When the U.S. Government filed Criminal Charges Against Therapists

[This article was written 1n 1997 and updated in 1998.  It deals with events that may be of historic interest, but the treatment program discussed no longer exists.]

In September of 1988, the first criminal trial involving recovered memories opened in Houston, Texas. The trial ended in a mistrial, but important issues were raised. 

Is the U.S. government in the business of deciding whether a diagnosis is accurate? That's the concern some therapists have over a recent court action. The International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSD) and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) announced that Judith Peterson, Ph.D., Richard Seward, M.D., and three others are being charged with criminal insurance fraud, mail fraud, and other unknown charges. [We now know that the charges are actually "mail fraud" and "conspiracy".] They were also charged with "misdiagnosing" patients. In the past misdiagnosis has been dealt with in civil court as a malpractice action.

Peterson was the director of the Dissociative Disorders unit at Spring Shadows Glen Hospital in Houston Texas, and Seward was the Medical Director. The unit reportedly charged over $15,000 per day (according to Pendergrast, 1996) to hospitalize patients who suffered from severe dissociative disorders. It appears that Peterson and Seward are charged with misdiagnosing patients and convincing them that they had been abused by a Satanic cult. Peterson has since stated that she is no longer certain that the Satanic memories are accurate, but that these memories may have been cover stories which were implanted by other groups who abused these patients (again according to Pendergrast, 1996).

As I reported in a previous article I had the misfortune of referring a patient to the Spring Shadows Glen program when it had the reputation of being a cutting edge dissociative disorders treatment program. In my opinion, the treatment which this person received at Spring Shadows Glen caused more problems than it solved. The indictment alleges that that Spring Shadows Glen used techniques similar to mind control. This allegation does not surprise me.

Many of the patients treated in the program were reportedly tied to the beds in restraints for sessions designed to encourage them to re-live and "abreact" the abuse which was assumed to be the root of their disorder. Did this encourage patients to "remember" events? The ISSD issued a press release which was widely distributed over the Internet. They speculate on the possible implications of the indictment in the following way:

Allegations of this kind belong in the civil domain, not in criminal court. They are malpractice and negligence complaints. In fact, the people who Dr. Peterson allegedly defrauded have already sued her; their cases were settled out of court....By prosecuting Dr. Peterson on charges of this kind, the Federal government is indicating their willingness to set standards for diagnosis and treatment. By criteria not yet known to ISSD, they have decided that Dr. Peterson purposely diagnosed DID when it was not present and purposely created false memories. They have also seemingly decided that the patients' memories were not accurate.

Imagine what will happen when this scenario is generalized to other patients and other professionals. Will any patient who is unhappy with the outcome of any form of therapy be able to allege that purposeful criminal fraudulent therapy was performed and cause a therapist to be indicted? Will the government now seek to imprison doctors treating patients who allege Agent Orange exposure, Gulf War Syndrome, unknowing exposure to government radiation testing, or other events that the government has not wished to acknowledge? Will mental health providers risk jail time for treating those traumatized by combat activities that the government prefers to deny? Will a physician be subject to prison time for mistakenly diagnosing indigestion in a patient who is having a heart attack? If these things can occur, then what professionals in their right mind will want to remain as providers of health care? (From ISSD Email Press Release, 10/97)

I was a member of ISSD at the time, but I believe that their press release is a bit alarmist. Peterson, Seward, and others are reportedly accused of some clearly unethical and illegal practices including mail fraud. The most serious charges seem to be clear violations of law. The charge of "misdiagnosis" bothers me, but it does not appear to be one of the central charges.

