Bennett Braun was perhaps one of the most evil psychiatrists I ever met or investigated. The anti-religious, criminal kidnap-deprogramming groups of the 1980's just loved him, because he made all "cults" seem even more dangerous, with his presentations including 11x17 glossy photographs of severed genitalia and tales of horrendous "international, multi-generational, satanic ritualistic conspiracies" that were secretly embedded in every community, stealing, raping, murdering, skinning and eating innocent children.
Braun and his cohorts, including Colin Ross, Roberta Sachs, Jerry Simandl and others, caused extreme paranoia for the media (who loved them for that, of course!) to spread around in society. Needless to say, they also caused horrible mental and emotional damage to their patients, many of whom spent years of their lives believing that they had multiple personalities caused by childhood sexual abuse, only to realize later that it was all false memory, implanted with the help of drugs and hypnosis by their psychotherapists. Bennett Braun was sued, prosecuted, and disgraced.
Braun's death should be remembered, to link his insane and extremely harmful practices to psychiatry in general. This is exactly what psychiatry does; this is what it is about!
Looking back at archives will easily tie the crazy "satanic abuse" crowd to the APA and various other bad actors who are still around. Braun's International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation ("ISSMP&D") was a respected "research" authority for several years. Their annual conferences were co-sponsored by none other than Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago!
I was a dues-paying member of ISSMP&D, and somewhere I still have a complete collection of issues of their monthly journal, Dissociation. If I can find those journal issues, I'll blog again about this, with more gruesome details. There was also a parents' advocacy organization called Believe The Children, which did their best to fan the flames of moral panic by forwarding stories of satanic abuse, none of which were ever validated. I went to a couple BTC meetings and collected their publications, too.
There are efforts now to revise and suppress this story, not un-similar to the Chinese Communist Party's attempts to wipe out all memory of Tiananmen Square and suppress any honest history of Mao's Cultural Revolution. If the APA has its way, ISSMP&D will be forgotten or recalled only as an insignificant little aberration in the long and bright narrative of humane, scientific mental health research and development. That's not how it was, I was there!
Things change. There is something weird in the coincidence that on the same day Bennett Braun died, a whole paradigm of modern offensive warfare was shaken to its foundations by the demonstrated ability of one nation to completely block a massive missile attack from another. (Maybe that's my next article.)
But as bad as Bennett Braun was, he was no worse than Ewen Cameron, Joly West, Harry Bailey, Radovan Karadžić, Ernst Rüdin, Benjamin Rush and a whole host of others throughout the grim history of psychiatry.
Psychiatria delenda est!
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