals-in-training who have no knowledge or living memory of the Satanic ritual abuse [SRA] moral panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. But perhaps they should. Cautionary tales may prevent the recurrence of pyrogenic cultural fantasies and the devastating clinical mistakes they inspire. But who should tell this tale? To those of us who are old enough to have been there, that era already seems like a curious relic of the past, bracketed in our memory palaces behind a door we are loathe to open again.
In the 1980s thousands of patients insisted that they were recovering childhood memories of physical and sexual abuse during Satanic cult rituals. In addition to the red or black robes of the abusers and other paraphernalia of devil worship familiar to any horror film devotee, these memories often included the ritual sacrificial murder of children, blood-drinking, cannibalism, bestiality, and incest. Famous believers in SRA ranged from Gloria Steinem to Pat Robertson. A prominent historian of religion has argued that “the emergence of SRA motifs” served as “a kind of feminist and evangelical Christian pornography.”
Clinicians who then believed in the factual basis of the claims [and there were many] have probably spent the last 30 years asking themselves, “How could I have been so …?” [fill in the blank]. Or perhaps they are still saying to themselves, as the authors of one book suggest in their title, Mistakes Were Made [But Not By Me]…
Had I written about it right off, I would’ve talked about some of those patients I saw back then in consultation, or how one of the candidates in our analytic institute became a national figure trying to debunk this wave of hysteria that swept through the mental health community, or maybe how it all fit in the craziness of that period. But right now, that’s no longer the story. The story is why did the Psychiatric Times unpublish it?
Mickey,
Thank you for your kind words and for drawing attention to this rather curious situation.
As I made clear in the article, I thought perhaps enough time had passed and we could have a discussion/reassessment of this episode in the history of psychiatry. I was prompted to write it, in part, because of several discussions with younger (35 and below) clinicians and historians of psychiatry who had no knowledge of any of this. Many of us who lived through this episode found it so distasteful and horrifying that we ran from it. I certainly did. After being repeatedly accused of being a witch or a secret member of a satanic cult — by licensed mental health professionals, no less — I thought the best strategy was to stay as far away from this issue and these folks as possible.
My involvement was brief and surprising to me — I felt a bit like Peter Sellers in “Being There.” I had written a sharply critical letter to the editor of the journal Dissociation (not catalogued in PubMed, but available online through a website maintained by the University of Oregon) and was called by Frank Putnam some months afterwards to be part of a panel that would open the 1990 ISSMP&D conference in Chicago. That plenary session was the first public “official” pushback against the SRA circus. So I stumbled into a minor historical event (and got to meet Gloria Steinem too!).
As we all know, psychiatry is not immune from such things. I thought a discussion of that era might raise awareness among our young clinicians-in-training and innoculate them a bit against future infection.
One more point (for some young historian of psychiatry out there): One unexplored source of the satanic panic, although as an unintended consequence, was the groupthink of the DSM-III-R (1987) committee that radically changed the dissociative disorders section for that edition. MPD was viewed — explicitly — as a survival of the “Judeo-Christian possession syndrome.” That is quite a statement.
It seems that American psychiatry attempted to extend the jurisdictional boundaries of the profession to encompass magico-religious phenomena.. And as they found, when they bit into the supernatural, the supernatural bit them back. Hard.
Good one, Richard. I worked at a preschool when the McMartin school case was blaring wall to wall. Some of the parents grabbed their children like they had to rescue them from me at the end of the day. They were truly terrified. I knew it was ridiculous as soon as I heard it— urban pre-schools and daycare centers are kind of public. Parents can walk in any time of day, unannounced.
Harper’s Magazine had an article with a photo of the large picture window with no curtains of blinds that faced the busy street in front of the school. It included some transcripts of the interviews that were being done with the children. I could hardly believe that they were doing this at all. How could they, in good conscience, cherry pick with the determination they did to the degree that they could not see that they were asking the children leading questions, and that the children were trying to tell the interviewers what they were so blatantly and insistently wanting them to say? One child said that the teacher had taken the whole class into an airplane and turned her into a mouse. Your article suggests that Braun and others in this unholy mess they created it, believed that the teacher may have been able to do that.
I had no idea that this and DID were linked in their minds, and that this went on for years after it should have been apparent that these interviewers had no idea what they were doing, poisoned the well, and convinced children that they had been horribly abused in a manner they could not comprehend.
Had no idea that the woman who made the initial accusation was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was a raging alcoholic. Her story is tragic. Bennett Braun and his colleagues were literally in a 20th Century witch hunt, which was insane and hateful. This went on for seven years! How unjust that these purveyors of moral panic weren’t sued into skid row and stripped of his license to practice any kind of medicine.
Thank you for writing this story. It should not be forgotten, it should be taught in every 101 psychiatry and psychology course. Mass delusions and mob mentalities are not something that psychiatrists should be contributing to society. The way media amps sensational stories (fictions) up to eleventy and repeats the same stories over and over and over again, filling people with dread and terror of something that doesn’t exist is mortifying. Moral Panic commodified and it’s selling like hot cakes.
