I do too. I'm a psychologist, and I often share FdB's pieces on mental illness, psychology, etc, with my psychologist network. And yes, I've pre-ordered the new book.
This article is terrific! I think the OtgaarEtAl cite is crucial; note that one of the supporting commentaries (Comment on Otgaar et al. ... https://doi.org/10.1111/lcrp.2_12272) backs up that work, though with a bit of optimism toward better empirical studies in the future.
This is an extremely well done and necessary piece debunking repression and its refashioning as “dissociative amnesia.” I don’t know what it will take for the flimsy, dangerous, and thoroughly debunked idea of repression to die out once and for all, but I hope pieces like this help increase awareness of how many stubborn proponents are out there still causing damage.
I'll second that. I remember Dorothy Rabinowitz at the Wall Street Journal continued to report on the lunacy of that daycare panic long after it had passed away from the headlines -- she absolutely refused to let the true victims of that case (those falsely accused) be forgotten. It was the first time I was truly inspired by the work of a journalist. This is why I don't tire of Freddie retreading the same issues many times (e.g. the romanticizing of mental health) -- the only way to keep some things from being memory-holed is for someone to keep telling the truth, over and over and over again.
And not just "innocent" as in "the state could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was in fact the perpetrator " but "no crime was committed, and this poor schmuck had jackall to do with it, but he went to prison as a child molester, all the same."
@Jena Martin has a brilliant podcast on the recovered memory movement, The Memory Hole. Anyone interested in this topic who wants to delve in further should check it out.
The incredibly depressing thing about this is that you needed to write it at all. I had thought that the whole "recovered memory" thing had been so thoroughly debunked decades ago that no one would even consider reviving it now. Clearly not.
Excellent piece, thank you. I am so old I lived through the McMartin preschool satanic sexual abuse "recovered memory" hysteria of 1983 and following. I reckon that is covered in "The recovered-memory movement of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t merely lose a scholarly debate; it ruined lives" . . . but that terrible episode deserves a specific mention. Made Salem look like a Sunday picnic.
Great piece. Let me add that it should be an immediate red flag how 'repressed memories/blah blah amnesia' virtually always involves sex abuse. If the brain regularly represses traumatic memories which can be later recovered, well, there's a ton of things which are traumatic to young people. Why aren't people repressing anything but salacious tales of incest and molestation, satanic cults and sex murder?
Basically why are people only repressing the type of memories that lend themselves well to books and news stories?
That's an excellent question considering the enormous numbers of Veterans who have had very clear memories of what happened to them in battle when they're interviewed.
To be fair, I knew one human, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who had no memory of the battle or of much of his time in France and the Low Countries.
That said, he didn't claim to recover any memories with therapy, nor did he make lurid claims of being the victim of sexual abuse.
I think you can find quite a bit of parallel techniques around the time of the Satanic Panic with UFO abduction stories and past lives stories, both of which I think were often gotten via hypnosis or recovering "repressed" memories.
I also think there's this really uncomfortable reality outside the problems with recovered memory therapy--we want to think of our memory as being a record of what happened, but it's really not. It's pretty easy to misremember a sequence of events from a few years ago, or to have a jumbled recollection of some thing that happened to you in the past. Very often your current memories are influenced by what you know now or what happened later, the "I always knew he was a no-good bastard" phenomenon. It's common to have politicians or celebrities tell stories about their pasts that aren't true (ISTR Hillary Clinton saying her plane had been under fire in Yugoslavia during a visit or something, but this kind of thing is pretty common), and while sometimes they're lies, my guess is that a lot of times, they're just confused recollections of what happened/what I thought happened/something I read later/a movie I watched/etc.
In my own life, I've had a few occasions where I was pretty sure about the sequence of events in some situation, but had some kind of written documentation that demonstrated that my certainty was misplaced. ("My first academic conference was X, then later I went to Y. I remember how I felt going to Y after my experience at X, and how I met people I remembered from X. Oh, look, I've got the proceedings from both, and Y happened a year before X. Wait, what?") Most of my memories of the past are not documented in any way I could check, so who knows how accurate they are. And that is disturbing as hell, but it's also true.
