OHIO ASSOCIATION OF RESPONSIBLE MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICES

 November 2001

Although Paul McHugh is retiring, hopefully he will still be around to continue the fight for the elimination of false memories. Dr. McHugh has been one of our most helpful and esteemed supporters over the last 9 years. I will be sending more information on some of the items he has written for those who paid their dues. Below is a quote from Peter Freyd on the Friday, Oct 28. Law & order show. For those who saw the show there is an address you can write.

~Carole

(Peter Freyd) Date: Mon, Oct 1, 2001, 11:20am

To: FMS-News@saul.cis.upenn.edu

Subject: writing NBC

My favorite line from "Repression", the Law & Order episode that NBC premiered on Friday, was:

"Technically it's called 'false memory syndrome' but I call it the 'power of suggestion run amok.'"

The speaker was the Police Department's psychologist explaining how everyone had been so misled by a young lady's horrendous accounts of continuing molestation. For those who have asked for an address to write:

Viewer Relations

30 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10112

and/or nbcshows@nbc.com

Arthur Hirsch

Dr. Paul McHugh

Psychiatry's guru eyes new chapter; Influence: For years, Hopkins' Dr. Paul R. McHugh has been a rigorous leader in his field, and that's not expected to change with retirement.

Dr. Paul R. McHugh is still on duty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he's been director of psychiatry for 26 years, but he's already been transfigured on canvas - captured in oil, framed in carved wood and soon to be hung in a library annex. Generations to come will see a man in a white coat, eyeglasses in his left hand, his congenial face open to possibilities, perched on a chair as if impatient with sitting.

The official portrait is part of the retirement package, although McHugh is not exactly retired, which only makes the painted image seem that much more apropos. Here's a fellow who resists sitting back in his chair, much less fading away.

Technically, as of this week, McHugh retired as Hopkins' director of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. As a practical matter, however, he will remain interim director until a successor is named. After that, he will work as a clinician and researcher, devoting more time to writing, through which he established a national reputation for chastising his own profession. Psychiatry has moved from one epoch to another since McHugh arrived in Baltimore, and much of the change has affirmed his convictions. But McHugh figures he still has a role to play in the profession's evolution.

"I felt that the only things that I could do now would be to spend more time on my own writing, and that I didn't want to go when people were saying 'Gee, he's lost a step,' " McHugh says. “ I love it, going out the way I'm going, people saying 'How will we replace him?' and all of that. Well, in two or three years you'll know how to replace me."

A committee searching since fall for McHugh's successor recently recommended a candidate, says Dr. Solomon H. Snyder, committee co-chairman. The candidate's name has been passed along in confidence to Edward Miller, chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine, and no information will be released until Miller's office announces the next chief of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Snyder says.

McHugh, a Massachusetts native who came to Baltimore from the University of Oregon, says he agreed two years ago with Miller that he would retire soon after he turned 70 in May 2001. "Seventy is a good age, wouldn't you say?" he says.

It appears so for McHugh, who seems to have Prozac flowing naturally in his veins. At a recent testimonial dinner given in McHugh's honor,

Dr. Richard S. Ross, dean emeritus of the School of Medicine, joked that when embroiled in difficult departmental matters, "I felt so much better after talking with Paul McHugh that I sometimes wondered if he understood the problem."

That would be the McHugh personal style, the backslapping, Massachusetts- accented bonhomie one might associate with someone running for mayor of Boston. The voice that emerges in his writing, and by all accounts in his teaching, is another matter.

That would be not the schmoozer but the stickler for intellectual rigor. McHugh as psychiatric guru would give his disciples this mantra for lifetime repetition: How do I know this?

McHugh has wielded a simple enough question like a scalpel. Over the years in his writings in the American Scholar, Commentary, the Weekly Standard and more specialized scholarly journals, McHugh has dissected what he considers psychiatry's tendency to fall in love with culturally fashionable theories. Says McHugh, who came to psychiatry from a medical residency in neurology: Where's the evidence? How do you know that?

Edward Shorter, who published "A History of Psychiatry" in 1997, says McHugh has "led the assault on political correctness in psychiatry," adding that "it took some courage to go against the tide" at the time McHugh published some of his toughest articles in the early 1990s.

McHugh is probably best known for his critique of recovered memory syndrome and the related psychiatric diagnosis of multiple-personality disorder. McHugh rejected both notions, saying therapists were putting these ideas into their patients' heads. Shorter, a professor at the University of Toronto, says that since McHugh wrote about it, recovered memory, which typically involved unearthed recollections of childhood sexual abuse, has been "entirely discredited in psychiatry."

