|
Adriaan
Mak tells his story | Claudete
Grieb
| Amish
story
| Michael
Cardamone
| Phil
Bourgelais
Magic
tool or dangerous quackery? Once-popular 'recovered memory'
therapy has left many victims struggling in its controversial
wake
By IAN McDOUGALL -- Toronto
Sun, June 23, 2002
A worldwide psychological war,
which has turned children against their parents, has attracted
the attention of Roy Romanow's commission on Canadian health
care.
Recovered memory therapy, to
its supporters, is still a revolutionary, therapeutic tool that
helps cure people suffering from the trauma of sexual assault.
To opponents, it's a dangerous
form of quackery that has torn families apart and even cost lives.
Adriaan Mak, who has heard
complaints from around the world about recovered memory, made
a presentation to the Romanow commission May 31, arguing the
federal government should follow a similar move in the United
States to cease funding therapists who use the practice.
"It's still going on,"
Mak said in an interview. "It hasn't died completely."
Mak's son accused him of assaulting
him when he was a child after going through recovered memory
therapy.
After a period of estrangement,
Mak said, his son recanted his accusation and the two have reconciled.
Others haven't been so lucky.
Claudette Grieb blames a recovered
memory therapist for the murder-suicide of her daughter Jackie,
26, and two-year-old granddaughter Dagmar.
"I will do anything in
my power to stop the death of another mentally vulnerable person,"
Grieb said in an interview.
"The government has to
stop funding it, and to stop funding psychological terrorism."
Recovered memory, according
to the American Psychological Association Web site, is recalling
something that has been supressed by a person because it is too
painful to remember.
But, the association also adds,
it is extremely rare to have a memory "recovered."
It also notes that laboratory studies have shown that memory
is "often inaccurate and can be influenced by outside factors."
Grieb's daughter committed
suicide June 4, 1998 by hanging herself from a doorway. Dagmar
was found hanging from a doorway opposite her mother.
For years Jackie suffered from
depression, made worse when she started taking LSD after she
moved to London, Ont. , in the early 1990s.
She moved back to Kitchener
and started her own business selling paintings.
But her depression continued
and got worse after she had her baby. She started seeing a counsellor.
In September 1997 Jackie told
a friend she had been sexually abused by her parents when she
was a baby.
It wasn't until Grieb got a
call from a relative that she found out about the accusations
Jackie had been making.
When she protested, Grieb was
told she was in denial.
Two months later, in November,
Jackie changed her phone number and severed all contact with
her parents.
The next time Grieb saw her,
she and her baby were dead.
"These abuse-excuse clinics
do nobody any good. The memories are the delusions of a mentally
ill person or (are) manufactured by inducement of their beliefs,"
Grieb said.
"The fact of the matter
is (counsellors) like to keep their weaker sisters in society
wallowing in their mud."
Grieb's story is one of thousands
surrounding recovered memory therapy, said Mak.
In fact, groups have sprung
up against the practice they term "false memory syndrome."
The use of recovered memory
therapy continues in sexual assault centres, native counselling
centres and even churchs where it takes the form of prayer, said
Mak, a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and Parents
Against Cruel Therapy.
Mak said governments spend
"millions" on recovered memory therapy.
'IN DENIAL'
He still remembers the day
his son accused him of raping him when he was two or three years
old.
"It was a knife through
the heart," Mak said. "At the end of this talk I told
him, 'You realize I am not a pedophile.' He said, `I was told
you would be in denial' and he left me standing there."
Many families remain torn apart
-- some through a voluntary separation, some because the accusations
have led to jail sentences.
Mak estimated there have been
240 Canadian cases involving charges of incest and parental sexual
abuse based on recovered memory.
Of those, about 180 were dismissed
out of hand, he said, but 40 people wound up in jail for three
months to seven years.
Judges are now skeptical of
recovered memory evidence, said Toronto defence lawyer Alan Gold,
but he added there was a time when it was accepted.
"By the mid-'90s to the
later-'90s courts realized that what some of the experts were
saying was not true."
Lawyer Cindy Wasser worked
as defence counsel in the Grandview Training School case, which
involved recovered memories of sexual abuse at a Cambridge-area
school.
"It was pretty bad,"
she said. "This evidence was coming in everywhere and judges
were overwhelmed. The Crown thought they had this wonderful tool
and everyone was quite amazed by it."
In 1996 and 1997, numerous
sex-related charges were stayed against her client, Robert Ross,
and he was acquitted on six others after allegations surfaced
about physical and sexual abuse in the 1970s at the reform school
for girls, which closed in 1976.
Two other workers at the school
were sentenced to jail terms for sex abuse.
People who claimed abuse at
the school were paid out $60,000 from the Ontario government,
plus counselling in exchange for an agreement not to sue the
province.
Gold said the use of recovered
memory therapy began in the U.S. and has been used mostly in
civil cases there. In Canada recovered memory use is usually
found in criminal cases.
"Recovered memory provides
a convenient excuse," he said. "In the church cases
sweeping the U.S., people are claiming recovered memory. Claiming
a recovered memory becomes awfully convenient when there's a
windfall."
Proponents of recovered memory,
and the therapy, believe there should be more government money
for research into the practice.
Ellen Campbell believes not
all claims of successful recall can be dismissed.
"No good therapist will
ever suggest that you were abused. When we get into a dangerous
part is when the people with a little knowledge do just that,"
said Campbell, the executive director of the Canadian Centre
for Abuse Awareness, Martin Kruze Fund.
"Suppressed memory is
a reality. I've talked to too many people to think otherwise."
Some of recovered memory's
critics have a vested interest -- they're guilty, she added.
"It's a great hiding place
for pedophiles."