It was kind of stunning watching the Kavenaugh story for examples of that, with almost everyone's belief/skepticism determined entirely by their political commitments. But of course this isn't a political issue, it's just a common incorrect bit of worldview that makes it easy to convince yourself that bad things whose cause is obscure (like someone's chronic illness or depression) are actually due to some evil actor we can try to punish.
The most recent high-profile version of this was the Kavenaugh accusations, which approximately everyone believed/disbelieved based on their political commitments.
The Kavanaugh story was an example of what? Not getting details right? To my memory (haha) there was no repressed memory aspect at all. The accuser had remembered since the infamous party, and Kavanaugh consistently denied. I recall discussion of whether being shit-faced prevents memory formation, not the same at all.
Maybe I am misremembering (I heard more about the story than I wanted to, tbh), but ISTR that she said she had realized only long after the alleged event, when she saw some coverage of Kavenaugh in some news venue, that he had been the guy who'd tried to rape/sexually assault her. Wasn't there something about her therapist's notes or something?
A person I knew in my life (who in fact I later found out was an abuser, but that's a separate story) once said to me, when this was in the news, that he felt Kavanaugh probably really didn't remember it. "He wouldn't want to remember it" in his words.
I'm not defending the practice, but I think it has more to do with the fact that the "memories" are generally from when they were children. Most of us don't remember our childhoods with much clarity, particularly before the ages of 5 or 6. Children have no idea how to integrate, contextualize, or compartmentalize trauma or memories the way adults, generally, learn to do. I agree it's always the salacious stuff, but if repressed memories were real, that's the stuff that would matter. I think it makes emotional sense that if children were exposed to these kinds of horrific acts, they would repress it and forget about it, if that were a thing, in a way that adults wouldn't be able to.
I don't think that holds at all. Coming down to see my father kissing my (ostensibly!) lesbian aunt was incredibly traumatizing and hard to process for me as a kid but
A. Doesn't involve molestation at all
B. I remember every sad detail of.
There are tons of memories that kids have that are traumatizing and hard to deal with. It's not just getting touched by your gym teacher
I well remember the Fells Acres case in Massachusetts.
I have not researched the subject as FdB has, but all of his examples are of women "recovering" memories of sexual abuse by men. Are there no recovered memories of, say, armed robbery? Hit and run? Securities fraud? I suppose that the Freudian basis of this practice means that the only trauma that is repressed deeply enough to need specialized extraction is sex-related trauma of women. So it is a variant of, precursor to, MeToo and Believe All Women. The extremely limited application of the practice is enough to discredit it.
Thanks for doing this update on the literature. I wrote a chapter about the recovered memory prosecutions in 2004 in my book The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth Century America, and I remember Dorothy Rabinowitz and Debbie Nathan's work well. It's astonishing that this is still going on. Counselors engaging in this sort of recovered memory "therapy" should be having their licenses revoked. And what ever happened to fact checkers at major publishing houses? Dial Press is owned by Penguin Random House. I hope they have to pay big time for publishing Griffin's malarkey.
Agree with everything you said, though I will mention a specific condition that's not exactly rare, and unfortunately also goes under the name "dissociative amnesia" (and is why people can claim, correctly, that dissociative amnesia is in the DSM-5).
Like many people, I experienced post-traumatic amnesia. That means that for a couple of hours after a (presumably) extremely unpleasant experience, even though I was awake and lucid and communicating the whole time, my brain wasn't storing anything in long-term episodic memory. I have clear memories before and after this period, and between them there is a blank.
It does seem that the experience was recorded in peripheral ways--a vague image or feeling here and there, an increased tendency toward anxiety, etc.--but it's never seemed that my mind had any hidden "facts" stored away somewhere. Of course I could go to a recovered memory specialist and get hypnotized and probably confabulate a detailed set of memories.
Looking into this now, I learn they actually distinguish between dissociative and post (physically)-traumatic amnesia, though they can blend together in reality. Since there was an impact in my case, it's hard to say exactly what caused it. I'm not sure the mechanism is understood in either case.
