After School Satan

[Project Willow]

It's the right thread.

In the video, are the chained people supposed to be ISSTD workers? They seem entirely co-operative.

I believe they are supposed to be victims of bad therapy, who died. There's a back story, but I don't remember the details.

[PufPuf93]

It's the right thread.

In the video, are the chained people supposed to be ISSTD workers? They seem entirely co-operative.

Where the witch-hunters are: Satanic Panic and Mental Health malpractice

“And this is where today’s Western, somewhat secularized, witch-hunters currently reside: among psychology’s pseudoscientific fringe; feeding delusion to the mentally vulnerable behind the protection of therapist-client privilege, and under the guise trauma therapy. While they revel in their disturbed pornographic fantasies of child-rape and extreme abuse, they proclaim their critics to be demented defenders of pedophilic assault. They co-opt the narrative of victim’s rights to conceal their absurd conspiracy theories from criticism and scrutiny. To question the validity of DID, or even the reality of a Satanic conspiracy, is — according to this defensive ploy — to question the very existence of child abuse itself. In this way, actual victims of abuse are used as human shields to defend our modern inquisitors as they engage in the most outrageous and under-investigated mental health scandal of our time.” (Full article)

The ISSTD and the Death of Jude Mirra

“The facts are these: an 8-year old autistic boy was diagnosed with a debunked psychiatric disorder. The diagnosis was arrived at by discredited methods. The professional pseudoscientific assumptions surrounding the boy’s “treatment” likely contributed to paranoid delusions in his openly disturbed mother, who ultimately killed the boy in order to spare him from the horrors of a nonexistent threat. While the boy’s mother now serves a prison term for her crime, the worse-than-incompetent “professionals” who not only failed to prevent her from committing the murder, but may have actively fed the paranoid delusions that acted as her rationale for the deed, remain unapologetic and without censure. It is my contention that proper professional mental health intervention may well have prevented this woman from murdering her son. The fact that her filicidal delusions could be reinforced by mental health professionals should be cause for outrage and reform.” (Full article)

https://greyfaction.org/ (which is a project of the Satanic Temple).

I know absolutely nothing about this; the link is from the video clip.

[Burnt Hill]

Admitting ignorance of the situation, so -
A mother murdered her son.
She is solely responsible, no?
What am I missing?

[divideandconquer]

From: Ethical standards, truths, and lies

Jonathan Swift, in his Gulliver’sTravels, conjures up a number of worlds that test the imagination. In a similar vein, imagine a dystopian world where few tell the truth about sexual assault and child abuse. The social contract has been broken. You cannot believe scientists about memories or the validity of their research (Steen, 2011). You cannot believe national news reporters about issues surrounding abuse and the credibility of victims, whether overstating(e.g., the Rolling Stone article by Erdely, 2014) or, more frequently, understating issues of abuse and sexual assault (Sommers, 2014). You cannot believe religious leaders’ or scout leaders’ claims about how they have handled reports of child abuse. You cannot believe university officials about their responses to campus sexual assault. When not lying, people use cover-ups as commonplace strategies to avoid telling the truth. When a lie has been embedded in the public consciousness, the truth has a difficult time making itself known. Only those who continue to tell the truth, however unpopular, protect us from such a dystopian world. Trauma therapists and researchers strive to continue to tell the truth about trauma, child maltreatment, and their sequelae in the face of incredible professional and media pressure to do the opposite (Herman, 1992).

This is an editorial about recent social and professional ethical developments that may signal attempts to arrive at truth about critical aspects of trauma after decades of lies and cover-ups. The first development came with the release of the Hoffman Report (Hoffman et al., 2015a), an investigation of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) complicity in abusive, traumatizing interrogations of political detainees, with one particular reference of note to this discussion. Another development was the publication of The Witch-Hunt Narrative by Ross Cheit (2014), which challenges widely held misconceptions about victims of child abuse and their credibility perpetuated since the preschool child abuse trials of the 1980s.

The ethical standards for International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) members are derived from the ethical guidelines of national and professional groups (ISSTD, 2015). For psychologists who are members of the ISSTD, the APA provides ethical principles (APA, 2010), including general principles and ethical standards. Not only did some powerful people within the APA fail to follow its principles and standards, but, as noted in the Hoffman Report, it was the APA ethics director who was among those complicit in this failure.