He has questioned the rationale for physician-assisted suicide and the sanity of its best-known champion, Dr. Jack Kevorkian; he has challenged the evidence for post-traumatic stress disorder and assailed the psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), for its proliferation of diagnostic categories insufficiently supported by clinical research. McHugh compares much of the DSM to the sort of appearance-based diagnostics practiced in general medicine in the mid-19th century.

Robert L. Spitzer, a Columbia University psychiatrist and biometrics specialist who has played an important role in compiling the DSM, praises McHugh's contribution on recovered memory, but says he "may have gone too far" in some of his views, including his dismissal of multiple-personality disorder.

Spitzer calls McHugh a "marvelous example of somebody who is a role model as a clinician" while also doing research and running a department, but he questions whether his views have really caught on, and suggests that his criticism of the DSM puts him outside the mainstream of the field. "He's a maverick," Spitzer says, "very individualistic."

That assessment has to be balanced against the fact that McHugh also has been head of psychiatry at Hopkins, which has for years been considered one of the best departments in the country. Shorter goes so far as to say that in psychiatry, "the United States leads the train in the world and Hopkins leads the U.S."

McHugh took charge there late in 1975, which, give or take a few years, corresponds to what McHugh calls "the end of the second epoch in American psychiatric history.” Freudian psychoanalysis was waning, overshadowed by advancements in the understanding of brain chemistry and by an emphasis on the kind of categorization of diagnoses represented in the DSM.

Fragmentation of the field was reflected in the Hopkins department of psychiatry, which had been without a director since Dr. Joel Elkes left the position at the end of 1973. Under Elkes, Hopkins psychiatrists were allowed to go their own ways in their approaches to patient treatment, says Dr. Richard J. Johns, who was a member of the search committee that recommended McHugh as psychiatric chief. "The department didn't have any real central focus," says Johns, distinguished service professor of biomedical engineering and medicine. "It was sort of all over the place."

McHugh's resistance to the lax atmosphere that then prevailed was clear even before he was selected to head the department. On his first visit to Hopkins, Johns recalls, McHugh was asked to conduct a round of short patient interviews before an audience of psychiatric residents and doctors, many of whom were smoking, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. After the patient left the room, McHugh said he'd done rounds in many hospitals, but had never seen staff members eating and smoking in a patient's presence. This remark prompted a rush to the ashtrays and garbage cans. The McHugh era had effectively begun.

"It was not an authoritarian approach," Johns says. But once he was appointed, McHugh "made clear what his expectations were, you might say."

What followed were two or three difficult years of transition during which power in the department shifted from staff members with backgrounds in social work and psychotherapy toward more of a medicine-based approach.

Dr. Richard S. Ross, who was dean of the School of Medicine at the time, recalls that "a lot of social workers, psychotherapist types, came to see me" to share their concern about where McHugh was taking the department. Ross says he made it clear he supported McHugh. "I just think McHugh felt M.D.-psychiatrists should be in the driver's seat," Ross says. "It was not a bloody revolution or anything like that."

McHugh has talked about his original mission to bring "coherent discourse" to a department that had become a kind of therapeutic Tower of Babel.

His goal was to get the staff talking a common language about patient care. This notion of interrelated rather than competing approaches - biological, social, behavioral - is explained in "The Perspectives of Psychiatry," which McHugh first published with his colleague Dr. Phillip R. Slavney in 1983.

"I was trying to teach the different meanings of psychiatry," McHugh says. "I wanted to develop a program here at Hopkins that would have people that were interested in the brain and also interested in testing for I.Q., interested in just plain personal stories. And that's really the story of my 26 years."

Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse

A One-Day Seminar offering CEU's for Psychologists,

Social Workers, Counselors, and Attorneys

Featuring...

Mark Pendergrast; Author--Independent Scholar

Terence W. Campbell, Ph.D. Author--Forensic Psychologist

Jack Quattrocchi, Esq. Family Law Attorney

Saturday, November 17, 2001

Campus Center Theater

University of Vermont

Burlington, VT 05405

Conference Description

All responsible citizens support the implementation of effective programs to reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse, assist victims, and punish those who harm children. These efforts must be based on fact rather than prejudice, on science rather than hysteria, and on reason and rationality rather than political ideology. With recent government reports detailing increased prevalence of child abuse comes growing awareness in legal and scientific communities that both children and adults are susceptible to the effects of misleading suggestions. Scientific research has demonstrated unequivocally that individuals of all ages may come to believe that they have actually experienced what they merely imagined, that memories can be false.