The impact does seem potentially meaningful, especially if it’s a head injury. I have no relevant expertise, but the idea that being physically concussed causing all kinds of brain trouble, including amnesia, seems pretty well established. For example, the NFL concussion stuff is brutal.
We may not understand the exact mechanisms involved, but ‘if you hit it with a hammer, it stops working right’ is pretty comprehensible.
My dad had an experience like this. He was in a very bad car wreck (not his fault, and he had no incentive to lie that I could see). He said he had no memory of the actual accident--as far as he could recall, he'd been driving down the highway, and then he was sitting dazed by his wrecked car with a cop trying to figure out what had happened, with no clear memory of anything that had happened in-between.
It’s probably relevant that concussions absolutely can cause memory loss. This is a ‘trauma’ in the sense of blunt-force trauma, but not necessarily in the sense of emotional severity of the event.
I had a family member who got out of bed while still half-dreaming, fell and hit their head very hard. They seemed okay, could talk - but had no idea what happened, no matter how many times it was explained, and it became alarmingly clear they simply weren’t forming any new memories at all. They went to the hospital, got checked out, and went back to normal over the next 24 hours-ish.
I think there’s strong evidence that physical trauma - concussions - absolutely mess up memory. But it’s also mostly a separate topic from emotional trauma.
There are a bunch of things that people want to believe because they are convenient for fiction, even if they are prohibitively rare or even impossible. Nuclear plants blowing up, amnesia making people forget who they are, all the sprinklers in a room going off at once, strangers kidnapping people. (I had one more I thought of the other day, and I thought it would come to me while writing this comment, but alas it did not.)
I wonder how much of the world is made worse by all the writers of fiction who internalized Freudian psychology and created fictitious worlds in which it was a good description of reality.
I mean, how much of that is the media sensationalizing events? Consider the whole rigamarole around that Today anchor's mom being kidnapped (and now supposedly killed). When you make such a big stink, you're bound to attract flies.
One of my pet peeves in fiction is people being in comas for extraordinarily long periods of time, then just waking up as if they've been napping. LOL. Being in a coma destroys your brain. Anything longer than 2-3 months you're not coming back from in any recognizable way. Longer than that, you're a vegetable, even if you wake up. Granted, it's mostly reserved for dumb soap operas, but occasionally this kind of trash gets thrown into a legitimate movie, and it drives me nuts.
"Believe victims" was a reasonable response to public discourse that long looked upon accusers as inherently suspect. It was never meant to be a guiding principle of our justice system, but some ideologically-motivated people have conflated it to mean exactly that.
I mean I would say it’s a reasonable axiom because generally the overwhelming majority of accusations are based in the truth. Humans seem to struggle with understanding that outliers are not the same as “never happens”.
It’s a balancing act of course but this is why we have the presumption of innocence as the cornerstone of our justice system to mitigate against begging that question. I’m generally favorable to 100 guilty go free rather than one innocent be locked up. The other way around is horrific. That isn’t to say that we should let 100 guilty go completely free.
Specifically: If accusations will get you mostly skepticism and lousy treatment, then it's likely that the majority of accusations will be true and for very serious stuff. If you then change the system so that accusations are treated as likely true and get you nicer treatment, you will get more accusations, including many more false ones, since it's easier to get away with false accusations and less costly to make both true and false ones.
I suppose I’m also guilty of making non-falsifiable statements here.
Regardless, my point is that the ambiguity created by the existence of even a single false accusation is the very basis for due process and the presumption of innocence.
The public will go this way and that over it as culture shifts. The courts, however, must never give in to either public hysteria or prejudice.
Crime as a topic seems very vulnerable to sensational public narratives. I suspect a big part of that is that crime is inherently difficult, at times impossible, to collect good data on.
We can measure how many people are exonerated, but not how many innocent people are in prison- if we had a way to know they were innocent, we’d exonerate them! Similarly, a lot of statistics rely on arrests, police reporting, etc, but we can never be quite sure these indirect measures aren’t incomplete or contaminated. It doesn’t help that police departments don’t have a great record of being truthful and unbiased.
So we’re left with this gap where rigorous data analysis is difficult and limited, and it leaves a big gap for less rigorous opportunists to spin narratives which serve their own purposes.
