Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Expert: Reasons to Accuse

    Why would anyone believe anything so painful as being sexually abused by a parent if it weren't true? 
  0.  Because the client is experiencing metabolic dysfunction that is altering the physiological balance and biochemical factors affecting brain function and emotional stability.  This can make the client highly susceptible and vulnerable to harmful therapies that suggest events as causes of ills rather than the physiology ("Broken Brain" br Dr. Nancy Adreason, "Nutrient Power" by Dr. William Walsh)

 [The book "Diagnosis for Disaster" highlights the reasons accuser gave for nurturing and retaining false memories.  The Chapter where the reasoning is evidenced is in brackets]
  1.  Because it explains why he or she cannot meet the modern social demand to manage careers, marriages, and children without the support of appropriate social programs. [Chapter 1]
  2.  Because it is a simple, neat explanation for a lifetime of turmoil and disappointment that has not been caused by any known or acknowledged trauma. [Chapter 1]
  3.  Because it provides a compelling and guilt-free reason for separating from family and ends those uncomfortable feelings of ambivalence. [Chapter 2]
  4.  Because it provides a sense of belonging and acceptance that he or she has been searching for all of his life. [Chapter 2]
  5.  Because someone in authority has said that belief is the only road to mental health. [Chapter 4]
  6.  Because no questioning of the treatment is allowed.  The clients are judged not competent to decide whether their memories are true.  Doubting is regarded as proof of their "denial" and resistance to getting well. [Chapter 4]
  7.  Because it is socially sanctioned excuse for escaping responsibility for one's own mistakes or failing to grow up emotionally. [Chapter 5]
  8.  Because he feels trapped, punished, and isolated in an inpatient program and believes he must play the "repressed memory game" in order to gain his freedom. [Chapter 5]
  9.  Because the therapist has used coercion and his or her aura of expertise to override the client's perceptions and convince the client that her memory can not be trusted. [Chapter 5]
10.  Because many therapists have failed to study the history of psychiatric practices, theory and past grave errors; these therapists do not realize that they can be mistaken. [Chapter 8]
11.  Because he or she finds focusing on a fantasy satanic abuse to be less painful than the mundane reality of parental neglect and emotional abandonment. [Chapter 9]
12.  Because it provides one simple graspable reason  for being unhappy when he or she "has it all." [Chapter 10]
13.  Because  it's less painful to blame some-one else that to examine one's own personal failings and do all the arduous work of changing from within. [Chapter 11]
14.  Because  she has an un-diagnosed mental condition, such as post partem depression, that has impaired the adult child's judgement and made it difficult for here to accept appropriate help. [Chapter 12]
15.  Because his or her unresolved and unconfronted conflicts with significant others have built up to a crisis level, and the adult child has an unconscious need to create distance until he or she can learn better conflict-resolution skills. [Chapter 13]
16.  Because she has become isolated and depressed due to current life problems and an honored authority told her repressed memories of incest are a common cause of deep unhappiness. [Chapter 14]
REASONS BELOW ADDED (not in the book "Diagnosis for Disaster")
17.  Because the therapist/friend has no surviving family and would like to form a new family with a dependent client (or friend).   This would match the description of the therapist and author of "Sybil" according to Dr. Nathan of "Sybil Exposed"
18.  Because pseudo memories has been linked to a number of  factors including hypnosis, trance like states (can be medicated), contextual variables, misleading post event information or suggestion , source monitoring errors, regression, stereotypes , instructional conditions, memory reprocessing , fantasy proneness, leading questions, search for confirmation of hunches and contagion. These reasons are summarized in an empirical meta-study by the Institute for Psychological Studies.
19. In order to extort money from parents by threatening the career(s) of the parent(s), refusing emotional contact and/or holding grand children and the family involved as "hostages" until monetary support is provided (often times to support drug or alcohol addictions).  Discussed in "Myth of Repressed Memories"
20.  Revenge for past perceived unjust actions or offenses unrelated to the accusations but provide a reason to create and nurture false memories as real. (Innocence Isn't Enough)