Judith Peterson seems to have started with a genuine motive to help people. She and other professionals such as Cory Hammond, Ph.D. believed that many abuse survivors with ritual abuse memories were victims of government mind control experiments gone amok. Some excerpts from a speech by Hammond in June of 1992 may help us understand the climate of the time:

Here's where it appears to have come from. At the end of World War II, before it even ended, Allen Dulles and people from our Intelligence Community... [managed to] get out some Nazi doctors who have been doing mind-control research in the camps. The people that came, the Nazi doctors, were Satanists. Subsequently, the boy [who they brought with them] changed his name, Americanized it some, obtained an M.D. degree, became a physician and continued this work that appears to be at the center of Cult Programming today....

...My best guess is that the purpose of it is that they want an army of Manchurian Candidates, ten of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, all sorts of very lucrative things and do their bidding and eventually the megalomaniacs at the top believe they'll create a Satanic Order that will rule the world. (D.C.Hammond, 1992, quoted as "Greenbaum Speech")

This speech is available in several slightly different versions online. Not everyone should read it, however. If you are a trauma survivor you may wish to avoid reading the above transcript because it contains descriptions of child abuse and torture techniques. A "victim safe" version is posted here.  The speech has resided at different placed on the Web. To fully appreciate this theory you need to read the entire transcript.  Since these links change frequently, try these alternate locations of the transcript:

• http://www.tesserae.org/tess/places/gb.html
• http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/institutional_analysis/ritabus.html
• http://www.angelfire.com/ca/heart7/green.html

I have heard both Peterson and Hammond speak on this subject, and the transcripts available online accurately reflect much of the theory they were operating under. Hammond put the theory into words, but Peterson took it one step further. She seems to have treated it as proven fact; and treated patients as if they all had these programmed structures within themselves. If patients were indeed tied down in restraints with the intent of probing for these structures, then it is conceivable that similar structures were created in at least a few patients.

This is beyond what Hammond was advocating, I think. He had discovered some patterns in some very disturbed patients and shared his discovery with a professional audience. Hammond's speculation concerning the conspiracy behind the abuse may be troubling, but it is not necessarily harmful. The harm comes from mistreating other people.

Hammond, Peterson, and Seward are not the only ones who believe that government mind control experiments have left human casualties. Projects with names such as MK-ULTRA, Artichoke, and Bluebird have been acknowledged by government officials in documents produced under the Freedom of Information Act. These experiments appear to have been conducted in the U.S. and Canada, and perhaps other places. Survivors of these experiments have the right to effective therapy.

What should we do as therapists? We need to be sure that we are using treatment techniques which are validated by research and by the clinical results of others. We need to be vigilant about boundary issues and ethics, while remaining compassionate about the things that our patients have been through. Above all, we need to heed Hypocrites' words "First do no harm." A variation of these words can be found in all of our ethical guidelines.

What do you think?

For further information on some of these issues try these links:

• "False memory Syndrome" Facts site
• Government Research into E.S.P. and Mind Control
• The International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSD)
• The False Memory Syndrome Foundation
• The Recovered Memory Project at Brown University
• APA Ethical Guidelines

Here are the features which cover these issues

• What the Hell is Satanic Ritual Abuse
• The Debate over Recovered Memories: A $5.8 million award sparks renewed interest in the discussion of recovered memories and false memories.
• Guest Column from the Memory Wars: A patient who attended a controversial treatment program speaks out.
• Pros and Cons of Support Groups for Trauma Survivors. Part 1: Real life and Online groups both have advantages and disadvantages.
• Pros and Cons of Support Groups for Trauma Survivors. Part 2: An interview with Lisa Varhola about her experiences with online support groups.
• The U.S. Government files Charges Against Therapists: Should all Therapists worry about this?
• New Research on Recovered Memories: A new Dutch study documents that memory for abuse can be lost and then recovere
• Corroboration of Child Abuse Memories: Elizabeth Bowman, M.D. reviews the literature on recovered memories which have been corroborated.
• Reliability and Suggestibility of Child Abuse Memories - Part I
  A look at the literature on hypnosis and memory and the implications for recovered memories.
• Reliability and Suggestibility of Child Abuse Memories - Part 2
  Further information on these issues

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