Also, we resolve the overwhelming majority of criminal cases with plea deals, so we rarely even get the reality check of a trial. There are many cases where I have a strong incentive to plead guilty to something I didn't do in order to avoid the punishment for the more serious but harder-to-prove thing I actually did.
I think what it speaks to, though, is something much deeper: Rape and sexual assault are what we could call subjective crimes, where the crime is often determined on testimony and interpretations of that testimony rather than physical evidence (even when such physical evidence exists). Such crimes are far more captive to cultural sentiment, and thus are influenced by those outliers that denigrate the ability of victims to seek justice (or conversely, for the accused to receive a fair trial).
I'm really glad you got an article about schools doing well in a major publication. There needs to be more of that in our doom ridden world. Fear, anger and hate are exhilarating and addictive.
Another fascinating case is the "Beatrice Six," six people who were accused of raping and murdering a 68-year-old woman in the small town of Beatrice, NE. The cops and the police psychologist managed to convince five of them that they were in fact guilty, and they confessed! Only one of them insisted he was innocent and insisted on looking at the actual DNA evidence, which ultimately exonerated all of them, after they'd been in jail for years. There's a documentary about it on HBO.
I can definitely see why recovered memories are rearing their ugly head again. It's a great entertainment and money spinners from grifters, the gullible and the bored.
Until two weekends ago I didn't realize how damaging the "therapy" drug and social media culture is. One of my daughters is all in on the ADD thing. She's got meds for it, which make her less stable. She's also a very heavy pot user...which makes her unstable...and she's totally in on the social media garbage. She does the anti-men fights and the mental illness support shit.
We had a family get together around youngest daughter's college graduation. She wanted to turn it into a Jerry Springer drama around perceived "You don't care about me" slights from her brother from 10 to 15 years ago. This is a 45 year old woman!
Without the social media crap, therapy (I've seen some very effective therapy) and "medication" there might have been some emotional discussion and resolution. That happens in families. Instead it was this huge drama with no resolution.
Facebook is making billions, but it's hurting a lot of people.
The style of therapy that holds that all adult mental health issues are the result of the conspiratorial repression of child abuse is extremely popular in Montreal, Canada, where I live — no doubt influenced by the fact that the largest English-language university here is very sympathetic to Michel-Foucault-ified psychological pedagogy and not very sympathetic to so-called “hegemonic” practices like… reason, or science. I’ve lost count of how many smart, thoughtful, kinda mentally ill friends I’ve lost to a nonstop hamster wheel of increasingly serious psychological collapses, which they try to remedy with increasingly insane accusations, which leads to another collapse, and so on, because they could only get their hands on this one kind of therapy. I think it should qualify as a public health emergency at this point.
As a community mental health therapist who trained (at the age if 40 with plenty of life experience) in the late 80’s and 90’s, I can’t tell you how much I appreciated this deeply researched piece! I was working under a forensic psychologist at the time who was thoroughly influenced by Elizabeth Loftus’s research. So I was familiar with the dangers of the “recovered memory fad.” Many of my low income client’s suffered childhood trauma that led to adult lives of substance abuse, severe depression and anxiety, etc. But none of their experiences were repressed and suddenly uncovered by me in therapy. Unfortunately, the internet came along and pop psychology flourished and has created Trauma Culture that has, unbelievably, refused to let go of these myths, even, and maybe more so, by professionals.
There's been complaints from some readers that I'm not doing deeply researched longform pieces anymore. Well here you go. This was a lot of work.
These types of essays are wonderful. I send your education pieces to people fairly often. I hope they have a long life on Substack.
I do too. I'm a psychologist, and I often share FdB's pieces on mental illness, psychology, etc, with my psychologist network. And yes, I've pre-ordered the new book.
This article is terrific! I think the OtgaarEtAl cite is crucial; note that one of the supporting commentaries (Comment on Otgaar et al. ... https://doi.org/10.1111/lcrp.2_12272) backs up that work, though with a bit of optimism toward better empirical studies in the future.
This was excellent.
I’m just one guy, but fwiw, I’d rather read one essay like this than three op-ed-like pieces on why Democrats are awful.