Although external verification is the only way to prove the validity of an uncovered "memory," convictions of child sexual abuse in our judicial system are often based solely on the testimony of children who have been subjected to leading, suggestive interviewing.

This conference will address the issues involved in differentiating between true and false allegations of sexual abuse and offer suggestions for incorporating knowledge into clinical practice. It will examine the factors which affect the reliability of both children's and adults' testimony.

Participants will learn about the history of false memory syndrome, the science of memory, and the role that rumor and hysteria often play in the genesis of false beliefs.

As justice, law enforcement, mental health, medical, and religious officials and parents work with children, they share the dual goal of making punishment more likely when children have been molested and making verdicts of innocence more likely when accusations are unwarranted. By attending this conference you will gain an insight into how conviction rates can be improved by separating out false claims from genuine cases of abuse, thereby enhancing the rationality of verdicts in child sex abuse prosecutions and allowing for the exoneration of innocent people who have been caught up in the sex abuse hysteria which has swept our nation.

8:00 Registration

8:25 Welcome and Introduction:

Richard E. Musty, Ph. D., Dep't of Psychology, University of Vermont

8:30 Memory Creation and Science

Mark Pendergrast; Independent Scholar and Author

Rumor, Pseudoscience, and Urban Legends

The Science of Human Memory

False Memory Syndrome: How to Believe the Unbelievable

Survivorship as Religion; The Perils of Hypnosis

Dissociative Identity Disorder/MPD/PTSD Debate

Believing the Children, Only When They Say What You Want

10:15 Refreshment Break

10:30 Children, Suggestibility, and Autobiographical Memory

Terence W. Campbell, Ph. D

Cognitive and biological variables influencing a child's report

accuracy

Source Amnesia; Source Misattribution; Interviewer Bias

Children as witnesses; What an expert on child suggestibility should tell the court

Rumor formation and dissemination

Interviewing techniques; Formal and Informal; Importance of

videotaping

12:15 Lunch--On your own

1:15 The Roles of the Legal System and Experts

Jack Quattrocchi, Esq. Institutionalization of Prosecution; Fetish of Finality vs. Desire for Justice

Rape Shield Laws: "Victim" or "Complaining Witness"?

From Rumor to "Reality"--Growing Consensus of "experts"

Reason and Rights; Courtroom: Setting for Justice or Therapy?

Experts: Educators of Fact-Finders or Advocates Providing

Conclusions?

Exonerating the Innocent: Judicial Review Panels

2:45 Refreshment Break

3:00 Panel Discussion; Questions and Answers

4:15 Closing Comments and Issuance of Certificates of Attendance

Objectives

After attending this seminar, the participant will be able to:

· Discuss some of the problems inherent in distinguishing between true and false accusations of child sexual abuse

· Identify some overarching issues in the child suggestibility debate

· Discuss the roles of rumor, pseudoscience, urban legends, and hysteria in the creation of false memories

· Recognize suggestive techniques that are utilized in the interview

process

· Discuss proper role of expert witnesses in the courtroom

· Recognize problems inherent in child sex abuse prosecutions and

identify possible solutions

· Understand the nature of human memory, with its distortions and

strengths

· Identify inappropriate types of psychotherapy as well as those proven effective

Terence W. Campbell, Ph. D

Author of Smoke and Mirrors: The Devastating Effect of False Sexual Abuse Claims, Terence W. Campbell earned a doctoral degree in Human Development and Clinical Psychology completed post-doctoral training in family therapy at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He specializes in family psychology and forensic psychology in his private practice in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

Dr. Campbell's work has appeared in many scientific and professional journals, such as the American Journal of Forensic Psychology, American

Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, Michigan Bar Journal, and Psychotherapy. He is also a member of the Scientific and Professional Advisory Board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation of Philadelphia.

Mark Pendergrast; Independent Scholar, Author

Investigative journalist and scholar, Harvard graduate Mark Pendergrast is the author of Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives. His other books include For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, named a

Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and, his most recent, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs as well as documentaries based on his books. He has given presentations before professional groups throughout the United States, Canada, and Germany.at the University of Maryland and

Jack Quattrocchi, Esq.

A graduate of Boston University School of Law, Jack Quattrocchi has over thirty years experience as a family law attorney. Physical and sexual abuse allegations often surfaced during custody, support, and visitation disputes. While some of the allegations were tragically true, a significant portion were unfounded, improbable, contrived, or even malicious. The necessity of protecting the child from real abuse while sorting out false claims often revealed glaring failures in the system. Mr. Quattrocchi will outline the problem and some ideas to improve the legal, child welfare, psychotherapy, social welfare, and police response.