=============================
 In the PBS special 'Divided Memories Part 2,' (April, 1995) producer Ofra Bikel examines the complicated issue of repressed memory.  The video examines the different kinds of therapies used to help patients remember, including age-regression therapy, past-life therapy, and hypnosis.  David Calof, a "recovered memory therapist" with a high school diploma (but no degree) admits that his patients do not recall factually accurate events in a 1998 deposition but allows his patients to characterize them as memories.   During his videoed interview Mr. Calof rhetorically asks "Why would anyone believe anything so painful as being sexually abused by a parent if it weren't true?
       The book "Diagnosis for Disaster" (1996) quickly published personal accounts by recovered memory victims that provide the evidence for 16 different answers to that question.  The chapters of the book dealing with those accounts are in brackets after being described [Chapter].
=========================================
=============================================
WARNING
  If you are seeking help for personal struggles and a therapist, counselor or friend says that "recovering childhood memories can help you get better" then IMMEDIATELY get up from your chair (or off the couch), run to the door, open it and flee. Hundreds of thousands have lost families, years of productive living and squandered immense wealth with tragedy inducing therapy that produces horrid false memories, splinters families, isolates the client and is documented to cause decline in mental health.
====================================
at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Location: Walla Walla, WA, USA

Expert: US 2nd Circuit Court Ruling


       
The legal precedent is now firmly established:  If "recovered" or "repressed memories" and "aggressive questioning" are (or were) used as evidence for convictions (and in this case a plea bargain) then these plea bargains, confessions and rulings are to be reversed.  The text written by the Justices detailing their thoughts below are from :
Friedman v. Rehal
[Note:  The Docket link above goes to a genuine copy of the original ruling]
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT
__________________
Argued: July 8, 2009 Decided: August 16, 2010
 Memory Archive

Pg 20-21
     Many have described these widespread prosecutions (using "repressed memories" or memories using "recovered memory therapy") as a modern-day “witch hunt.”  These prosecutions were largely based on memories that alleged victims “recovered” through suggestive memory recovery tactics, including those petitioner claims were used in this case. Indeed, the dramatic increase in conspiratorial charges of child sexual abuse has been traced to a relatively small group of clinical psychologists who supported the psychoanalytic notion of “repressed memories” and encouraged patients to employ extensive “memory recovery procedures” to “break through the barrier of repression and bring memories into conscious awareness.”   Popular memory recovery procedures included hypnosis, age regression, dream interpretation, guided abuse-related imagery, use of photographs to trigger memories, journaling, and interpretation of symptoms as implicit memories.  These procedures and others commonly employed have great potential to induce false memories.  Hypnosis, for example, has been shown to produce bizarre and impossible memories, including memories of ritualistic satanic abuse, memories from early infancy, memories from past lives, and memories from the future.  The prevailing view is that the vast majority of traumatic memories that are recovered through the use of suggestive recovery procedures are false.....

Pg 23
"Finally, once individuals “recovered” memories of abuse or otherwise labeled themselves victims of abuse, they were generally encouraged to participate in various activities on an individual and community level to reinforce and develop existing memories of abuse.  There, proponents of recovered memories advised alleged victims to expand on existing memories through suggestive memory recovery procedures (both in and out of therapy), participation in survivor groups, and solicitation of consistent information from others, “all with significant potential both to bias construction of historical narratives and to lead to confabulation of false memories.” When allegations of abuse span an entire community, these activities can provide an outlet for community reinforcement—an outlet which can strengthen survivor identities and foster the collective growth of increasingly inaccurate memories. See id."

Pg 27
"The record here suggests “a reasonable likelihood” that Jesse Friedman was wrongfully convicted.  The “new and material evidence” in this case is the post-conviction consensus within the social science community that suggestive memory recovery tactics can create false memories and that aggressive investigation techniques like those employed in petitioner’s case can induce false reports."

 This ruling now being used throughout the federal court system means that cases which use or once used "recovered memory therapy", "repressed memories"  or "leading or suggestive questioning" need to be reviewed and reversed if the conviction, plea bargain or confession relied on these, now known to be, dubious standards of evidence.
at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Location: Walla Walla, WA 99362, USA

Expert: Trial Introduction to USA v. Peterson, et al.