The ethical standards for International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) members are derived from the ethical guidelines of national and professional groups (ISSTD, 2015). For psychologists who are members of the ISSTD, the APA provides ethical principles (APA, 2010), including general principles and ethical standards. Not only did some powerful people within the APA fail to follow its principles and standards, but, as noted in the Hoffman Report, it was the APA ethics director who was among those complicit in this failure.

The Hoffman Report

The Hoffman Report was released in July 2015, with a revised report issued in September 2015 (Hoffman et al., 2015b). In this report, commissioned by the APA Board of Directors and prepared by the law firm of Sidley Austin, LLP, the APA was found to be responsible for a number of unethical practices. The inquiry related to the APA’s issuance of ethical guidelines for psychologists participating in interrogations of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and other locations (Hoffman et al.,2015b, p. 2). Key APA officials, including APA Ethics Director Stephen Behnke, were described as having colluded with U.S. Department of Defense officials to issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain the Department of Defense regarding abusive interrogation practices (pp. 9,12). During this time, APA officials were said to have strong reason to suspect that abusive interrogations were occurring but avoided taking steps to confirm these suspicions (p. 9). In addition, the report concluded that“ the handling of ethics complaints against prominent national security psychologists was handled in an improper fashion, in an attempt to protect these psychologists from censure” (p. 10). In effect, this was a cover-up. How does this relate to trauma, child maltreatment, and their sequelae?

The conventional wisdom on the part of a group of vocal skeptics including research psychologists, defense attorneys, and the media is that victims of sexual assault and child abuse cannot be believed. Victims are too prone to false memories (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). They are too suggestible. Victims’ claims and the ramifications that follow, they say, amount to a witch-hunt. Regarding the first assumption, that victims are prone to false memories, the primary and oft-quoted researcher is Elizabeth Loftus. The Hoffman Report noted that:

the (APA) Ethics Office was not insulated from outside influence and the nature of the process allowed for manipulation at times. Koocher told Sidley that Raymond Fowler manipulated the adjudication process when there was a complaint filed 260 B. L. BRAND AND L. MCEWEN against Elizabeth Loftus, a high-profile psychologist who did work on false memories. When Fowler found out there was an ethics complaint pending against Loftus, he reached out to her and told her she should resign her membership before a case could be formally opened against her. He later denied that he had done so and appointed one of his deputies to “investigate” how Loftus had found out about the complaint. (Hoffman et al., 2015b, p. 484, emphasis added)

Koocher (2014) himself discussed what he referred to as “the mysterious resignation of Elizabeth Loftus from APA” (p. 7) in an article in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.“In 2002, Fowler acknowledged to the former APA President Norine G. Johnson and me in a private conversation that he had‘ gotten word’ to Loftus about the potential ethics complaint prior to her resignation”

There were two ethics complaints filed in late 1995 by Jennifer Hoult and Lynn Crook, each of whom had prevailed in successful civil suits against their parents for abuse (Jennifer Hoult v. David P. Hoult, 1993; Lynn Crook v. Bruce Murphy and Lucille Murphy, 1991). In each of the ethics complaints that stemmed from these civil suits, Hoult and Crook alleged that Loftus incorrectly portrayed the facts of their legal cases in published articles to the benefit of the false memory position. Loftus resigned from the APA in January 1996, shortly after the complaints were filed. Since her resignation, Loftus has repeatedly sworn under oath that she had no knowledge of the existence of the ethics complaints prior to her resignation from the APA (Cheit, 2015). One of the APA’ s ethical standards is that psychologists may not make false or deceptive statements regarding their publications and research findings, nor may they engage in fraud, subterfuge, or intentional misrepresentation of fact, according to the general principles. The two women who filed the ethics complaints were proven to be victims of child abuse, and they sought justice from the APA, yet it appears that the APA protected a psychologist who was accused by two people of an ethics violation. The Hoffman Report shows that the APA let down the profession and the victims in the matter of prisoner interrogations and shielded the psychologists involved. If the allegations about the reason for Loftus’s resignation are true, the APA also let down the profession and the victims in the matter of child abuse by neglecting to investigate the inaccurate portrayals of successful cases against abusers.

