February 12, 2004
TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE:
Not in cult: Woman gets $7.5 million (ABDON M. PALLASCH, February 12, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)
This is not "The X-Files" or a supermarket tabloid story -- it is a real court case settled this week at the Daley Center.Rush North Shore Medical Center psychiatrist Bennett Braun and psychologist Roberta Sachs paid a northwest suburban woman $7.5 million to settle her claim that they brainwashed her into believing she was a member of a cult and needed to be sterilized so she would not bear any more babies to be sacrificed for the cult.
The truth is that Elizabeth Gale, 52, never had any children. She was just a woman with mild depression who surrendered herself to the care of Braun in 1986.
"At the time, Dr. Braun and his team were recognized national experts in multiple personality syndrome, recovery of repressed memories of childhood abuse, etc.," said Mary Ellen Busch, attorney for Rush, which denies the charges. "Over the last 10 years, the methods by which repressed memories were recovered have become very controversial."
Braun, Sachs and their practices have since been banished from Rush. The state suspended Braun's psychiatry license for three years, although he's now practicing in Montana. The state reprimanded Sachs, who is now in Maryland. Their attorneys could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Braun and Sachs "convinced Ms. Gale she had dozens of different personalities which had been created as a result of the horrific trauma they told her she suffered as a child," said her attorney, Todd Smith of Power Rogers & Smith. Smith takes over this summer as president of the American Trial Lawyers Association.
He said Braun and Sachs "convinced Ms. Gale she was a member of a worldwide secret ... satanic cult ... that Ms. Gale was a 'breeder' for the cult and that she had sacrificed her previous children, when she in fact had never had children," Smith said. Braun and Sachs "instructed Ms. Gale to undergo a tubal ligation to avoid further 'cult pregnancies.' She did so in May of 1991."
They persuaded Gale to abandon her family, change her name more than once, quit her job and sell all her possessions to stay a step ahead of the alleged "cult," Smith said.
Again we see that psychiatry--like its fellows: Darwinism and Marxism--is the real cult. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2004 10:44 AM
For once, the Scientologists have a point.
Posted by: Mike Earl at February 12, 2004 12:14 PMYou don't distinguish between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, do you?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 12, 2004 1:52 PMThere is a lot of quackery hiding under the umbrella of psychiatry. I would jettison the whole notion that psychotherapy has any scientific basis. At best it is a helpful form of human interaction practiced in common with confessors and bartenders. At worst it is a confidence scheme. When courts treat it as a science, we get daycare abuse witchhunts and false "recovered" memory trials where grown women put their fathers on trial based on false accusations of childhood abuse manufactured by feminist psycihatrist/inquisitors.
Of course, you realize OJ that if this guy had lived in Colonial Massachusetts, he would be a witch hunter.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 12, 2004 3:07 PMRe: "national experts in multiple personality syndrome, recovery of repressed memories of childhood abuse" -
Oh, that is a good one! "Expert" in a field where you basically just make up the rules as you go along, eh? Nice work if you can get it - too bad they mess up people's lives in the process.
Yes
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 12, 2004 5:22 PMSo you'll be aware both are quacks.
Posted by: oj at February 12, 2004 5:31 PM"Satanic Panic" strikes again...
Reminds me of that episode of South Park where the kids all accuse their parents of molesting them to get them arrested and taken away so they can play uninterrupted. While the parents are in jail for pedophilia, they're "treated" by a therapist/counselor/whatever who automatically BEEE-LEEEVES that any evidence for or protestations of innocence mean "You're obviously in denial." (The kicker was, they presented this therapist as being himself a closet pedophile who got off on "hearing their confessions" in great detail.) When the parents are returned "cured" at the end of the episode, they BEEE-LEEEEVE completely (false memories and all) that they DID molest their kids.
And will you lay off bashing Darwin every chance you get? It's making you look like you've got a one-track mind.
Posted by: Ken at February 12, 2004 6:01 PMRobert:
"I would jettison the whole notion that psychotherapy has any scientific basis."
Sorry, I can't resist this, but is that your shorthand for psychotherapy is not a body of knowledge resting on objectively testable theories and observations? Or are you just saying it is junk science?
Posted by: Peter B at February 12, 2004 8:36 PMThere's some kooky stuff in DSM-4, but that doesn't mean nothing is known.
There's equally kooky stuff in economics textbooks, but I bet few people would deny, in the whole, the value of economic theory. Orrin wouldn't.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 13, 2004 4:43 PMTo the contrary--I think economics is bunk for the most part, thus the criticisms of Greenspan.
Posted by: oj at February 13, 2004 6:35 PMI love it when you finally get a grasp on evolution, OJ.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at February 13, 2004 8:19 PMPeter,
To second Jeff and answer your questions, yes and yes. I would agree with Harry that there are scientifically reliable facets to psychology, and would say that the profession is on its safest ground when it focuses on the more testable areas of brain science, such as the neuro-chemical basis for depression.
The problem with treating psychotherapy, or the "talking cure" as a scientific discipline is that you are trying to impose an expectation of objective certainty and precision onto a problem space, human happiness, that is primarily subjective,immensely complex and uncertain. It is a situation ripe for exploitation by charlatans. The gloss of scientific respectability gives it an authority that is unearned and misplaced, and has tended to shield it from the kind of common sense layman's scrutiny that any other kooky, dangerous fad would be discredited by. Where the imprimatur of unquestioned authority takes hold, dangerous people gather and live off the ignorant. Junk science has this in common with junk religion.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 13, 2004 10:06 PMAnd I was going to lay-off sleep doctors.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at February 14, 2004 12:53 AMYou seem to like some economists well enough, Orrin.
The project of psychiatry faces are really difficult problem which, at it happens, wrecks Intelligent Design.
There is nothing rational or efficient about our psychological makeup, in which a few systems try to perform multiple and too often incompatible functions.
This is why pills have side effects.
Anyhow, it seems that one basic system has been tasked with four jobs, the Four F's (Fleeing, Feeding, Fighting, Making Love).
You cannot (susually) adjust just one F without affecting the other three.
Score another one for Darwin.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 14, 2004 4:22 PMHarry:
No one's needed to say anything since Adam Smith.
Intelligent Design need not be rational or efficient.
None of the F's matter much in the long run, but Faith in a higher cause matters hugely--score one for God.
Posted by: oj at February 14, 2004 5:30 PMNo one needed to say anything since Adam Smith in precisely the same way no one really needed to say anything since Darwin. They both baked their respective cakes, everything else since has been limited to icing.
Faith in a higher cause matters hugely for those to whom faith in higher cause matters hugely. To the rest, it matters not at all.
Score one for so what.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at February 14, 2004 7:25 PM