As many leading figures in psychology and psychiatry have noted for decades, the U.S. mental health system is in desperate need of reform. The most serious and widespread problem is the continued use of "psychotherapies" that have never been proven safe and effective by credible scientific research.  Many of these "psychotherapies" are harmful or even dangerous.  National efforts to reduce widespread fraud and corruption in the mental health system have focused on education, regulation, legislation and litigation (malpractice suits).

       Reform efforts have intensified in the last few years as thousands of U.S. families were destroyed by increasingly bizarre "psychotherapies". The most damaging of these quack treatments involved the controversial and unscientific notion of "repressed memories" of childhood abuse. Using well known methods of brainwashing and coercion, irresponsible and often disturbed therapists convinced thousands of vulnerable patients that they had been horribly abused as children. The most bizarre forms of such "treatment" involved convincing patients they suffered from "multiple personalities" and "satanic cult abuse".  Such bogus treatments were often wildly expensive and resulted in payments of millions of dollars to the clinics and hospitals who engaged in such "treatments." Many successful malpractice lawsuits against such therapists and hospitals have left the practitioners of "recovered memory therapy" in full retreat.
The United States Department of Justice entered the controversy over "repressed memories" by issuing criminal indictments against several well known practitioners of recovered memory therapy. These criminal indictments of five mental health professionals in Houston have dramatically increased the stakes in the debate over recovered memory therapy . The 60-count indictment is believed to be the first of its kind in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice has accused the therapists and hospital staff of the Dissociative Disorders Unit of the Spring Shadows Glen hospital in Houston of perpetrating a scheme to defraud insurance firms by allegedly falsely diagnosing patients with multiple personality disorder caused by their alleged participation in a secret satanic cult.
The conspiracy and mail fraud charges include allegations that the defendants "brainwashed" patients, including children, into "relating false experiences and memories about the ‘satanic cult’, and that false medical records were created to substantiate the false diagnoses and treatment." The alleged conspiracy resulted in millions of dollars in insurance payments, according to the federal indictment. These indictments were handed down by a federal Grand Jury and resulted from a detailed investigation by the FBI and the Pension Welfare Benefits Administration of the Department of Labor.
Each of the 60 counts in the indictment carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and, if convicted, the defendants would face sentences under federal guidelines that include no parole provisions. This indictment throws the full weight of the U.S. government against mental health practitioners who believe they can abuse patients with "treatments" lacking any scientific support.
Critics of repressed memory therapies have consistently argued that mental health practitioners induce memories of abuse through inappropriate treatment regimens. The indictment supports these claims by accusing the defendants of fraudulently eliciting "statements of satanic ritual abuse and cult activities from the admitted patients, through nontraditional treatment modalities, including the use of leading or suggestive questions during therapy sessions while the patients were: under hypnosis; under the influence of a drug or combination of drugs; isolated from their families, friends and the outside world; denied certain privileges and freedoms, including uninterrupted sleep; held down by excessive or medically unnecessary physical restraints; or, otherwise by the use of techniques commonly associated with mind control and ‘brainwashing,’ in order to conduct their fraudulent insurance payment enterprises."
The criminal indictments come at a time when psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners have received a drubbing in civil courts by individuals suing after retracting memories recovered during therapy. In highly publicized cases in Minneapolis, Dallas, Chicago and other cities across the U.S. "recovered memory" therapists have suffered multi-million dollar losses via jury verdicts or settlements.
The effects of the lawsuits, licensing board actions against such therapists and now criminal indictments has been devastating. Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., founder and executive director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, noted in one of the organization’s newsletters that "The growth of the recovered/repressed memory movement has been stopped; the number of new lawsuits against parents based only on recovered / repressed memories is negligible. What is happening in the legal area now is critical to how the mopping up will proceed."
After years of banner headlines about malpractice suits and now criminal indictments, the professional associations are finally speaking up on these issues. Last April, the British Royal College of Psychiatry Working Party on Recovered Memories issued a stern warning to the public and psychotherapists that there is no empirical (scientific) evidence supporting the concepts of repression or dissociation. They also note that memory enhancement techniques frequently used in therapy are not safe or effective. In fact, they characterize such procedures as "dangerous methods of persuasion."
The failure of the psychology and psychiatry professions to properly police the practices of mental health professionals has resulted in the tragic destruction of thousands of U.S. families. The American legal system is performing as it should to stop the widespread fraud and corruption resulting from the use of psychotherapy procedures that have no basis in scientific research, logic or common sense.
========================