The Witch-Hunt Narrative

Another recent professional and ethical development is the publication of The Witch-Hunt Narrative. In The Witch-Hunt Narrative, Cheit (2014) demonstrates how reporters and some academics have created a myth of false accusation and false persecution of child abusers. Cheit provides compelling evidence about victims of child abuse and their credibility, particularly related JOURNAL OF TRAUMA & DISSOCIATION 261 to the investigations of child abuse in child care centers. His research counters rhetoric that victims are suggestible and that efforts to investigate and prosecute credible claims of child abuse amount to a witch-hunt.

The current (as opposed to historical) definition of a witch-hunt is “a campaign directed against a person or group holding unorthodox or unpopular views” (“Witchhunt,” 2015). Do the attempts to prosecute child sexual abuse really fit this definition? Is there a campaign against accused child abusers, when it is generally understood that child sexual abuse is underreported, underinvestigated, and underprosecuted (Cross, Walsh, Simone, & Jones, 2003; Sedlak et al.,2010;Smithetal.,2000)? Cheit (2014) is persuasive that a group of journalists, academics, and defense attorneys believe that the term witch-hunt fits these cases, yet he proves that this characterization is inappropriate and inaccurate. In his list of those promoting the witch-hunt narrative, he includes journalist Debbie Nathan and defense attorney Michael Snedeker and their book Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of an American Witch Hunt (Nathan & Snedeker,1995). Academics include Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck and their book Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony (Ceci & Bruck,1995) and Elizabeth Loftus (Loftus,1995).

The Witch-Hunt Narrative illustrates in exacting detail how in the area of child abuse involving day care centers“ falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it” (Swift,1710, p.2). This book demanded 15 years of research on day care child abuse cases, including reviewing original documents, court transcripts, and medical reports to find the inaccuracies. Cheit (2014) presents three cases in full chapters: McMartin, Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, and Frank Fuster/Country Walk in Florida. He analyzes and presents in short form dozens more cases. He found that in spite of mistakes in the management of some cases, there was no epidemic of witch-hunts in the 1980s. The claim of the witch-hunt narrative was that there were hundreds of cases just like McMartin. Instead, there were a handful of such cases. In many of the cases held up as witch-hunts there was credible evidence of child abuse.

Consider the Fuster/Country Walk case from 1985. Frank Fuster was convicted based on a spontaneous disclosure of child sexual abuse and additional statements from children not subjected to repetitive interviews. Fuster’s son tested positive for gonorrhea of the throat, and Fuster had had a recent conviction for sexual assault on a minor (Cheit,2014, p. 285). This case resulted in a successful prosecution with testimony from young children, yet the witch-hunt narrative considers it a miscarriage of justice. Since then, Fuster’s lawyer has stated that if the case had been tried 10 years later, Fuster would not have been convicted because of heightened public doubt about the validity of children’s claims of abuse (Cheit,2014, p. 354).

If Fuster would not be convicted in today’s environment, this is a dream for defense lawyers representing accused abusers. In fact, defense lawyers are key in promoting the idea that many convicted of child abuse are innocent. The 262 B. L. BRAND AND L. MCEWEN National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ) provides legal assistance and other support to defendants in child sexual abuse cases that it claims were injustices. Its current president is Michael Snedeker, the defense lawyer who coauthored Satan’s Silence with Debbie Nathan. Snedeker and Nathan argue that satanic ritual abuse cases were proliferating in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a moral panic, subjecting hundreds of people to state-mandated persecution that in many ways compares to the Salem Witch trials, in their opinion. Nathan is on the NCRJ Board of Directors. According to the NCRJ website, this nonprofit group continues to sponsor the Fuster case (NCRJ, 2015a).

