Cult of Madness

The Dallas law firm of Stanley, Mandel & Iola placed the ad after one of its associates, Michelle Galindo, worked on a case similar to Martha Hurt's. Galindo was convinced there were other patients out there who had been subjected to improper counseling. She knew that hundreds of patients had been treated at Charter Hospital in Plano, but reaching them was tricky. Some were humiliated, others so indoctrinated by their therapy that they still trusted what their therapists had told them.

Hurt contacted Galindo, tearfully telling the lawyer that she questioned whether her memories were real. "I trusted the doctors and believed in them," Hurt says. "When I talked to Shelley [Galindo] and found out this therapy wasn't the norm and wasn't accepted by everyone, I was pretty upset. I was reluctant to sue anybody. [Galindo] encouraged me to check things out. Slowly things started to fall apart."

Shortly after her first meeting with an attorney, Hurt attended a Dallas meeting of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a Philadelphia-based group started by a college professor and his wife whose adult daughter accused her father of sexually abusing her. She listened as parents -- more than 40 of them -- recounted losing their daughters after they began therapy and started uncovering memories of unspeakable abuse.

"It was a roomful of moms and dads just like my own," Hurt says. "When I got up and told my story, they said therapists had said almost the exact same things to their children. I thought, maybe there is something else to this. Maybe what my own family said was true. One man stood up and said how much he missed his daughter, but he didn't know what to do to get her back.

"I told him not to give up, that she was lost and didn't know how to get home. He started crying. When you see that many people in the same situation, it makes you start to wonder."

Hurt's two worlds began colliding. At home with Tyo, she still suffered from alternative personalities, which he talked to on a regular basis. But after spending more time with her family, she came to believe she had never been abused. "They made me see that things didn't make sense," Hurt says. "I shared a bedroom my whole life. We only had one bathroom. How could I have been abused and no one else know about it?"

Looking at her medical and school records further convinced her. She could not have suffered such horrible sexual abuse and have it escape a pediatrician's attention. No one ever noticed that she had alternate personalities until she was in therapy.

Hurt left Tyo and moved in with her parents. She began conventional therapy for depression with a Dallas psychologist and began to see what had happened to her. She finally decided to file suit against her therapists and Charter and Millwood Hospitals, alleging, among other things, gross negligence and fraud. She is asking for an unspecified amount of compensation for past and future counseling, pain and suffering, mental anguish, past and future loss of relationship with her children, plus exemplary damages.

In the course of filing suit, she was alarmed to learn that Charter had lost all of her hospital records. And she became utterly convinced that her former therapists had made her sicker, not better.

When Hurt's attorney Chris Barden asked Grundman in her deposition whether she believed that Hurt's memories, particularly of satanic abuse, were delusions, she said that was a possibility. But she believed they would deal with that later in therapy, which they never did.

"If you treated a patient who thought he was Napoleon, would you write down in great detail all his battle plans and how he made his uniforms and where he stored the horses, and would you fill up dozens and dozens and dozens of pages of what Napoleon planned to do with his men?" Barden asked Grundman. She said she would not.

In his deposition, Ross says that he believed Hurt's memories could have been delusions but that to confront his patient with that possibility would have been too traumatic.

Colin Ross is now head of trauma programs at Timberlawn Mental Health System of Dallas. Last year, he told an interviewer for the A&E cable channel show The Unexplained that patients could get worse in therapy if they are led to believe they suffered trauma that didn't happen. He discussed an MPD patient who, before coming to Charter, had believed she was victimized by a satanic cult. He said she had been a victim of false memories that had been cooked up in therapy and that made her worse.

The lawsuit has not been easy on Hurt. Several defense lawyers have brought up the ad as proof that she didn't have problems with her therapists until she saw the chance to make a profit.

"Even after I came to see [Galindo], there were still parts I believed," Hurt says. "I'm still hanging on to parts. You don't just drop it. I lost my husband, my kids, myself. I thought I was one person. No, you're this person. No you're these people -- 200 people. And then you realize you're not that person. It's a slap in the face."

Hurt's older children, now 19 and 20, have had a hard time re-establishing a close relationship with their mother. But this summer, her youngest daughter, who is 11, came to live with her. She and her ex-husband have even discussed getting back together, but he needs more time to be sure she is well.

"We have talked about reconciliation," says Bobby Hurt. "But there is so much water under the bridge. I do still love her, though. She's a wonderful lady. It's hard to fathom how seriously those therapists destroyed our lives. It has been devastating. It wrecked everything -- my marriage, my children's lives, the relationship I had with my in-laws. My poor children had no mother to speak of since 1993 -- and even before that when she began losing touch with reality."

Hurt can't stop blaming herself for what happened. "I'm flabbergasted," she says. "Why couldn't I say enough's enough? Why did I let someone allow me to lose my whole life? I went from having a loving, loving family and three kids to having nothing, to being on food stamps and welfare. That's quite a change. No matter what, I can't ever get these years back with my family and kids. Things will never be the same."