This acclaimed account by author of the bestselling author of Irrationality of his own manic depression remains unique in its honesty and perception. As an eminent psychologist who suffered a severe mental breakdown. Stuart Sutherland was ideally placed to provide an original and insightful description of his illness and often bizarre consequences.
In the second part of Breakdown, Sutherland describes and assesses the various forms of therapy and drug treatments available to sufferers of manic depression and analyses the origins of mental illness. Essentail reading for anyone affected by or interested in mental illness.
Therapeutic Folly
So far I have dealt with mistakes made in hospitals, but there is no reason to suppose that therapists treating patients out of hospital are more sensitive to their needs. It will be sufficient to deal with two topics in which singular arrogance and stupidity has been exhibited, both in Britain and the US.
In 1986 a man living in the Orkneys was jailed for physically harming his children. Later one child told the mother that she had been sexually abused by her father. The mother told the police and her husband was sentenced to a further term in jail. Two of her children subsequently refused to go to school because their classmates taunted them about their father’s practices. The local social workers then intervened: at first the mother trusted them, believing, ‘They were genuinely trying to help me . . . for they were elegant girls in designer clothes who talked sweetly.’ The mother agreed to one daughter going away for three weeks’ ‘assessment’. In fact she was held for six months, most of the time in isolation. The child was told she would only be allowed to eat or to sleep when she revealed details of continuing sexual abuse in the family. When she grew up she claimed she, ‘Had been turned into a zombie. Every word the social workers claimed I said was untrue.’ Many of the interviews were not recorded (or the recordings were destroyed). In one that has survived—an interview with another daughter only four years of age—the social worker suggests ten times that someone had inserted his ‘dickie’ into her ‘fanny’, an allegation that she consistently denied.
On the unsubstantiated allegations of continuing sexual abuse made by the social workers, eight of the children were taken into care. They were eventually released on the direction of a legal officer responsible for child care, who had been horrified by the social workers’ bullying interviews with the children, as revealed in the surviving tapes. Eighteen months later, all the children were again taken into care and remained there: the mother was refused all contact with them. Two of the older ones subsequently brought law suits for their release and returned home. The youngest was three years old and was not sent home for several years.
Not content with the damage they had already done, the social workers, in collaboration with the police, made a further raid at dawn and removed another nine children belonging to four separate families, whom they accused (along with the local minister of religion) of taking part in satanic abuse involving sexual acts with children. These families had in fact merely supported the distraught mother and her children; in the eyes of the social workers they were guilty by association. For five weeks the nine children were separated from their parents and from one another. The parents were not allowed to communicate with them even by letter. Eventually, a sheriff examined the evidence and was outraged by the tapes of the interviews. He ruled the proceedings incompetent and the children were released. Later the parents sued the local council for damages, which were duly awarded both to them and to their children. Not a single prosecution was brought against any member of the four families suspected of child abuse.
As a result of this and similar cases, two commissions were set up in the UK (one by the Department of Health and one by the police) to examine the issue of satanic rituals. They both reached the same conclusion, as did a similar commission in the US: there was no evidence for satanic rituals having occurred anywhere in Britain or America. When people claiming to be eye witnesses were examined, it was found that their statements were completely inconsistent. It was also concluded that, if sufficiently brainwashed, children could be forced to say anything the interrogator wanted. As for the two main social workers involved, they resigned their posts and set up as freelance consultants on child abuse, for which their experiences must have made them well qualified. The latest development is that a 17-year-old boy is trying to clear his parents of the allegation of sexual abuse. He was carried off by the social workers who offered him (spuriously) a ride in a helicopter if he would describe the (non-existent) abuse. He claims to have been traumatized by his six-week enforced absence from his parents. The events in the Orkneys were repeated on a grander scale in Cleveland, England where 200 children were taken away from their homes in dawn raids. There was no substance to the allegations and they were later released.