Nathan and Snedeker included a list of the supposedly unjustly accused, including Fuster, in their book. A similar list was compiled by Charlier and Downing (1988) in a newspaper story that was a critical source that fueled many witch-hunt advocates. Cheit’s (2014) research indicates that both lists are filled with exaggeration regarding satanic elements. According to Cheit, most of the cases on these lists have nothing to do with satanic ritual abuse claims. For example, Charlier and Downing characterized abuse allegations as “ritualistic” in nature if activities occurred in a basement when the child care center itself was situated in a basement, or if abuse took place in a bathroom (Cheit, 2014 , pp. 93–94). In addition, both lists of so-called witchhunts feature cases in which there was substantial evidence of guilt. Cheit’sresearch on 17 of Nathan’s21“ satanic” cases found only three that really fit their definition of a witch-hunt (Cheit, 2014, p. 117). Cheit (2014) also addressed the scientific underpinnings of the witch-huntnarrative offered by memory researchers Ceci and Bruck. These authors provided samples of supposedly leading questioning by the psychologist who assessed the children in the Michaels case (Ceci & Bruck, 1995,pp. 116–118). Cheit compared Ceci and Bruck’s version of interview transcripts of supposedly leading questioning with the actual prosecutor’s office transcripts of the interviews and found that although Ceci and Bruck claimed to have lightly edited the transcripts, they excerpted and combined pieces from different interview days and sometimes altered the chronological order of excerpts. They also omitted critical responses from the children that made the abusive nature of interactions much clearer (Cheit, 2014, pp. 255, 258).

This editing inaccurately portrayed the interviews and cast doubt on the prosecution’s case, thereby supporting the witch-hunt position. The Michaels case was a tragic turning point in that it seems to have cemented the notion in the public’s mind that children are highly suggestible and that their recollections are not credible.

The APA contributed to the promulgation of the perspective that victims are unreliable if it protected a psychologist who was accused of ethical violations related to the false memory position rather than conducting an investigation that could have been more supportive of abuse victims. If the APA did not heed its own ethics standard, the lapse has become amplified in JOURNAL OF TRAUMA & DISSOCIATION 263 that the false memory perspective is now commonly held by many lay and professional people. The APA’s lapse is likely having an even broader impact because the false memory perspective has become so pervasive that it now dominates many psychology textbooks (Brand & McEwen, 2014; Kissee,Isaacson, & Miller-Perrin,2014; Wilgus, Packer, Lile-King, Miller-Perrin, & Brand, 2015).

In the conclusion of his book, Cheit (2014) details the legacy of the witchhunt narrative, including the following:

(1) An effort to keep children from testifying in court based on their presumed suggestibility, even in cases with strong corroborative evidence of abuse.
(2) A view that delayed disclosure of sexual abuse, a common phenomenon with victims of child abuse, undermines the credibility of reports of abuse.
(3) An effort to undermine the professionals, frontline workers, and institutions who assist victims of child abuse. (p. 407)

All of Cheit’s conclusions with regard to the legacy of the witch-hunt narrative apply to sexual assault victims as well and are promoted by journalists, academics, and defense attorneys. From this unbalanced perspective, victims are vulnerable to implanted false memories (Vitelli, 2012), repressed or delayed memories cannot be trusted (Sacks, 2013; Schafran, 2015), and those who would help them are criticized and undermined (Lilienfeld, Lynn, & Lohr, 2015).

We appreciate the 15 years of meticulous research that was required in writing this book. There are many who, like Cheit (2014), speak the truth, and we encourage them, and you, to continue. We suggest that you read the Executive Summary of the Hoffman Report and the footnote about Elizabeth Loftus on page 484, as well as Cheit’s book The Witch-Hunt Narrative. Do these two developments herald a change in how we as a society view victims of sexual assault and child abuse? They at least help us decide whom to believe. We urge the APA to authorize an independent investigation of the two victims’ allegations that Loftus behaved unethically. Spurgeon warned, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on” (Spurgeon,1959, p. 155). The victims of child abuse and sexual assault need the APA and all of us to hurry up and pull on our boots.

