Dec. 31, 2012

Anticipating Attorney General Roy Cooper’s 2007 statement dismissing charges against the lacrosse defendants, Duke law professor Paul Haagen said,

“The critical thing could be the wording. It could simply say the state can no longer prove its case, which would be a very harmful outcome for the community, (or it) could provide a full accounting of why the case should never have been brought.”

As it turned out, Cooper – elbowed along by the Duke students’ phalanx of top-shelf lawyers – chose the road less traveled by prosecutorial bitter-enders such as H. P. Williams, Nancy Lamb and Bill Hart:

“In the rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see clearly…. I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people.”

Cooper’s words were appropriate to end the case of the lacrosse defendants – and they would be just as appropriate to end the case of the Edenton Seven.

Nov. 28, 2012

“There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evil-doer.”

– Robert Lynd, Irish essayist  (1879-1949)

The average Edentonian may have been too fearful and confused to feel good about demonizing the Edenton Seven – ah, but what a rush it must have given the cocksure therapists and prosecutors!

Oct. 9, 2013

“We are a society that, every 50 years or so, is afflicted by some paroxysm of virtue – an orgy of self-cleansing through which evil of one kind or another is cast out.   From the witch-hunts of  Salem to the communist hunts of the McCarthy era to the current shrill fixation on child abuse, there runs a common thread of moral hysteria.

“After the McCarthy era, people would ask: But how could it have happened?  How could the presumption of innocence have been abandoned wholesale? How did large and powerful institutions acquiesce as congressional investigators ran roughshod over civil liberties – all in the name of a war on communists?  How was it possible to believe that subversives lurked behind every library door, in every radio station, that every two-bit actor who had belonged to the wrong political organization posed a threat to the nation’s security?

“Years from now people doubtless will ask the same questions about our present era – a time when the most improbable charges of abuse find believers; when it is enough only to be accused by anonymous sources to be hauled off by investigators; a time when the hunt for child abusers has become a national pathology.”

– From “From the Mouths of Babes to a Jail Cell” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (Harper’s Magazine, May 1990)

March 22, 2014

“Editorial Note: In light of the responses we have received regarding this article by Richard Noll, PhD, that was posted on our website on December 6, 2013, the article has been reposted with a modification. Additionally, we are posting responses from certain of the individuals mentioned in the article and from Dr. Noll in order to leave analysis of the article up to our readers.”

– From “Speak, Memory,” Psychiatric Times’ reposted version of Noll’s “When Psychiatry Battled the Devil.”

As pointed out at 1 boring old man, PT’s belated reposting omits this passage:

“New (American Psychiatric Association) work groups for the preparation of DSM-IV were formed. Not surprisingly, none of the former members of the DSM-III-R Advisory Committee on Dissociate Disorders was invited to be on the work group for the dissociative disorders.”

Prominent among those uninvitees, of course, were Dr. Richard Kluft and Dr. Bennett Braun, both of whom broke their silence to accept PT’s offer of space to swat back at Noll. Also responding: Dr. David Spiegel, recently described as “the most influential man responsible” for the inclusion of DID/MPD in DSM-V.

And now Noll has gently rebutted – for the most part, refuted – the SRA apologists’ noisy rebuttals.

It’s been 25 years since the fever-breaking Chicago conference – plus another three months while Psychiatric Times searched its soul and its appetite for litigation. Does the vigorous exchange on the PT site mark the beginning of psychiatry’s overdue reexamination of its SRA era?

If so, that discussion must address not only the causes of the moral panic but also its effects: that is, the wrongful and brutal prosecution of hundreds of innocent defendants such as the Edenton Seven – a subject Kluft, Braun and Spiegel managed to mention not at all in their responses. Are they really so oblivious?