The craze to hunt down sexual abusers began in the US, where there have been hundreds of cases in which people subsequently found to be innocent have been persecuted and imprisoned. One of the first was a hysterical attack on care-givers at the McMartin Preschool in California. It was started by a social worker but continued by the children’s parents, who claimed not merely that their children had been sodomized but had had their eyes jabbed with scissors: one baby was said to have been killed in order that his blood could be drunk. Several of the school’s care-givers were prosecuted and spent years in prison in the course of the longest trial ever held in California. All were found innocent. As in England, an American commission set up to investigate satanic rituals, found no evidence of their existence.
From the 1960s onwards, more and more members of the psychiatric professions came to believe that child abuse was widespread and that it was the main cause of aberrant behaviour ranging from schizophrenia, through depression to playing truant and dressing sloppily. They reasoned as follows. All mental illness is caused by child abuse. Therefore anyone mentally ill has been abused. Because the mental illness can only be cured if the person abreacts by reliving with the appropriate emotions the events of the abuse, the only way to help the mentally ill is to make them uncover memories of their abuse: that is the therapists’ duty. The mental health professions, aided by the media, persuaded the lay public that child abuse was rife. This belief was formed and propagated for three reasons. First, many if not most people take a morbid delight in a witch-hunt—it is always good to be able to blame one’s troubles on someone else: Nazi Germany singled out the Jews, eighteenth-century Britain the Catholics. Second, most people are titillated by sex in any form. Third, as I have already pointed out, ‘experts’ must lay claim to knowledge, however false, that the general public does not possess. Therapists claim to be ‘expert’ at detecting abused people, both children and adults, a claim for which they have produced no evidence whatever.
Many people who have alleged that they were abused as children have subsequently retracted. From their accounts it is clear that their therapists had prompted them to confabulate memories of child abuse. I have already mentioned patients’ desire to please their therapists, a powerful motive for recalling something that never happened. But the therapist can bring even stronger pressure to bear by telling the patients that they cannot recover from the psychiatric problem which brought them into therapy until they manage to recall an incident of sexual abuse. The therapist may also make suggestions about the nature of the abuse and lead patients gradually from one ‘memory’ to another until they become convinced that they are recalling something that actually happened. This does not mean that the therapists are acting dishonestly. They may simply be naive. They may genuinely believe that abuse has occurred and that recovery depends on the patient recalling it. Even if their behaviour is honestly intended to help the patient, it is inexcusable. Stupidity combined with dogmatism can be as harmful as malice.
It is known that even memories only a few minutes old can be distorted by the way a question is framed. In one experiment people who had watched a video of a car crash imagined they had seen a non-existent barn after being asked ‘Did the car pass the barn before it crashed?’ How much more susceptible to suggestion are children’s memories or those of adults for events that occurred many years ago, particularly when they are in therapy and are looking for any crutch to ease their agony.
Psychotherapists find what they seek. For example, in The Primal Scream, written in 1970, Arthur Janov only mentions one patient—a schizophrenic with delusions—who claimed to have been sexually abused as a child. Twenty years later, in The New Primal Scream, he wrote ‘I have treated a great number of incest patients.’ Psychiatrists find, and patients claim, the fashionable causes for distress. In 1960, patients complained of lack of parental love, in 1990 of sexual abuse. It seems unlikely that parents have changed their habits so drastically.
Apart from using persistent suggestion and persuasion, psychotherapists have invented a number of other methods that enable them to claim, often if not usually falsely, that their patients have been abused. To back up their judgement, psychologists have invented, as is their wont, ‘tests’ for whether someone has been sexually abused. They present adolescent or adult patients with lists of symptoms that they believe are typical of child abuse, which include ‘poor self-esteem’, ‘excessive daydreaming’, ‘feelings of guilt’, ‘fatigue’, ‘fear of being left alone’, ‘loss of appetite’, and so on. The list is remarkably similar to those of the ‘symptoms’ of masturbation put forward at the end of the last century. A high score on such a check-list is said to be associated with sexual abuse as a child. It would be remarkable if anyone could give honest answers to such questions without being diagnosed as having suffered child abuse. Moreover, it should be remembered that the people with whom the therapist is dealing are almost all mentally disturbed—that is the reason they contacted a therapist in the first place. They are therefore likely to have most of the symptoms listed regardless of whether they have been abused. Few if any will escape the net spread by the questionnaire.
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