[guruilla]

http://auticulture.com/liminalist-81-so ... s-e-cheit/

THE LIMINALIST # 81: SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN MINIATURE (READING FROM THE WITCH-HUNT NARRATIVE, BY ROSS E. CHEIT)

The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children, by Ross E. Cheit, on the McMartin preschool case, the death of academic research, discrediting child witnesses and debunking psychological research, a mosh-pit of denial, complicity or ignorance, a foundational case in the witch-hunt narrative, Abbey Mann and Indictment, implicating Oliver Stone, Judy Johnson as “suspect personality,” the destabilizing nature of research, the original allegations at McMartin, parental reluctance to investigate, overstating the Satanic element, CII exaggerations, fantastic elements in the testimonies, an exponential disassociation from reality, a strategy for casting doubt, protecting the guilty, creating a smokescreen, social engineering in miniature, suppressing the medical evidence, an applied awareness of mimesis, the emergence of public awareness of child sexual abuse, a triggered society, assuming implausibility, organized deviance, the ignored tunnels, FBI documentation of tunnels, an inability to think in ambiguity, Levenda’s fallacy, morality plays left and right, mimesis, crowd control, social psychology, studying a sample of social engineering, a lever for mass control, fabricated behaviors, creating moral panic by faking moral panic, a psychiatric wall, a rising anger, perpetuating the exploitation, the cognitive problem of dual tragedies, a narrative without ambiguity, the irrelevance of adult denial versus the relevance of child testimony, abstract abhorrence and actual tolerance of child abuse, Woody Allen: national icon, a wall of denial, the pressure of seeing & the pressure of speaking, how surrender happens, the opening of surrender.

[divideandconquer]

http://auticulture.com/liminalist-81-social-engineering-miniature-reading-witch-hunt-narrative-ross-e-cheit/

THE LIMINALIST # 81: SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN MINIATURE (READING FROM THE WITCH-HUNT NARRATIVE, BY ROSS E. CHEIT)

The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children, by Ross E. Cheit, on the McMartin preschool case, the death of academic research, discrediting child witnesses and debunking psychological research, a mosh-pit of denial, complicity or ignorance, a foundational case in the witch-hunt narrative, Abbey Mann and Indictment, implicating Oliver Stone, Judy Johnson as “suspect personality,” the destabilizing nature of research, the original allegations at McMartin, parental reluctance to investigate, overstating the Satanic element, CII exaggerations, fantastic elements in the testimonies, an exponential disassociation from reality, a strategy for casting doubt, protecting the guilty, creating a smokescreen, social engineering in miniature, suppressing the medical evidence, an applied awareness of mimesis, the emergence of public awareness of child sexual abuse, a triggered society, assuming implausibility, organized deviance, the ignored tunnels, FBI documentation of tunnels, an inability to think in ambiguity, Levenda’s fallacy, morality plays left and right, mimesis, crowd control, social psychology, studying a sample of social engineering, a lever for mass control, fabricated behaviors, creating moral panic by faking moral panic, a psychiatric wall, a rising anger, perpetuating the exploitation, the cognitive problem of dual tragedies, a narrative without ambiguity, the irrelevance of adult denial versus the relevance of child testimony, abstract abhorrence and actual tolerance of child abuse, Woody Allen: national icon, a wall of denial, the pressure of seeing & the pressure of speaking, how surrender happens, the opening of surrender.

As Jason said, the "witch hunt" narrative is "like a magic trick" as it not only allows the guilty to slip away but also transforms them into the "innocent" --the wrongly accused--right before our very eyes, while at the same time, warning any other victims thinking of coming forward to think again. All of us can imagine being wrongly accused, however, very few of us can imagine satanic anything, let alone organized satanic ritual abuse, especially by those with power, money, status, etc.. This is 2016 for heaven's sake, not the Dark Ages!

The very conscious--at least on the part of the higher ups-- participation of media, of academia, of high level politicians, of law enforcement professionals, ect in these horrendous crimes--at the very least, in covering them up--should be enough proof to convince anyone of the evil that governs this world.

https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/arti ... e-coverup/

edit: Wow! I didn't realize you are Jason. Very interesting podcast!

The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist

[Novem5er]

Kind of relevant (maybe).

Jack Chick Was Right: How ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Made Me an Occultist

Dungeons & Dragons was a major fuel of the satanic panic that convinced gullible Americans that their children were in danger of being indoctrinated into occultism, black magic, and witchcraft. Far too many people truly believed a game in which kids (and it was mostly kids) role-played wizards, warriors, and thieves hacking and slaying monsters with swords and magical spells in fantasy settings would turn the youth of America into black-robed, pagan ritualists. Crazy, right? Well, maybe not.