Great work. Very appreciated.
Brilliant piece! It is depressing to me that people still continue to believe in the “recovered memory” nonsense.
This is an extremely well done and necessary piece debunking repression and its refashioning as “dissociative amnesia.” I don’t know what it will take for the flimsy, dangerous, and thoroughly debunked idea of repression to die out once and for all, but I hope pieces like this help increase awareness of how many stubborn proponents are out there still causing damage.
Funny, soon as i read the headline, i started thinking of The Great Satanic Daycare Panic. Innocent people went to prison as a result.
I'll second that. I remember Dorothy Rabinowitz at the Wall Street Journal continued to report on the lunacy of that daycare panic long after it had passed away from the headlines -- she absolutely refused to let the true victims of that case (those falsely accused) be forgotten. It was the first time I was truly inspired by the work of a journalist. This is why I don't tire of Freddie retreading the same issues many times (e.g. the romanticizing of mental health) -- the only way to keep some things from being memory-holed is for someone to keep telling the truth, over and over and over again.
Yes. I'm old enough to remember the Daycare Panic and the study about implanting false memories in real time.
I'd like to add that Actual Innocence found that a large part of the evidence from witnesses is from unintentional, or intentional memory implants.
Many people have very plastic memories that are easily molded.
And not just "innocent" as in "the state could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was in fact the perpetrator " but "no crime was committed, and this poor schmuck had jackall to do with it, but he went to prison as a child molester, all the same."
@Jena Martin has a brilliant podcast on the recovered memory movement, The Memory Hole. Anyone interested in this topic who wants to delve in further should check it out.
The incredibly depressing thing about this is that you needed to write it at all. I had thought that the whole "recovered memory" thing had been so thoroughly debunked decades ago that no one would even consider reviving it now. Clearly not.
Excellent piece, thank you. I am so old I lived through the McMartin preschool satanic sexual abuse "recovered memory" hysteria of 1983 and following. I reckon that is covered in "The recovered-memory movement of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t merely lose a scholarly debate; it ruined lives" . . . but that terrible episode deserves a specific mention. Made Salem look like a Sunday picnic.
Great piece. Let me add that it should be an immediate red flag how 'repressed memories/blah blah amnesia' virtually always involves sex abuse. If the brain regularly represses traumatic memories which can be later recovered, well, there's a ton of things which are traumatic to young people. Why aren't people repressing anything but salacious tales of incest and molestation, satanic cults and sex murder?
Basically why are people only repressing the type of memories that lend themselves well to books and news stories?
That's an excellent question considering the enormous numbers of Veterans who have had very clear memories of what happened to them in battle when they're interviewed.
I know, right? Shocking they didn't repress it only for it to be 'recovered' by a trained analyst!
To be fair, I knew one human, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who had no memory of the battle or of much of his time in France and the Low Countries.
That said, he didn't claim to recover any memories with therapy, nor did he make lurid claims of being the victim of sexual abuse.
I think you can find quite a bit of parallel techniques around the time of the Satanic Panic with UFO abduction stories and past lives stories, both of which I think were often gotten via hypnosis or recovering "repressed" memories.
I also think there's this really uncomfortable reality outside the problems with recovered memory therapy--we want to think of our memory as being a record of what happened, but it's really not. It's pretty easy to misremember a sequence of events from a few years ago, or to have a jumbled recollection of some thing that happened to you in the past. Very often your current memories are influenced by what you know now or what happened later, the "I always knew he was a no-good bastard" phenomenon. It's common to have politicians or celebrities tell stories about their pasts that aren't true (ISTR Hillary Clinton saying her plane had been under fire in Yugoslavia during a visit or something, but this kind of thing is pretty common), and while sometimes they're lies, my guess is that a lot of times, they're just confused recollections of what happened/what I thought happened/something I read later/a movie I watched/etc.
In my own life, I've had a few occasions where I was pretty sure about the sequence of events in some situation, but had some kind of written documentation that demonstrated that my certainty was misplaced. ("My first academic conference was X, then later I went to Y. I remember how I felt going to Y after my experience at X, and how I met people I remembered from X. Oh, look, I've got the proceedings from both, and Y happened a year before X. Wait, what?") Most of my memories of the past are not documented in any way I could check, so who knows how accurate they are. And that is disturbing as hell, but it's also true.