What Reviewers Say About Victims of Memory An impressive display of scholarship. Pendergrast demonstrates a laudable ability to lay out all sides of the argument.

Daniel L. Schacter, Scientific AmericanA well-written, well-researched, stimulating book. Obligatory reading.

Nathaniel Branden, Author, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

Anyone touched by the subject of repressed memories would do well to read this book.

Burton Einspruch, M.D., Journal of the AMA

What Reviewers Say About Smoke and Mirrors

Inevitably controversial, the book addresses two hot topics in psychology, therapy, criminal, and personal injury law--determination of the truth or falsity of child sexual abuse allegations and "repressed-memory" claims.

Campbell offers always thoughtful, research-based (but disputed) insights about both topics.

Robert J. Levy, J.D., William L. Prosser Professor of Law, University of

Minnesota Law School, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Judges, prosecutors, attorneys, and police would be especially well advised to keep this book handy and to follow its eminently sane advice.

Frederick Crews, Author, The Memory Wars; Editor, Unauthorized Freud

Please complete the form and mail with check to:

Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse Conference

Dep't of Psychology, University of VT

Burlington VT 05405

JUST FOR BEING AMERICAN
by Dave Barry

No humor column today. I don't want to write it, and you don't want to read it. No words of wisdom, either. I wish I were wise enough to say something that would help make sense of this horror, something that would help ease the unimaginable pain of the victims' loved ones, but I'm not that wise. I'm barely capable of thinking.
Like many others, I've spent the hours since Tuesday morning staring at the television screen, sometimes crying, sometimes furious, but mostly just stunned. What I can't get out of my mind is the fact that they used our own planes.
I grew up in the Cold War, when we always pictured the threat as coming in the form of missiles -- sleek, efficient death machines, unmanned, hurtling over the North Pole from far away. But what came, instead, were our own commercial airliners, big friendly flying buses coming from Newark and Boston with innocent people on board. Red, white and blue planes, with "United'' and "American'' written on the side. The planes you've flown in and I've flown in. That's what they used to attack us.
They were able to do it in part because our airport security is pathetic. But mainly they were able to do it because we are an open and trusting society that simply is not set up to cope with evil men, right here among us, who want to kill as many Americans as they can. That's what's so hard to comprehend: They want us to die just for being Americans. They don't care which Americans die: military Americans, civilian Americans, young Americans, old Americans. Baby Americans. They don't care. To them, we're all mortal enemies. The truth is that most Americans, until Tuesday, were only dimly aware of their existence, and posed no threat to them. But that doesn't matter to them; all that matters is that we're Americans.
And so they used our own planes to kill us. And then their supporters celebrated in the streets. I'm not naive about my country. My country is definitely not always right; my country has at times been terribly wrong. But I know this about Americans: We don't set out to kill innocent people.
We don't cheer when innocent people die. The people who did this to us are monsters; the people who cheered them have hate-sickened minds. One reason they can cheer is that they know we would never do to them what their heroes did to us, even though we could, a thousand times worse. They know that when we hunt down the monsters, we will try hard not to harm the innocent. Those are the handcuffs we willingly wear, because for all our flaws, we are a decent people. And now we are a traumatized people.
The TV commentators keep saying that the attacks have awakened a `sleeping giant.'' And I guess we do look like a giant, to the rest of the world. But when I look around, I don't see a giant: I see millions of individuals -- the resilient and caring citizens of New York and Washington; the incredibly brave firefighters, police officers and rescue workers risking their lives in the dust and flames; the politicians standing on the steps of the Capitol and singing an off-key rendition of God Bless America that, corny as it was, had me weeping; the reporters and photographers who have not slept, and will not sleep, as long as there is news to report; the people in my community, and communities across America, lining up to give blood, wishing they could do more.
No, I don't see a giant. What I see is Americans. We may have the power of a giant, but we also have the heart of a good and generous people, and we will get through this. We will grieve for our dead, and tend to our wounded, and repair the damage, and tighten our security, and put our planes back in the air.
Eventually most of us, the ones lucky enough not to have lost somebody, will resume our lives. Some day, our country will track down the rest of the monsters behind this, and make them pay, and I suppose that will make most of us feel a little better.
But revenge and hatred won't be why we'll go on. We'll go on because we know this is a good country, a country worth keeping. Those who would destroy it only make us see more clearly how precious it is.

OHIO ASSOCIATION OF RESPONSIBLE MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICES

440-356-4544

cdk77@webtv.net

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