Confession time: I’m a practicing occultist. Not an armchair Crowleyite bedecked in Hot Topic jewelry or fluffy RenFaire Wiccan, but someone who has worked extensively with a number of practical magical systems. And if it hadn’t been for the magical education I got playing and DMing D&D as a kid, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time reading about occultism before taking the plunge into actual practice about twenty years ago. And from informal surveys of my magician friends, D&D was definitely our gateway drug. So, in fact, that Jack Chick pamphlet was somewhat prophetic (although, I feel compelled to add, my brand of occultism does not involve harming anything or anyone, much less anything that could be remotely described as “evil”).

https://wearethemutants.com/2016/10/25/jack-chick-was-right-how-dungeons-dragons-made-me-an-occultist/

I wasn't exposed to D&D until probably 1992, but I'd been a fan of fantasy children's books and fantasy video games for several years before that. Of course, many of those early exposures were, themselves, likely influenced by D&D of a decade earlier. Now, to counter the above article, I always had the opposite reaction to D&D and occultism. As in:

"Really, you're wearing a magical amulet? Like in D&D? Does it give you resistance to undead or does it just increase your AC?"

But there's my secular nature, again. I have a strong attraction towards the fantastical, but also a strong distinction between what is fictional or not.

[DrEvil]

^^Surely you mean "or does it just lower your AC?"

[Novem5er]

^^Surely you mean "or does it just lower your AC?"

Oh, the shame! I forgot that in the older versions of D&D (which I started with) the lower the AC, the better! Around the year 2000 they updated it with 3rd edition and unified their systems so that a higher number was always better. They got rid of THAC0 and replaced it with an Attack Bonus. Again, the shame of forgetting my roots.

Thanks for the reminder. Why didn't my pet demon remind me?!!

[American Dream]

Things Jack Chick hated (a partial list): Dungeons and Dragons, Roman Catholics, Freemasons, Muslims, Jews and Satan.

https://boingboing.net/2016/10/24/rip-j ... f-the.html

[Novem5er]

I'm willing to bet that Jack Chick (RIP as of Sunday) did as much to inspire rebellious teens to play D&D as he did to frighten parents against it.

Is it weird that I actually like his art?

But back to the article I posted above, was Jack Chick wrong? Didn't Dungeons & Dragons expose millions of teens to something cool that was "outside" the Bible? I can probably tell you more about the Lore from the Forgotten Realms or Middle Earth than I can tell you about the Old Testament. My thing is that reading Tolkien or Weiss & Hickman or many others made the Bible feel less real and more like the rest of the fiction. That was also true, however, of the occult sources I looked into as a teenager. I suppose it's the chicken and the egg argument, though. Did the True Texts of ancient times inspire modern fiction? Or has fiction always been the inspiration for the ancient texts?

[American Dream]

By the same token, many kids say that it was 'Drug Education" that made them most curious to get high...

[tapitsbo]

How do we feel about this Knowles piece on the subject?

http://secretsun.blogspot.ca/2017/01/mk ... -memo.html

I usually enjoy his site but this piece is quite a bit better than his usual.

[guruilla]

Read & vomit...

I have met Miller & done a podcast with her (ditto Wendy Hoffman)

She had retired, but now it seems that she can't even speak publicly on the subject due to this latest campaign by the ST

Canadian Therapist Gives Up License After Satanists Expose Her 'Mind Control' Talks

Ed Cara
Tuesday 1:10pm
Filed to:SATANIC PANIC

Activists with The Satanic Temple say a now-former therapist in Canada has been pushing conspiracies about globe-spanning, mind-controlling cults for years. And after they exposed some of her professional talks to her licensing board, she voluntarily gave up her psychology license.

In June, a representative of The Satanic Temple sent a complaint about retired therapist Alison Miller to the College of Psychologists of British Columbia, the organization responsible for licensing psychologists in the province. Though Miller retired from practicing therapy in 2018, the complaint accused her of causing harm by spreading “the dangerous notion that satanic cults engage in ritual abuse of children” in her public speeches and published books.