The number of criminal charges
laid as a result of recovered memory has fallen over the last
five years, but Gold fears the practice is still going on but
is being covered up.
"It may be appearing in
complainants who are being advised to claim they remembered all
along," he said. "Whenever you have one of these junk
sciences you think they're gone and then they reappear."
The Canadian Psychological
Association includes cautions in its code of ethics on recovered
memory and warns psychologists about the use of techniques employed
in recovered memory therapy like hypnosis and "body memory
interpretation."
Recovered memory therapy has
its risks because practitioners base their work on two assumptions,
said Tim Moore, the chair of psychology at York University's
Glendon College
"Number one, (that) the
presence of symptoms are caused by past traumatic sexual abuse.
The second is this lost or forgotten material can be faithfully
remembered and it is necessary for the alleviation of the symptoms.
"That's a powerful set
of assumptions," he added.
But proponents, like Campbell,
think recovered memory may be the only way to prosecute people
who committed sex crimes years ago.
"I know that people are
accused for the wrong reasons," she said. "You can't
discount it either way. We tend to err on the side of the survivor."
"If you're talking about
something that happened 30 years ago, I would lean heavily on
the therapy," she added.
FALSE ACCUSATIONS
Campbell admits that the label
recovered memory can be used to falsely accuse someone. But what
she thinks would help would be federal guidelines for judges
on the use of recovered memory testimony.
"We do need some really
good guidelines," she said. "Right now it's 'he said,
she said.'
"You have to be very careful.
Look what's happening where mothers are accusing fathers of sex
abuse just to get back at husbands."
Grieb, meanwhile, is preparing
to fire off her latest salvo against recovered memory therapy.
She wants the province's coroner
to call an inquiry into her daughter's death after taking her
fight to Ontario's Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.
The board has agreed to pay
Grieb compensation for Dagmar's death but refused to consider
her daughter's, she said.
"They have denied that
my daughter is a victim."
Copyright © 2002, Canoe,
a division of Netgraphe Inc.
Man recants
repressed 'memories'
Saturday, November 3, 2001,
By KIRK MAKIN - JUSTICE REPORTER, The Globe and Mail
When Rowland Mak mounts a podium
today to retract accusations that his father sexually assaulted
him as an infant, he will do more than simply conclude a long
and poignant family drama.
The 35-year-old man's recantation
at a Toronto conference will put a symbolic nail in the coffin
of a controversial psychological phenomenon: repressed memory
syndrome.
"It takes a lot of courage
to come to the realization that someone abused you when you were
young," Mr. Mak said. "It also takes a lot of courage
to admit it wasn't true; that for all the years I was separated
from my dad, I was wrong. It is very liberating."
It was back in 1991 that Mr.
Mak first confronted his father -- Adriaan Mak -- with his allegation
of being raped at the age of 2 or 3.
"He told me in a monotonous,
almost trance-like voice," the 70-year-old man said in an
interview. "He said his therapist had led him to expect
that I would be 'in denial,' and that my denial confirmed my
guilt. With that, he left me standing in the street. I was in
total shock."
His family was devastated.
Rowland -- a bright youth who had enjoyed the usual privileges
of a middle-class home -- had been spiralling into an aimless
world of LSD, drug-peddling, dead-end jobs and welfare payments.
Depressed and confused, he had been undergoing regular therapy
for a year.
Yesterday, he described himself
as a sensitive youth whose psychological moorings were damaged
in his teens by two separate incidents in which older men took
advantage of him sexually.
He recalled being struck during
one session when his therapist said she had been a victim of
ritual abuse herself and knew a great deal about repressed memories.
"I remember her saying:
'I wouldn't close the door on sexual abuse -- there has got to
be some reason you're afraid of your father,' " he recalled.
"Suddenly, it rang true for me -- I believed my father had
raped me."
Several months after levelling
his accusations, Rowland's therapist floated the idea that his
abuse could have been part of an elaborate cult ritual. He immediately
seized upon the idea, and commenced patching together "memories"
of his father and other men abusing him and other children.
"I came to believe they
were connected to a secret society that controls all of society,"
he recalled.
How can a person actually create
memories without realizing the falsity of what they are doing?
Rowland Mak said it is not particularly difficult if one is both
psychologically vulnerable and being aided by a sympathetic therapist
who believes in what she is doing.
"When you are exploring
your subconscious and deep emotions that you are unaware of,
you give a therapist a tremendous amount of power," he said.
He said his convictions were
continually reinforced by other "survivors," who clustered
together at meetings and described the abuse they felt they had
suffered.
While all this was going on,
Adriaan Mak was attempting to fight his growing depression by
immersing himself in the task of exposing repressed memory therapy
as a fad that had destroyed thousands of families.
As successful as the campaign
was, what the retired high school teacher wanted most was to
get his disaffected son back.
In the late 1990s, Rowland
Mak quit drugs, left therapy, settled down with a woman and took
up the study of positive thinking. Then, a year ago, he was struck
by a startling revelation as he changed his daughter's diapers.
The child was the same age
Rowland had been when he was anally raped -- at least, according
to his reconstructed memories. He suddenly realized that the
offence he had accused his father of perpetrating was improbable
in the extreme -- and that a child of such tender years simply
couldn't carry that sort of coherent memories.
"It just hit me that this
didn't happen," he said yesterday. "I called my father,
and said: 'Dad, you were right. It didn't happen.' "
Rowland Mak intends to tell
his story today to the group his father has worked with so tirelessly:
the False Memory Foundation.
"I have problems when
I think about my therapist, because she crossed lines she shouldn't
have," he said yesterday. "But I don't have anger to
the recovered memory therapy community itself. It was all just
a colossal, well-intentioned mistake."
Copyright © 2001 Globe
Interactive, a division of Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
