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Happy Thanksgiving everyone. 

I hope the Holidays leave you stuffed and happy.

Everyone who did not go missed a fantastic conference in Illinois There will be more to report in the upcoming months, but I just want to say a few words about the Illinois-Wisconsin group. They did an outstanding job of putting the entire conference together. All their hard work paid off and they are to be congratulated.

I first met some of the Illinois group in 1992 at Benton Harbor, Michigan. Liz LaPlant was one of the first people I talked to after losing our daughter that really understood what was going on. She invited me to a meeting of a "few" people who had a similar problem as we did.

The few people turned into 60, including Helen and Jerry Barr, all the way from Salt Lake City, Utah, and Chuck Noah from Seattle, Washington. Pam and Peter were there to tell us of a new organization starting in Philadelphia called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

We learned a lot from that meeting. We were oddly comforted and saddened at the same time by the fact that we were not alone in this terrible dilemma.

Meanwhile the Illinois group has continued their long fight and later joined with the Wisconsin group to form their current society, which put on the outstanding conference. I asked Liz for a list of things they had done and the list was too long to include in this newsletter. It included an interview or program with all the major networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and CNN. The list mentioned many local and "next state over" networks, radio shows and talk shows. There were interviews with newspaper, magazines, senior centers. -----Well you get the idea. They have been a going concern for 10 years now and have been a major factor in turning the whole FMS problem around.

CONGRATULATIONS AND THANKS TO A FANTASTIC AND HARDWORKING GROUP. Keep up the good work. ~Carole

Dorothy Rabinowitz
Biography and Archives

Dorothy Rabinowitz is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. She writes "Critic at Large," an occasional column for the Journal's editorial page, which also appears on OpinionJournal.com as "Dorothy Rabinowitz's Media Log." She won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for her 2000 articles on American culture and society.

Ms. Rabinowitz joined the Journal in June 1990 as an editorial page writer and TV critic. She was named to the paper's editorial board in May 1996.

Before joining the Journal, Ms. Rabinowitz was a freelance writer, syndicated columnist and commentator on New York's WWOR-TV News. She is the author of "New Lives," a book about survivors of death camps, published in 1976 by Alfred Knopf, and "Home Life," a book about old age, published by Macmillan in 1970.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. She received the 1997 Champion of Justice Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in recognition of her journalistic achievements and commending her in particular for her writing on false sexual abuse charges. In 1993 she won the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in the commentary category.

A New Yorker, Ms. Rabinowitz earned a bachelor's degree from Queens College and did postgraduate work at New York University, while teaching in the English departments at NYU and the Pratt Institute.

DOROTHY RABINOWITZ'S ARCHIVE
http://opinionjournal.com/medialog/archive/
Dorothy Rabinowitz

Psychologists’ Disciplinary Failure Leads to New Law in Ohio

David Milne

Ohio gets a new law criminalizing patient-therapist sex after a newspaper runs a series of articles indicating that psychologists guilty of engaging in sex with their patients are rarely punished.

When mental health professionals sexually abuse their patients, it is time to stop offering them a carrot and pick up a big stick. That is the message Ohio legislators are sending to therapists who take sexual liberties with patients.

SB 9, signed last month by Gov. Robert Taft (R), makes sex between mental health professionals and their patients a felony punishable by imprisonment and heavy fines.

Ohio is the 24th state, along with the District of Columbia, with laws on their books that criminalize therapist-patient sex (see box). For coercing a patient to have sex as part of treatment, offenders will be sentenced up to five years in prison and fined $10,000. Any sexual contact (sexual imposition) between therapist and patient would be charged as a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. No longer will accused therapists be allowed to use the "consensual sex" alibi, unless it can be proven that the patient was not "emotionally dependent" and did not submit to the act as a part of their therapy.

The impetus for the bill was a series of articles in the Cleveland Plain Dealer beginning in December 1999, showing that psychologists convicted of sexual offenses received little or no censure by the State Board of Psychology. Since its establishment in 1972, the Ohio Board of Psychology had revoked the licenses of only 16 of its 3,900 members.

Consequently, the bill drafted by Sen. Robert F. Spada (R) in 2000 focused exclusively on legislation that would make the state psychology regulatory board more responsible for disciplining members who were found guilty of sexual offenses by criminalizing such acts.

The proposed bill was vehemently opposed by the Ohio Psychology Board and other state counseling associations. The Ohio Psychiatric Association (OPA) weighed in on the matter because it had problems with Spada’s bill as written. The major objection was that it was written incorrectly—it used the terms "psychologist" and "psychiatrist" interchangeably, making the two appear to be equivalent, said S.R. Thorward, M.D., chair of OPA’s government relations committee.

Moreover, the bill did not need to include psychiatrists because, Thorward pointed out, "there was nothing new in the bill that did not already exist in terms of the Ohio Medical Practice Act and supervision that was being done by the Ohio State Board of Medical Examiners." The existing law and board regulations apply to all physicians in the state, including psychiatrists, and stipulate that serious boundary violations, such as patient-therapist sex, be reported to the county prosecutor in which the misbehavior occurred.

Although Spada’s bill was indeed aimed at psychologists, after discussions between OPA and Spada’s staff, it was clear that Spada did not want to back off including psychiatrists. Thus, OPA took the position that the bill had to be broadened to include all mental health professionals.

We were not so much pushing for an expansion of the bill," said Thorward, "but we convinced Sen. Spada that if he was going to refer to psychiatrists in the bill, then the bill needed to cover all mental health professionals. A compromise was reached and the bill was expanded, so the mandatory reporting and criminal penalties included all mental health professionals. Since that was already required by physicians, we did not have any reason to oppose the bill on these grounds. And we are not going to take any stance that would indicate to the community that anything less than full [accountability] of a person guilty of sexual offenses is beneficial," he said.

Although the bill initially died in December 2000, Spada had it reintroduced last year.