“When treating hypochondria, everything you do is placebo.”
I entered the mental health field in 1987, and I remember people in authority, seasoned clinicians, discussing satanic ritual abuse. I can remember their confidence in their own expertise and the need to “increase public awareness”. We were encouraged to screen all our clients and to take seriously anything we heard. I can remember being told about “characteristic signs” that a child was “ritually abused”. We were told that the problem was widespread and underreported, and advised to assume that the child would tend to under report the trauma, due to “shame”, so that, no matter how horrific the stories I heard;, the reality was likely far worse. It was considered unethical to not believe the story. Im sure these folks would be embarrassed to be reminded of their beliefs now..
I remember clinicians who believed in Multiple Personality Disorder too. Some are still practicing. They tended to have clusters of patients with Multiple Personality Disorder. .
One of the hallmarks of the disorder in every person with the diagnosis I personally worked with was their ability to not shift into other personalities around me, as long as I insisted Id only deal with the personality on their drivers license.
Id tell them to “save that topic for therapy”, and joke that Id have to charge them a co pay for every extra personality. I worked in residential treatment facilities, and despite hundreds of hours, and the stress “normal”residential living; the only time they could’nt control themselves was around the people who “believed” in their disorder. The enlightened ones. Faith is contagious.
We can draw obvious similarities between this Ritual Sexual Abuse episode, and the Salem Witch trials, and the McCarthy trials back in the 50’s, and many other similar episodes in history. But I suspect these are only very good examples of a phenomenon that is happening around us continuously somewhere in the culture.
A good example these days in my institution is “bullying” in schools. Might prove to be a million dollar industry. Consider all the trainings and CEC’s, all the school consultations. all the therapy for the victims, and specialized treatment for bullies themselves. The more public awareness is drawn to the issue, the more harm it reveals. Consider the lawsuits making sure no school tolerates a bully.
There is always money in sacred trauma.
My word for this phenomenon is “narratives”, although “dialectics (as in Marsha Linehan) also applies, As does “memes”. or even “schema”.
Because I am a behaviorist; I tend to see “narratives” expressed in habits, (thoughts, feelings and actions). They are often predictable, or form patterns that are recognizable. This is my bias.
In narratives we usually find faith/denial. (If both are defined as “high degree of belief relative to a low degree of evidence”). There is an excessive need for validation in the absence of evidence, and to ignore the pesky contradictory evidence which will naturally creep into any hypothesis that is completely wrong. Everything TS Kuhn describes.
People who “doubt” or ask questions are met with defenses, are dismissed as unenlightened, or cynical, Or possibly suffering from Anosognosia.
I usually find myself alone in a field tipping some one’s sacred cow, and they call me cynical, and unenlightened, or crazy..
And perhaps they have a point. I think the “Witch Trial narrative” explains the persistent public belief in a chemical imbalance, or how “treatment” will prevent school shootings. Or that the dangerous people stop taking their meds.Or that the way to prevent future terrorist acts is to meekly give up our freedoms and remain terrified. Or that working people need not organize since labor unions are corrupt, (unlike the corporations, banks, political, legal, educational systems; exploiting us individually).. Or that treatment prevents suicides, eases grief or trauma, restores function, or prevents disability.Or that marriage counseling prevents divorce.
In each example the opposite might prove to be true, yet the belief persists as if immune to evidence,
I suspect “narratives” explains the unreliability of eyewitness accounts, the power of testimonials, and the “false memory” scandal in psychology a few years ago.
Re reading it just now, even I think it sounds crazy.
Whatever happened to catatonics?
Could it be that an individual’s reaction to a crisis, (when his environmental demands exceed his coping resources), is driven by more by his expectations, taught to him through culture, then by his genetics or even experience?
Consider that hypochondria and the placebo effect are, (like denial and faith) basically the same phenomenon;. Both result from the “power of suggestion” and have profound, (and genuine) effect on a person’s capacity, Both require faith/denial, and persist despite an inability to locate a physical explanation for the suffering or the relief.
What if most mental illness turns out to be “hypochondria”? How will we look back on the DSM 5 debates from that perspective?
Would this explain Whitakers epidemic? Or Irving Kirsch’s in The Emperor’s New Meds?
At the same time Satanic Ritual Abuse and PTSD symptoms for children who had been sexually abused were hot topics, there was always a woman in a group for sexual survivors who was told she was abused, but didn’t remember it. So when all the other women were talking about wanting to forget it, there was always that woman who talked at length about how she couldn’t remember it.
When going into an office to make a first appointment and fill out patient information, the mention of child sexual abuse could light up the person behind the desk— really big smile— some of them were really excited to “get one” sometimes.
Aside from the fact that psychiatrists and social scientists appear to have far lower standards for what constitutes a theory, has psychiatry always been dominated by domineering personalities who concern their observations to be fact?
Oh, and that woman was always, obviously an alcoholic. When she wasn’t talking about not remembering, she talked about being an alcoholic.