It was kind of stunning watching the Kavenaugh story for examples of that, with almost everyone's belief/skepticism determined entirely by their political commitments. But of course this isn't a political issue, it's just a common incorrect bit of worldview that makes it easy to convince yourself that bad things whose cause is obscure (like someone's chronic illness or depression) are actually due to some evil actor we can try to punish.
The most recent high-profile version of this was the Kavenaugh accusations, which approximately everyone believed/disbelieved based on their political commitments.
The Kavanaugh story was an example of what? Not getting details right? To my memory (haha) there was no repressed memory aspect at all. The accuser had remembered since the infamous party, and Kavanaugh consistently denied. I recall discussion of whether being shit-faced prevents memory formation, not the same at all.
Maybe I am misremembering (I heard more about the story than I wanted to, tbh), but ISTR that she said she had realized only long after the alleged event, when she saw some coverage of Kavenaugh in some news venue, that he had been the guy who'd tried to rape/sexually assault her. Wasn't there something about her therapist's notes or something?
I think she always knew it was Kavanaugh, they went to high school together. She came forward when she saw he was short-listed to the supreme court.
In any case not a recovered memory, a 'who is lying?' story.
A person I knew in my life (who in fact I later found out was an abuser, but that's a separate story) once said to me, when this was in the news, that he felt Kavanaugh probably really didn't remember it. "He wouldn't want to remember it" in his words.
I'm not defending the practice, but I think it has more to do with the fact that the "memories" are generally from when they were children. Most of us don't remember our childhoods with much clarity, particularly before the ages of 5 or 6. Children have no idea how to integrate, contextualize, or compartmentalize trauma or memories the way adults, generally, learn to do. I agree it's always the salacious stuff, but if repressed memories were real, that's the stuff that would matter. I think it makes emotional sense that if children were exposed to these kinds of horrific acts, they would repress it and forget about it, if that were a thing, in a way that adults wouldn't be able to.
I don't think that holds at all. Coming down to see my father kissing my (ostensibly!) lesbian aunt was incredibly traumatizing and hard to process for me as a kid but
A. Doesn't involve molestation at all
B. I remember every sad detail of.
There are tons of memories that kids have that are traumatizing and hard to deal with. It's not just getting touched by your gym teacher
I well remember the Fells Acres case in Massachusetts.
I have not researched the subject as FdB has, but all of his examples are of women "recovering" memories of sexual abuse by men. Are there no recovered memories of, say, armed robbery? Hit and run? Securities fraud? I suppose that the Freudian basis of this practice means that the only trauma that is repressed deeply enough to need specialized extraction is sex-related trauma of women. So it is a variant of, precursor to, MeToo and Believe All Women. The extremely limited application of the practice is enough to discredit it.
Thanks for doing this update on the literature. I wrote a chapter about the recovered memory prosecutions in 2004 in my book The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth Century America, and I remember Dorothy Rabinowitz and Debbie Nathan's work well. It's astonishing that this is still going on. Counselors engaging in this sort of recovered memory "therapy" should be having their licenses revoked. And what ever happened to fact checkers at major publishing houses? Dial Press is owned by Penguin Random House. I hope they have to pay big time for publishing Griffin's malarkey.
Agree with everything you said, though I will mention a specific condition that's not exactly rare, and unfortunately also goes under the name "dissociative amnesia" (and is why people can claim, correctly, that dissociative amnesia is in the DSM-5).
Like many people, I experienced post-traumatic amnesia. That means that for a couple of hours after a (presumably) extremely unpleasant experience, even though I was awake and lucid and communicating the whole time, my brain wasn't storing anything in long-term episodic memory. I have clear memories before and after this period, and between them there is a blank.
It does seem that the experience was recorded in peripheral ways--a vague image or feeling here and there, an increased tendency toward anxiety, etc.--but it's never seemed that my mind had any hidden "facts" stored away somewhere. Of course I could go to a recovered memory specialist and get hypnotized and probably confabulate a detailed set of memories.
