News Items

Contents:

Churches Misled on Child Protection. The Scientific and Professional Advisory Board to BFMS writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, to correct the misinformation provided by their child protection advisors to the Safeguarding Adviser for the Church of England and Methodist Church, the Reverend Pearl Luxon.

Church must accept reality of false memories of childhood sexual abuse. The notion that therapists can help people to 'recover' memories of sexual abuse causes serious harm to patients and their families, writes psychologist Chris French.

Call for church to renounce book aimed at victims of child sexual abuse. Scientists specialising in false memory syndrome have written to the archbishop ofCanterbury criticising The Courage to Heal, which they describe as 'misleading' and 'potentially harmful'.

Consultation on the Statutory Regulation of Psychotherapists and Counsellors - The Health Professions Council (HPC) has launched a consultation and invite professionals and the public to contribute by 16th October 2009. To download copies of the consultation please see the HPC Website.

Dear Tanya: Is psychotherapy to blame for our daughter’s lack of contact? We don’t understand why our daughter has distanced herself from her family - The Times, 21 July 2009

Professor Chris French, BFMS Advisory Board member, has a new regular column on the Guardian Online science pages. His next topic will discuss false memories and the work of the BFMS and will be appearing on Tuesday, 7th April. Please feel free to leave your comments on the blog site.

Hysteria in Four Acts - Article by Paul McHugh in Commentary Magazine.com, December 2008

Mother loses libel battle over 'Ugly' lawyer's misery memoir - The Times, 2 December 2008

Mother denies judge's abuse claim - BBC News, 18 November 2008

Weird ... or what? Why do people have paranormal experiences? - The Guardian, 14 October 2008

Is your mind playing tricks on you? - The Guardian, 16 September 2008

False child abuse claims to be kept on file - The Daily Telegraph, 13 September 2008

Study shows how false memories rerun 7/7 film that never existed - The Guardian, 10 September 2008

Experts able to plant false memories in minds - The Herald 29th August 2008

Family torn apart by child abuse slur - The Sunday Mercury, 22 July 2008

Can you regulate psychotherapy? - The Times, 15 July 2008

New research sparks fears over paedophile convictions - The Sunday Mercury, 14 July 2008 plus letters published in response - 20 July 2008

You can't trust a witness's memory, experts tell courts - The Times, 11 July 2008

Courts do not rely on a person’s memory alone - The Times, 11 July 2008

CBS remake of "Sybil" - Press release from Pamela Freyd, FMSF in America to TV Movie Reviewer - 5 June 2008

Memory, make-believe and the courts - what's the mischief? - Inside Time, May 2008

I see a tall,dark stranger...from trading standards - The Times, 23 May 2008

When claims are false, lives can be destroyed - The Times, 20 December 2007

Dangerous Convictions - Inside Time, December 2007

Second Opinion - Private Eye, 23 November - 6 December 2007

Disciplinary Notice - Mrs Janet Sinclair - The Psychologist, December 2007

Lies of Little Miss Misery - Daily Mail, 1 November 2007

Brain Stains and Brain Stains: In Sheri's Words - Scientific American, October 2007

Woman wins memory therapy pay-out - The Press Association, 20 October 2007

Talking therapy roll-out gets thumbs-up - Community Care, 18 October 2007

Psychobabble is ruining thousands of minds - The Observer, 4 February 2007

Click any of the following for news items from that year

2006 - 2005 - 2004 - 2003 - 2002 - 2001 - 2000 - 1999

Health Professions Council - Statutory Regulation of Psychotherapists and Counsellors

Further information is in preparation.

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CBS remake of "Sybil"

The item below is a press release that Pamela Freyd has just sent to TV reviewers:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - TV MOVIE REVIEWER - JUNE 5, 2008

SYBIL: AN MPD HOAX

On Saturday June 7, 2008 CBS will air its remake of the movie SYBIL, (based on the 1973 book with the same name) about an early, alleged case of "multiple-personality disorder" (MPD).

SYBIL was the first major book/movie to tie "MPD" to child abuse. Before SYBIL was published, there were fewer than 50 reported cases of MPD worldwide. By 1994, over 40,000 cases had been reported.

SYBIL, however, is well known to be a hoax. See, for example, The New York Review of Books, 44(7), April 24, 1997, "Sybil-The Making of a Disease: An Interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel," by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen.1

Dr. Spiegel (Faculty, Columbia Medical School) reported that statements from the real "Sybil" convinced him that her "memories" were the result of suggestion by Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur. He reports that Wilbur engaged author Flora Rheta Schreiber to write "Sybil's" case for a popular audience only after professional journals refused to publish it. He refused to lend his name and credentials to co-author the work when asked to do so by Wilbur and Schreiber.The 2006 book The Bifurcation of the Self: The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorder (Springer) by Professor Robert Rieber (Fordham University) documents how the hoax was perpetrated. Rieber had access to the original Schreiber/Wilbur interview tapes made when Sybil was being written. We learn that the "memories were a result of prolonged hypnosis and, to quote Dr. Wilbur: "Uh, the first time we got any memories back was when I gave her Pentothal ..."  (Rieber, page 217)2

Wilbur's treatment of Sybil required eleven years and a total of 2,254 sessions.