A Legal Commentator Introduces the Trial

R. Christopher Barden
Above is Introduction to Criminal Trial asserting Insurance Fraud by Doctors and Hospital that created "memories" in patients in order to generate insurance reimbursements for "harm done" due to childhood abuse as evidenced by "repressed memories" created using well known techniques that confuse fantasies with actual memories. 

A video depicting the treatment center addressed in this legal action:

 ========================================
WARNING
  If you are seeking help for personal struggles and a therapist, counselor or friend says that "recovering childhood memories can help you get better" then IMMEDIATELY get up from your chair (or off the couch), run to the door, open it and flee. Hundreds of thousands have lost families, years of productive living and squandered immense wealth with tragedy inducing therapy that produces horrid false memories, splinters families, isolates the client and is documented to cause decline in mental health.
=====================================================
at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Location: Walla Walla, WA, USA

Expert: The Injustice of Recovered Memories


Many of those working in our legal system have a poor understanding of the nature of human memory that miscarriages of justice are an almost inevitable consequence, according to a book published today by the British False Memory Society.  Miscarriage of Memory, edited by William Burgoyne, Norman Brand, Madeline Greenhalgh and Donna Kelly, presents factual accounts of prosecutions in the UK that were based entirely upon memories of sexual abuse recovered during therapy in the absence of any supporting evidence. 
Typically such cases occur when a vulnerable individual seeks help from a psychotherapist for a commonly occurring psychological problem such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on. At this stage, the client has no conscious memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and is likely to firmly reject any suggestion of such abuse. To a particular sort of well-meaning psychotherapist, however, such denial is itself evidence that the abuse really did occur.
Despite strong criticism from experimental psychologists, many psychotherapists still accept the Freudian notion of repression – the idea that when someone experiences extreme trauma, a defense mechanism kicks in that buries the memory of the traumatic event so deep that it cannot be retrieved into consciousness. Like radioactive waste, its presence is said to exert a malign influence. Indeed, the whole rationale of such therapy is that these hidden memories must be recovered and worked through in order to achieve psychological health.
During therapy, and often as a result of "memory recovery" techniques such as hypnotic regression and guided imagery, the client may gradually develop clear and vivid memories of abuse having taken place, typically at the hands of parents and other family members.
On the evidence of a huge amount of well-controlled research, we can now be confident that these memory recovery techniques are highly likely to give rise to false memories – apparent memories for events that never took place.
The memories can be detailed and extremely bizarre, involving ritualized Satanic abuse, gross acts of sexual perversion, cannibalism, human and animal sacrifice, and so on. But they may be nothing more than fleeting images. Indeed, some patients never manage to recover explicit "memories" of abuse but are convinced that such abuse must have occurred because their therapist, who is perceived as an authority figure, tells them that it is the only explanation for their unhappiness.
Whether the patient "recovers" explicit memories or not, the end result will be a family torn apart, with all the heartache, confusion and lasting emotional damage that entails.
It is, of course, far more likely that such cases will come to the attention of the legal system when explicit memories are involved. The book Miscarriage of Memory details several such cases.
Understandably, practitioners and social workers are legally required to inform the authorities when they suspect that sexual abuse has occurred and, equally understandably, the need to protect possible victims of abuse is paramount. Serious problems can arise, however, when the initial suspicions of abuse are not well-founded and when the legal system is in the hands of people who often do not fully appreciate the complexities of human memory.
Consider, for example, the comments of retired judge Gerald Butler, when asked whether we needed memory experts to explain to juries how people's memories work (speaking on "Can you trust your memory?" the BBC Radio 4 programme Law in Action in 2008):
"I think, frankly, that is a faintly ridiculous suggestion. We do have experts who can be very helpful ... there are handwriting experts, there are fingerprint experts, and of course there are the DNA experts who have turned out to be of immense value in the courts. But we also have juries who are there in order to use their common sense and when it is a situation that you weigh up a witness's evidence and decide whether he or she is telling the truth or that he or she has a faithful recollection of what has taken place, this is essentially a matter for the jury. It is not a matter for an expert."
