|
 ost
shrinks are good people who want to help their clients get better. They aren't
always able to do so, though in these days of Prozac and other mood-altering
drugs their success rates are higher than ever. I'm not pro-drug, especially
when it comes to mind-altering drugs, but having personally seen two
perpetually-depressed people benefit immensely from taking Prozac-type pills, I
can't deny that they have some use, even if I do think they are vastly
over-prescribed. Especially the ones they use to drug children into obedience;
an opinion that will likely change once I've got one or two of the little
bastards running around my own house.
While
this page collects some stories of good psychiatrists, it archives stories of
bad ones too. And since the bad stories are more often in the news and much more
interesting to read, you can guess which type are more likely to show up on this
page. More
recent additions are on top.
February
14, 2004
Remember all of those Satanic
panic stories from the 80s, when crazy psychiatrists convinced people
that they had repressed memories, and that their children had been
tortured and sold for Satanic sex, or abused for kiddy porn, or that vast
conspiracies of Satan worshipers were ruling the world? No? I
hardly do either, but a few court cases related to them are still going
on.
Rush North Shore
Medical Center psychiatrist Bennett Braun and psychologist Roberta Sachs
paid a northwest suburban woman $7.5 million to settle her claim that
they brainwashed her into believing she was a member of a cult and
needed to be sterilized so she would not bear any more babies to be
sacrificed for the cult.
The truth is that
Elizabeth Gale, 52, never had any children. She was just a woman with
mild depression who surrendered herself to the care of Braun in 1986.
"At the time, Dr.
Braun and his team were recognized national experts in multiple
personality syndrome, recovery of repressed memories of childhood abuse,
etc.," said Mary Ellen Busch, attorney for Rush, which denies the
charges. "Over the last 10 years, the methods by which repressed
memories were recovered have become very controversial."
So just what did they
tell the woman she'd been doing?
Braun and Sachs
"convinced Ms. Gale she had dozens of different personalities which
had been created as a result of the horrific trauma they told her she
suffered as a child," said her attorney, Todd Smith of Power Rogers
& Smith. Smith takes over this summer as president of the American
Trial Lawyers Association.
He said Braun and Sachs
"convinced Ms. Gale she was a member of a worldwide secret ...
satanic cult ... that Ms. Gale was a 'breeder' for the cult and that she
had sacrificed her previous children, when she in fact had never had
children," Smith said. Braun and Sachs "instructed Ms. Gale to
undergo a tubal ligation to avoid further 'cult pregnancies.' She did so
in May of 1991."
They persuaded Gale to
abandon her family, change her name more than once, quit her job and
sell all her possessions to stay a step ahead of the alleged
"cult," Smith said.
Their strategy with
Gale mirrored the approach they took with Patricia Burgus, with whom
many of the same defendants settled for $10.6 million in 1997, Smith
said. Braun had Burgus convinced she was "high priestess" of
the alleged cult.
Neither Braun nor Sachs
has ever been criminally charged for their actions with Gale, Burgess or
other patients in their repressed memory therapy. A federal prosecutor
in Houston filed fraud charges against a colleague of theirs in Texas
but did not secure a conviction.
I think the most
outrageous part is that not only didn't the "doctors" get sent
to prison, they didn't even lose their medical licenses. They got
kicked out of the state, but both are still practicing in America.
Now there's a pair of shrinks to stay away from.
Go in depressed, come out
insane. That's not quite how it's supposed to work.
|