In a letter to Dr. Wilbur, (reprinted in Rieber page 91) Schreiber reports that she had visited "Sybil's" hometown but was unable to find anyone to corroborate the awful things that supposedly happened to"Sybil" there.  Schreiber was also unable to find the "woods" where
many incidents allegedly occurred.

Will the CBS remake of SYBIL include the information documenting Sybil's MPD as a hoax? Does it matter?  Yes! Bitter experience shows that when the media give credence to psychological anomalies, they spread wildly.

Media coverage played a pivotal role in the dissemination of McMartin preschool copycat cases in the mid 1980's, the spread of the "Satanic Panic" and alien abduction sightings in the 1990's, and in widely held beliefs about "repressed" memories of childhood abuse.

SYBIL played a substantial role in a cultural and psychiatric tsunami, later known as the "false" or "recovered" memory debate. In spite of professional skepticism about MPD and multi-million dollar malpractice suits by former MPD patients, there is danger of unleashing another
tsunami unless the truth is told.

Does anyone care?  Yes!  As Oprah Winfrey's recent experience over the fraudulent James Frey memoir A Million Little Pieces shows, the public really does care to know whether the material served them by the media is fact or fiction.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://www.fmsfonline.org/sybil.html (including the Spiegel interview from the New York Review of Books.

[1] Available from the FMS Foundation. See also http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=1199
[2] This book contains more than 75 pages of transcripts of conversations between Wilbur and Schreiber.

The new TV movie originally scheduled to be shown on CBS over a year ago. It has, in fact, since been shown in six other countries:

Italy - 28 May 2007
New Zealand - 15 Jun 2007   
Dominican Republic - 4 Aug 2007 
Brazil - 20 Aug 2007
Norway - 3 Jan 2008
Hungary - 23 Feb 2008       

It is now finally being slipped into a summer Saturday slot with no advanced publicity. The only mention on the CBS website (www.cbs.com) is in the weekly schedule.

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Woman wins memory therapy pay-out

A woman who falsely accused her father of rape after undergoing a discredited form of psychotherapy has won a £20,000 payout from health bosses.

Katrina Fairlie, 37, sued NHS Tayside claiming that the 'recovered memory' treatment that triggered the accusations ruined her and her family's lives.

Ms Fairlie, daughter of former deputy leader of the Scottish National Party Jim Fairlie, underwent the therapy after being referred to Perth's Murray Royal Hospital in 1994.

See also: Woman who falsely accused her father of rape reveals 'doctors hijacked my mind', £20,000 payout for woman who falsely accused her father of rape after 'recovered memory' therapy and Settlement for bogus abuse woman

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Talking therapy roll-out gets thumbs-up

Mental health charities welcomed a government pledge yesterday to roll out talking therapy services across England to treat depression and anxiety.

Health secretary Alan Johnson committed to increasing NHS spending on psychological therapies to £170m by 2010-11, meaning an extra 900,000 people will be treated over the next three years and all GPs eventually will be able to offer the service.

This constitutes a massive increase on current pilot funding on talking therapies: £3.7m over two years for the two major pilots in Doncaster and Newham, east London, which were launched last year, and £2m in total annually for 11 further pilots launched this year. 

A survey of over 15,000 community mental health service users published last month by the Healthcare Commission found that over one-third of people who wanted talking treatments did not receive them.

This is despite guidance issued in 2004 by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence calling for people to be offered talking therapies for common mental health problems, given their effectiveness.

A coalition of five mental health charities - the Mental Health Foundation, Mind, Rethink, the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health and YoungMinds - which is campaigning for the guidance to be implemnted said yesterday's announcement was a "welcome boost".

Mental Health Foundation chief executive Andrew McCulloch said: "We hope this will result in the extension of psychological therapies to people of all ages, especially older people, young people and to ethnic minority groups, who are often harder to reach and less likely to be offered talking therapy treatments by their GPs."

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Psychobabble is ruining thousands of minds - The Observer, 4 February 2007

Your report, 'Crackdown on therapists who abuse vulnerable', (News, last week) will have been welcomed by the thousands who have had their lives wrecked by poor quality therapy and counselling.
We at the British False Memory Society deal every week with people who have been falsely accused of historical sexual abuse. More often than not, the accusation is made by a now-adult child against his or her parent, often following prolonged counselling sessions. In our experience, too many therapists are all ready to conclude that a person's problems have arisen because they were abused as a child. Once this theory is suggested, it can be easy for a vulnerable individual to be suggestible to the idea that these events happened and, with the guidance of the therapist, recall 'repressed memories', which can cause irreparable damage.

The therapy industry has had years to get its house in order. Now hundreds of families are looking to the government finally to bring evidenced-based practice to the thousands of vulnerable people seeking help.

Madeline Greenhalgh
Director

Matt Smith
External Communications Manager
British False Memory Society
Wiltshire

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