Cult of Madness

Several men, including a brother-in-law, had taken liberties with Hurt in the past. When she was in high school, a teacher groped her and a neighbor had been found peeping through her bedroom window. After she married, one of her brothers-in-law raped her. She talked with Stanley about these events, but the doctor was more interested in probing Hurt's past.

When Hurt said there was much of her childhood that she could not remember, Stanley told her that was often an indication of childhood sexual abuse.

To assist in filling in the lapses in Hurt's memory, Stanley had her write with her nondominant hand, ostensibly to help her access various childhood memories, and guided her through the hypnotic process of age regression, wherein a patient is put into a trancelike state and is verbally walked through her life beginning with infancy. She also helped her get in touch with her inner child, who, at the therapist's urging, Hurt named Mawsa.

"She would tell me to close my eyes and picture myself in my bedroom at night when I was 5," Hurt recalls. "Then she would ask, 'Do you see someone, a man, in your bedroom? Is he coming toward you?'"

After several weeks of sessions with Stanley, Hurt convinced herself that her mother and father had sexually molested her throughout her childhood. "I'm not very proud of this," Hurt says now, "but I'm a people-pleaser, especially with authority figures, and I'm a very suggestible person. She's leading me, and I'm going where she wants me to go."

In the spring of 1991, Hurt spent a month in the psychiatric unit at Millwood Hospital, where Stanley headed the women's treatment program, which she also designed. Here Hurt's memories of childhood trauma grew exponentially; she now recounted episodes of abuse by 32 different people. Her records say she recalled first being raped by her father at age 2. Although Stanley admitted under oath that children's memories before age 4 are highly unreliable, she said she assumed Hurt just got her age wrong.

According to the affidavits of the experts in Hurt's case, they believe a combination of drugs -- she was prescribed Xanax, Prozac, and a sleeping pill -- hypnosis, contamination from the other patients, and assorted questionable therapeutic techniques primed Hurt to recall false memories of abuse.

During her hospital stay, Hurt was encouraged to read The Courage to Heal, a workbook that helps people recover childhood memories of sexual abuse and that was considered the bible of the recovered-memory movement. The book was written in 1988 by two laymen who claimed without any evidence that one-third of American women were sexually abused as girls and that many of them not only did not recall it, but also dealt with the trauma by developing different personalities.

Instead of focusing on problems with her husband or undergoing conventional therapy for depression, Hurt was lost in the past -- or some semblance of what she thought was her past.

"They said I couldn't get well until I remembered," Hurt says. "They convinced me that getting my bra fitted at the department store was sexual abuse if it had made me feel uncomfortable. They told me every boy who ever hugged or kissed me sexually abused me if the contact wasn't wanted."

Why couldn't Hurt see that her discoveries from therapy seemed, on the surface, dubious? "These people were broken-down and defenseless," psychologist and lawyer Chris Barden says. "We might get up and leave, but we're not desperate to get well. It is like what a chemotherapy patient is willing to put up with, because they want to get well. They believe the doctors that this is the way."

As early as 1985, the American Medical Association warned doctors of the risks of using hypnosis to help patients retrieve memories. It cautioned that subjects in hypnosis are more vulnerable to the effects of leading questions, that hypnosis can lead to confabulations and false memories, and that memories appear to be less reliable than non-hypnotic recall.

In her deposition in Hurt's case, Stanley denied using hypnosis on Hurt during her treatment. Although she destroyed Hurt's records a month before the suit against her was filed in May 1998, Hurt's Millwood Hospital records corroborate that she underwent hypnosis on numerous occasions. Furthermore, hypnosis experts claim that techniques such as age regression and guided imagery, which Stanley employed, can also induce a trancelike state that makes patients vulnerable to suggestion.

Stanley, who stopped working with sexually abused patients in 1994, admitted in her deposition that Hurt had no recollection of being sexually abused before Stanley treated her. Asked whether she believed her patient's memories of being victimized by 32 perpetrators were credible, she said, "Well, they were her memories; whether they were factual or not, I don't know." Stanley said she probably did not discuss with Hurt the veracity of the memories, because it "can be very damaging to the therapeutic relationship to doubt the patient."