In fact, many hundreds of people have been wrongfully convicted in the UK because juries and those involved in the legal system relied upon "common sense" in considering issues relating to memory. Several thousand case histories have been referred to the British False Memory Society and at least 672 of these are known to have involved the police or higher legal authorities.
It is imperative that those working in the legal system are familiar, at least in general terms, with the way that memory works. Experimental psychologists, following the initial controversy over the veracity of recovered memories back in the 1980s, have developed several reliable techniques to study factors that influence the formation and maintenance of false memories. The studies have proved beyond doubt that false memories can be produced quite readily in susceptible individuals.
Of course, false memories do not only arise in the context of sexual abuse allegations. As Professor Tim Valentine, an expert in psychology and the law at Goldsmiths, University of London, informs me:
"Witnesses' recall can be influenced by information acquired during an investigation. Just repeatedly questioning a witness tends to increase their confidence in both correct and mistaken answers. A shopkeeper who was a key witness in the Lockerbie bomb case was interviewed 20 times by the police, during which he was shown fragments of burnt clothing. He recalled a Libyan customer who had been in the shop nine months previously. Initially he said he did not sell the man any shirts. In court he described selling two shirts to the customer that were similar to fragments of clothing found in the suitcase that contained the bomb. Might this be a false memory induced by questioning about the shirts?"
Another dramatic case further illustrates the way in which witnesses can sometimes confuse the source of their memories, with potentially catastrophic results. Donald Thomson, an Australian psychologist, was bewildered when the police informed him that he was a suspect in a rape case, his description matching almost exactly that provided by the victim. Fortunately for Thomson, he had a watertight alibi. At the time of the rape, he was taking part in a live TV interview – ironically, on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. It turned out that the victim had been watching Thomson on TV just before the rape occurred and had confused her memory of him with that of the rapist.
Well-controlled experiments have also shown conclusively that memory can become contaminated when co-witnesses discuss their recall of events, a phenomenon known as "memory conformity". Valentine provides one possible example of this in a high-profile British murder case in 1999:
"When Barry George first stood on an identity parade on suspicion of murdering Jill Dando, one witness identified him, but two neighbours made no identification. These three witnesses were given a lift home together. During the journey they discussed the identity parade and learned that the witness had identified number 2 in the line-up. Subsequently the other two witnesses made a statement identifying number 2. These 'partial identifications' were given as evidence in court. Barry George's conviction was quashed at his second appeal."

A huge amount of well-controlled research and analysis of myriad real-life legal cases have shown that to understand the complexity of human memory requires rather more than just "common sense".
Chris French is a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit. He edits the The Skeptic
Further readingBrainerd, CJ, & Reyna, VF (2005) The Science of False Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Loftus, EF, & Ketcham, K (1994) The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. New York: St Martin's Press.
McNally, RJ (2003) Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ofshe, R., & Watters, E (1994) Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria. New York: Scribner.
Schacter, DL (2001) The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
This article originally found (4/25/2016) at:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/24/false-memories-abuse-convict-innocent
***** WARNING *****
  If you are seeking help for personal struggles and a therapist, counselor or friend says that "recovering childhood memories can help you get better" then IMMEDIATELY get up from your chair (or off the couch), run to the door, open it and flee. Hundreds of thousands have lost families, years of productive living and squandered immense wealth with tragedy inducing therapy that produces horrid false memories, splinters families, isolates the client and is documented to cause decline in mental health.
======================================================================
at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Location: Walla Walla, WA 99362, USA
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)