recovered memory therapy?

Quote:

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It wasn't until the Burgus family's $3 million insurance policy started drying up, her medication levels were lowered, and a few trips back home to her native Des Moines that the soft-spoken, 42-year-old gradually realized her recovered memories couldn't be true.

"That's when my head began to clear," Burgus said. "I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year and nobody said anything about it.

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http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/...590/braun.html

I don't know how many of you may be familiar with the phenomenon,
but the radio talk shows were pushing this stuff not too long ago.
One radio host, I can't remember his name, everyone who called for advice
he told them "you must have been abused as a child" and of course,
"you repressed the memories until now"
:cool:

There's an old adage: if a lie is told enough times, it becomes the truth. It's not necessarily that memories are recovered but that we believe that it happened -- whether true or not.

Given the right combination of drugs, the age of the person involved, the level of desire to please, and the ideas planted, people with "recovered memories" really do believe sometimes that the ideas they've "recovered" did happen to them. Actually, I suppose "age" is the wrong word to use, more like the maturity level. It is a scary phenomenon to me, I lived in North Carolina for several years when I was younger, and there was a huge daycare sex abuse case there, where the testimony was mostly from kids who all had "recovered" memories, and lots of people went to jail. Upon further examination by different pschyiatrists/psychologists, it became clear that was these kids remembered and what actually happened, and what they remembered when coaxed to remember something different was totally different. There was no way to know what really happened, whether those kids were terribly abused, or whether it was a witch hunt started by one parent and then including most of the parents and kids involved. I think it would be terrible to be any of the people involved in that situation, because the daycare workers are the only ones who really know what happened, and if they are innocent, they will never not have that stigma attached to their names, and the kids don't even know for sure what happened to them, the parents don't know if they left their kids someplace they were being abused...

The mind is a very fragile and "programmable" instrument. It is actaully surpisingly simple to build a picture in someone's mind and convince them that that picture was created by themselves. If you then told them that picture is out of their past, they could very easily believe you. Interstingly, the most succeptible people to this type of conditioning are the ones who believe that they are always entirely in control of their minds. Those who realize that the mind can "play tricks on you" are typically less vulnerable to that type of foreign influence. It seems that the woman in that article was led into creating an image of herself by the so called psychiatrist and she believed so fully in her mental stability that the thought of it being false never even crossed her mind. I think the psychiatrist should be imprisoned.
-NeuTron