Therapy Provoked Delusions

Mr. & Mrs. Thompson received a phone call from their daughter Vivian.
Without precursor, Vivian began to shriek, accusing her father of having sexually abused her,
and her mother of standing by, enabling the abuse.

Vivian’s tirade continued for ten minutes in which she also claimed an uncle and cousin raped
her. Pressed, she refused to give specifics and when her parents disclaimed the events;

“I knew you would deny it! Never try to contact me again. You are dead to me!”

And  hung up.

For a long time the parents stared at each other. They tried to call Vivian but got her machine.
They rang up everyone they knew, they called people who might be able to get in touch with
Vivian to find out what was going on to no avail.

Vivian, at the time of the call, was thirty five years old.
She had lived with her parents until she was nineteen, married and moved away.
Her marriage broke up when she was twenty three and she began an affair with
another man which ended when she was twenty five.

She remarried when she was thirty two and had divorced last year.

Her relationship with her parents, up until that phone call, had been very good. They had spoken
often, visited, there were family rituals, there had never been a hint of that kind of problem.
Eventually the parents learned that Vivian had been seeing a therapist to discover why her
relationships with men never lasted.

The therapist, certain that something had happened to Vivian in her childhood, hit upon
sexual abuse at the hands of a male relative.

Vivian had not been able to recall anything like that. To get to these ‘hidden’ memories,
the therapist used various drugs and hypnotism.

Now ‘realising’ that her inability to form lasting relationships with men stemmed from sexual abuse,
Vivian attacked her parents.

The therapist had warned her;

“They will deny it, they always do,”

When her parents denied Vivian’s ‘memories’ the diagnosis of the therapist was confirmed.

Vivian, however, still had problems forming long lasting relationships with men.

After five years of therapy and three more bad relationships, at the age of forty,
Vivian consulted another therapist.

After two sessions in which concentration was on the men in Vivian’s life she realised
she had a fear of commitment. In that fear she selected men that she didn’t and couldn’t love.

So what happened to all that sexual abuse?

Vivian had never been sexually abused. All those ‘memories’ were drug induced delusions.

She tried to get in touch with her family.
She learned her father had died two years ago.

Vivian went into a suicidal depression, then successfully sued the first therapist for ruining her life.

Although the names are changed, this is a true story. Although sounding incredible, it is not unique.

A number of therapists have been successfully sued for malpractice, (the sums rather high),
for creating these kinds of memories in their patients.

For Vivian, for many of the other patients, all the money in the world will never repair the damage.

In False Memory Syndrome a subject is led to believe events that did not occur. As the patient
is in a very vulnerable state, if s/he has dependency issues, the manifestation will be to accept
the provoked memories as true and use them as the reason why s/he is experiencing
particular problems.

That the ‘revelation’ does not make the patient feel better, nor solves the problems should
be a flag that the diagnosis is incorrect.

Yet, the majority of patients act on these false memories, cementing them into their minds,
acting as if they were true, and, as with Vivian, creating a far worse situation.

The American Medical Association as its sister organisations in the United Kingdom and Canada
have issued warnings concerning the sudden adult memory of childhood abuse.

If these ‘memories’ arise only ‘after’ therapy, if they can not be verified by other sources, they
are likely to be delusions.