Looking into this now, I learn they actually distinguish between dissociative and post (physically)-traumatic amnesia, though they can blend together in reality. Since there was an impact in my case, it's hard to say exactly what caused it. I'm not sure the mechanism is understood in either case.
The impact does seem potentially meaningful, especially if it’s a head injury. I have no relevant expertise, but the idea that being physically concussed causing all kinds of brain trouble, including amnesia, seems pretty well established. For example, the NFL concussion stuff is brutal.
We may not understand the exact mechanisms involved, but ‘if you hit it with a hammer, it stops working right’ is pretty comprehensible.
My dad had an experience like this. He was in a very bad car wreck (not his fault, and he had no incentive to lie that I could see). He said he had no memory of the actual accident--as far as he could recall, he'd been driving down the highway, and then he was sitting dazed by his wrecked car with a cop trying to figure out what had happened, with no clear memory of anything that had happened in-between.
It’s probably relevant that concussions absolutely can cause memory loss. This is a ‘trauma’ in the sense of blunt-force trauma, but not necessarily in the sense of emotional severity of the event.
I had a family member who got out of bed while still half-dreaming, fell and hit their head very hard. They seemed okay, could talk - but had no idea what happened, no matter how many times it was explained, and it became alarmingly clear they simply weren’t forming any new memories at all. They went to the hospital, got checked out, and went back to normal over the next 24 hours-ish.
I think there’s strong evidence that physical trauma - concussions - absolutely mess up memory. But it’s also mostly a separate topic from emotional trauma.
There are a bunch of things that people want to believe because they are convenient for fiction, even if they are prohibitively rare or even impossible. Nuclear plants blowing up, amnesia making people forget who they are, all the sprinklers in a room going off at once, strangers kidnapping people. (I had one more I thought of the other day, and I thought it would come to me while writing this comment, but alas it did not.)
I wonder how much of the world is made worse by all the writers of fiction who internalized Freudian psychology and created fictitious worlds in which it was a good description of reality.
I mean, how much of that is the media sensationalizing events? Consider the whole rigamarole around that Today anchor's mom being kidnapped (and now supposedly killed). When you make such a big stink, you're bound to attract flies.
One of my pet peeves in fiction is people being in comas for extraordinarily long periods of time, then just waking up as if they've been napping. LOL. Being in a coma destroys your brain. Anything longer than 2-3 months you're not coming back from in any recognizable way. Longer than that, you're a vegetable, even if you wake up. Granted, it's mostly reserved for dumb soap operas, but occasionally this kind of trash gets thrown into a legitimate movie, and it drives me nuts.
"Believe victims" was a reasonable response to public discourse that long looked upon accusers as inherently suspect. It was never meant to be a guiding principle of our justice system, but some ideologically-motivated people have conflated it to mean exactly that.
very well said
I get the sentiment but it begs the question, which you point out how that is a big problem.
I mean I would say it’s a reasonable axiom because generally the overwhelming majority of accusations are based in the truth. Humans seem to struggle with understanding that outliers are not the same as “never happens”.
It’s a balancing act of course but this is why we have the presumption of innocence as the cornerstone of our justice system to mitigate against begging that question. I’m generally favorable to 100 guilty go free rather than one innocent be locked up. The other way around is horrific. That isn’t to say that we should let 100 guilty go completely free.
I have no idea whether "the overwhelming majority of accusations are based in the truth".
I suspect that you get the behavior you reward. That goes both ways.
Incentives!!!!!
Specifically: If accusations will get you mostly skepticism and lousy treatment, then it's likely that the majority of accusations will be true and for very serious stuff. If you then change the system so that accusations are treated as likely true and get you nicer treatment, you will get more accusations, including many more false ones, since it's easier to get away with false accusations and less costly to make both true and false ones.
I suppose I’m also guilty of making non-falsifiable statements here.
Regardless, my point is that the ambiguity created by the existence of even a single false accusation is the very basis for due process and the presumption of innocence.
The public will go this way and that over it as culture shifts. The courts, however, must never give in to either public hysteria or prejudice.
Crime as a topic seems very vulnerable to sensational public narratives. I suspect a big part of that is that crime is inherently difficult, at times impossible, to collect good data on.
