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The thriving recovered-memory industry dismays psychiatrist Ganaway. "In some cases," he says, the hospitals and clinics "are memory mills with an almost assembly-line mentality," he says. "A patient comes in with no memories but leaves with memories of childhood incest or ritual abuse." Yet even some well-trained family and marriage counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists seem too quick to tie their patients' problems to repressed memories of incest and ritual abuse. "That makes psychotherapy very easy at first," explains Johns Hopkins' McHugh. "Therapists and patients can say, 'We found the secret.' The fact that the patients and families steadily become more confused, incoherent and chaotic is then believed to be an expression of the original incest." What is really happening, he says, is that "conflicts are being generated by false memories. We have found something to make therapy easy."
Some patients now leave their therapist's office convinced that they suffer from multiple-personality disorder, which is said to stem from repressed memories of early childhood trauma, including physical and sexual abuse. Until the publication of Sybil, MPD was apparently rare; around the world, only a few hundred cases had been documented over the previous three centuries. Since then, however, many thousands of supposed cases of MPD have been identified in the U.S. alone -- most of them incorrectly, say critics, by therapists who are looking for an easy solution in their search for evidence of childhood sexual abuse or who too easily accept the likelihood of the disorder. One problem, says Ganaway, is that once these patients have been diagnosed with MPD, they are convinced that they have it, tend to exhibit what they think are the symptoms and often reinterpret their entire life histories accordingly.
Those charges infuriate Dr. Richard Kluft, a Philadelphia psychiatrist, who works extensively with MPD patients. "It's an absolute lie that MPD is a rare psychiatric disorder," he says. He attributes the sharp rise in reported MPD cases to the rise of feminism and the resulting willingness of people "to speak out more openly on issues of exploitation and abuse."
Another doctor who believes that MPD is fairly common is Bennett Braun, medical director of the dissociative-disorders program at Rush-Presbyterian- St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. Braun says the number of cases of MPD has risen not for faddish reasons but because therapists have become better at recognizing the symptoms.
In his 12-bed unit at Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, a branch of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, Braun treats MPD cases, some of whom think that they are victims of satanic-ritual abuse. When he first began to hear the satanic stories in 1985, Braun says, he was incredulous. Now, having heard similar tales from many people from different states and countries and having treated more than 200 of them, he declares, "Yes, there is satanic-ritual abuse."