Word: backlashers
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BEHAVIOR: Repressed-memory therapy is harming patients and intensifying a backlash against mental-health practitioners...
Gavigan is just one victim of a troubling psychological phenomenon that is harming patients, devastating families, influencing new legislation, taking up courtroom time, stirring fierce controversy among experts and intensifying a backlash against all mental-health practitioners: the "recovery" -- usually while in therapy -- of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, satanic rituals and other bizarre incidents...
...Recovered-memory therapy will come to be recognized as the quackery of the 20th century," predicts Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. And in the process, Emory University psychiatry professor George Ganaway fears, it may "trigger a backlash against ((legitimate charges of)) child abuse. As these stories are discredited, society may end up throwing the baby out with the bath water -- and the hard- earned credibility of the child-abuse-survivor movement will go down the drain...
...backlash has already begun. In Texas this summer, a woman patient won a settlement from two therapists and a psychiatric hospital after suing them for therapeutic negligence and fraud. She claimed that four years of recovered false memories had made her a "walking zombie." It was the first of what some reputable therapists fear will be many such rulings that will ultimately give their profession a black...
Christine Courtois, also in the APA work group and a clinical director at the Psychiatric Institute in Washington, charges that criticism of the recovered-memory phenomenon is part of a backlash against society's tardy recognition of widespread sexual abuse. The "wholesale degradation of psychotherapy by some critics," she says, represents "displaced rage" at therapists for bringing the issue to public attention...