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The presentations highlighted in the complaint—including one titled “Working Through Your Traumatic Memories and Destroying the Mind Control”—were given by Miller at a 2017 conference hosted by Survivorship, an organization billed as a support group for victims of ritual abuse. The president of Survivorship, a Massachusetts-based licensed mental health counselor named Neil Brick, claims he is a ritual abuse survivor who was “programmed” by the Illuminati into becoming a killer and spy.

In Miller’s presentations, she passes along tales of her patients being abused by cult members who dressed up as Satan, red tail and all. At another point, she describes trying to steer a patient away from her belief that she had been abducted by aliens; instead, she said, it was more likely that a cult had implanted the memory of aliens in the patient in order to make her seem “crazy.” Miller also claims that repressed memories can be stored in the body and can periodically emerge as physical convulsions akin to “electroshock memory flashbacks,” and that victims of ritual abuse often cope with their trauma by dissociating and forming multiple personalities, though she refers to these personalities as “parts.”

“It can be hard to undo the damage of false memories.”
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Miller detailed many of these ideas in her 2011 book, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control. And though it’s unclear how many patients Miller may have worked with during her career, her LinkedIn page indicates she had been practicing as a registered psychologist in British Columbia since 1990—more than 25 years.

While still a matter of great controversy, some mental health professionals do believe that people can develop multiple personalities as a result of severe trauma—a condition called dissociative identity disorder, or DID, in the DSM. But according to Steven Lynn, director of the Laboratory of Consciousness, Cognition, and Psychopathology at Binghamton University in New York, most of Miller’s claims about how our memory functions, let alone the existence of these cults, are dubious.

“There is no scientific support that can be claimed for the validity of these statements; in fact, they are at the fringes of pseudoscience, much less grounded in evidence that would be accepted in any corner of the scientific community,” he told Gizmodo via email, referring to the stories Miller told of patients with repressed memories of cults and aliens that could cause seizure-like flashbacks.

Founded in 2013 by Lucien Greaves (a pseudonym), The Satanic Temple is most known for its political activism—the group’s name being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as its members don’t literally worship the devil. They’ve protested against lawmakers who are openly influenced by their conservative religious beliefs, in defiance of the separation between church and state. In several states, they’ve even sued the government for restricting residents’ access to abortion, arguing that such laws threaten the religious freedom and beliefs of their members, who worship an unabashedly pro-choice “Satan,” meant as a symbol for the need to rebel against “arbitrary authority.” Though envisioned as a high-minded satire of right-wing Christianity, The Satanic Temple has evolved into a genuine movement—warts and all—with chapters throughout the U.S. and non-profit status.

How The Satanic Panic Completely Changed The Way We Think About Memory
The Gateway podcast follows Gizmodo’s investigation into the influence internet spiritual guru Teal …

Read more
But Greaves has said that the inspiration for The Satanic Temple came from a very specific period during the 1980s and 1990s, when law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and the media stoked a moral frenzy over Satanic cults supposedly kidnapping, murdering, and wiping out the memories of people across the world. The Satanic Panic, as it came to be known, was aided by a small but influential group of mental health and self-help professionals who claimed they could dredge up the repressed memories of their patients, often said to be caused by ritualistic cult abuse. Ultimately, however, no objective evidence ever emerged of these cults existing, and at least some patients retracted their claims of repressed memories, saying it was the therapists who had victimized them with manipulative techniques meant to elicit false recollections.

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Though the Satanic Panic is no longer dominating headlines, The Satanic Temple says remnants of the Panic are still around today, in the form of therapists and others who espouse discredited theories about repressed memories and fearmonger about clandestine cults. To that end, they’ve established a dedicated off-shoot to investigate and bring attention to these therapists, called Grey Faction.

“The heyday of this was the 1980s and 1990s, sure. But it never really totally went away, and there hasn’t been much of a reckoning in the mental health field.”
“There are a couple of different groups and organizations with individuals who continue to promote the idea that there are roving gangs of Satanists abducting and abusing people so severely that they block it from their memory—and that these memories can only be recovered with the aid of a therapist at some point in the future,” Grey Faction director Evan Anderson told Gizmodo by phone. Grey Faction claims that Miller was one of these individuals.