We can measure how many people are exonerated, but not how many innocent people are in prison- if we had a way to know they were innocent, we’d exonerate them! Similarly, a lot of statistics rely on arrests, police reporting, etc, but we can never be quite sure these indirect measures aren’t incomplete or contaminated. It doesn’t help that police departments don’t have a great record of being truthful and unbiased.
So we’re left with this gap where rigorous data analysis is difficult and limited, and it leaves a big gap for less rigorous opportunists to spin narratives which serve their own purposes.
Also, we resolve the overwhelming majority of criminal cases with plea deals, so we rarely even get the reality check of a trial. There are many cases where I have a strong incentive to plead guilty to something I didn't do in order to avoid the punishment for the more serious but harder-to-prove thing I actually did.
I think what it speaks to, though, is something much deeper: Rape and sexual assault are what we could call subjective crimes, where the crime is often determined on testimony and interpretations of that testimony rather than physical evidence (even when such physical evidence exists). Such crimes are far more captive to cultural sentiment, and thus are influenced by those outliers that denigrate the ability of victims to seek justice (or conversely, for the accused to receive a fair trial).
"believe victims" is exactly the wrong way to instruct a jury. The tension with due process is inherent and obvious.
I realize "be sensitive and fair" scans worse. Believe victims is an understandable response, but it was destined from the start to go sideways.
I'm really glad you got an article about schools doing well in a major publication. There needs to be more of that in our doom ridden world. Fear, anger and hate are exhilarating and addictive.
Another fascinating case is the "Beatrice Six," six people who were accused of raping and murdering a 68-year-old woman in the small town of Beatrice, NE. The cops and the police psychologist managed to convince five of them that they were in fact guilty, and they confessed! Only one of them insisted he was innocent and insisted on looking at the actual DNA evidence, which ultimately exonerated all of them, after they'd been in jail for years. There's a documentary about it on HBO.
I can definitely see why recovered memories are rearing their ugly head again. It's a great entertainment and money spinners from grifters, the gullible and the bored.
Until two weekends ago I didn't realize how damaging the "therapy" drug and social media culture is. One of my daughters is all in on the ADD thing. She's got meds for it, which make her less stable. She's also a very heavy pot user...which makes her unstable...and she's totally in on the social media garbage. She does the anti-men fights and the mental illness support shit.
We had a family get together around youngest daughter's college graduation. She wanted to turn it into a Jerry Springer drama around perceived "You don't care about me" slights from her brother from 10 to 15 years ago. This is a 45 year old woman!
Without the social media crap, therapy (I've seen some very effective therapy) and "medication" there might have been some emotional discussion and resolution. That happens in families. Instead it was this huge drama with no resolution.
Facebook is making billions, but it's hurting a lot of people.
The style of therapy that holds that all adult mental health issues are the result of the conspiratorial repression of child abuse is extremely popular in Montreal, Canada, where I live — no doubt influenced by the fact that the largest English-language university here is very sympathetic to Michel-Foucault-ified psychological pedagogy and not very sympathetic to so-called “hegemonic” practices like… reason, or science. I’ve lost count of how many smart, thoughtful, kinda mentally ill friends I’ve lost to a nonstop hamster wheel of increasingly serious psychological collapses, which they try to remedy with increasingly insane accusations, which leads to another collapse, and so on, because they could only get their hands on this one kind of therapy. I think it should qualify as a public health emergency at this point.
As a community mental health therapist who trained (at the age if 40 with plenty of life experience) in the late 80’s and 90’s, I can’t tell you how much I appreciated this deeply researched piece! I was working under a forensic psychologist at the time who was thoroughly influenced by Elizabeth Loftus’s research. So I was familiar with the dangers of the “recovered memory fad.” Many of my low income client’s suffered childhood trauma that led to adult lives of substance abuse, severe depression and anxiety, etc. But none of their experiences were repressed and suddenly uncovered by me in therapy. Unfortunately, the internet came along and pop psychology flourished and has created Trauma Culture that has, unbelievably, refused to let go of these myths, even, and maybe more so, by professionals.