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On October 22, the College of Psychologists of British Columbia (CPBC) responded to Anderson’s complaint, having conducted its own review. In response to the CPBC’s investigation, Miller defended her statements, citing some research and arguing that she was voicing the stories of her patients and had no reason to doubt their authenticity (attempts to reach Miller by Gizmodo have so far been unsuccessful).

“The respondent stated that her views regarding diagnostic and treatment issues related to survivors of ritual abuse have been taken out of context or misinterpreted,” the CPBC wrote in its reply to Anderson.

Though the CPBC declined to investigate the allegations of patient mistreatment, in part due to Miller’s retirement status, the organization nonetheless concluded that: “On their face, many of the Respondent’s statements are unusual and do not reflect mainstream beliefs about abuse, trauma, and mental health.” They were also concerned that Miller “expressed a degree of certainty about the activities of cults that may not be warranted, yet she did not limit her statement with a caution about the sources of her information.”

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Ordinarily, the CPBC’s findings might have prompted further action, up to and including professional censure. But according to the response, Miller told the CPBC during the investigation that she thought she needed to retain a non-practicing license in order to have access to her practice’s records. After being told that wasn’t the case, Miller sent a letter in late August stating that she was giving up her license. As a result, the investigation would be officially closed, the CPBC told Anderson.

While the CPBC’s findings aren’t as emphatic as Grey Faction would have liked, Anderson nonetheless considers it a victory, as the decision will prevent Miller from offering continuing education units, which are collected by therapists and social workers to maintain their license, through her presentations. Nor will she, the CPBC noted, be able to call herself a psychologist.

It’s fair to say that we’re no longer at the peak of the Satanic Panic. And, as Lynn notes, the more outlandish beliefs expressed during the Panic by therapists and others are not widely accepted in the mental health field. But there are still many people who believe that repressed memories exist and that anyone can successfully dig them out with the right methods, despite decades of research suggesting that these techniques are more likely to create false memories.

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As many as 8 percent of therapy patients in the U.S., according to a 2018 study, have seen a therapist who floated the possibility of them having repressed abuse, while 5 percent have actually undergone therapy to recover these memories. Just last year, Gizmodo reported on Teal Swan, an “internet spiritual guru” who encourages her followers on YouTube to do processes that uncover so-called repressed memories—and Swan herself was likely influenced by a therapist who played a key role in the Satanic Panic.

“Unfortunately, research shows that a minority of therapists and counsellors around the world still believe damaging memory myths,” Julia Shaw, a UK-based psychological scientist who has studied and written about the phenomenon of false memory, told Gizmodo in an email. “I have worked on legal cases myself in which impossible memories of abuse are described—impossible for logistic reasons (like the defendant not being in the country at the time) or because their brains could not have remembered the event (they were too young to be able to form memories). Unfortunately, such cases are not as rare as they might seem, and even for impossible cases it can be hard to undo the damage of false memories.”

According to Anderson, many of Miller’s ideas enjoy legitimacy in certain pockets of the therapy world. Prior to her retirement, Miller was closely associated with the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), an organization in existence since the early 1980s said to promote “clinically-effective and empirically-based” resources on how to treat trauma (previously, it was known as the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation). The ISSTD and its members are routinely presented as credible expert sources for understanding dissociative disorders, such as when ISSTD co-founder and former president Richard Kluft served as a consultant on a TV show about a woman with DID, “The United States of Tara.”

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As recently as 2017, Miller was chair of the ISSTD’s Ritual Abuse and Mind Control and Organized Abuse special interest group. Other past ISSTD members, including founder Bennett Braun, have been sued by their former patients for allegedly encouraging them to develop false memories. Gizmodo reached out to ISSTD for comment but did not receive a reply.

“Cases similar to the Miller case illustrate how a range of psychiatric folklore mixed with conspiracy theories can persist for decades after sufficient disconfirming evidence and argument has been presented,” Lawrence Patihis, a memory researcher at the University of Southern Mississippi and lead author of the 2018 study on repressed memory therapy in the U.S., told Gizmodo by email. “In the same way no medical clinicians should be allowed to practice pseudoscience, neither should psychology clinicians.”

So long as these organizations and therapists who still earnestly believe in the Satanic Panic exist, Anderson said, Grey Faction’s work isn’t done.

[Harvey]

A searing interview. I can see why she's being attacked.