Return of the Conspiracy Therapists
Or: Hey, Input Mag! I fixed yr story about multiple personality TikTok
I am watching a decades-old episode of The Fifth Estate, a Canadian newsmagazine, on the subject of multiple personality disorder. The episode, titled "Mistaken Identities," first aired in November 1993.
The footage is uncanny — adult women in a hospital clinic rocking back and forth on the floor, crying, playing with blocks, sucking on their thumbs. They are acting like this, according to the voice over, because they have something called Multiple Personality Disorder, and they believe that they are currently inhabited by the personalities of young children. The diagnosis, which is known these days as Dissociative Identity Disorder, is said to be the result of extreme childhood trauma. (I'll use both terms, DID and MPD, interchangeably from here on out.)
"[M]ultiple personality disorder is ... a little child imagining that the abuse is happening to somebody else," says a man on the screen, boasting a mullet and a purple paisley tie. "It puts some distance between her and the abuse, it softens the emotional impact, and then the next step is to put a memory barrier between yourself and this new identity. And now, not only did it not happen to you, you don't even remember it."
This is the explanation of DID offered by Colin Ross, the psychiatrist profiled in the program. I am acquainted with Ross; we've spoken on the phone multiple times, and we met once at a meeting of something called the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD for short). He is a well-known personality in the field of DID research and recovery. A past president of the ISSTD, Ross is the author of dry academic titles like Multiple Personality Disorder: Diagnosis, Clinical Features, and Treatment and Trauma Model Therapy: A Treatment Approach for Trauma, Dissociation, and Complex Comorbidity.
In many ways, Colin Ross is the living embodiment of the DID field. To all outside appearances, he is a serious researcher and clinician working to further the understanding of multiple personality disorder and its sibling, repressed memories. He currently operates multiple trauma recovery programs in the state of Texas.
When speaking, Ross delivers everything in a silky monotone that seems to ooze competence. But if you talk to him for more than five minutes, the conversation can get really weird. When we met, Ross and I discussed satanic rituals, UFO abductions, and government mind control conspiracies, all of which he believes are "real" on some level. He claims to have seen the effects of these conspiracies in his clinical practice.
Among Ross's other books is Military Mind Control, an expose of incest and satanic ritual abuse inflicted upon a young girl by the military-industrial-child pornography complex. And the ISSTD itself, a professional association for the study of dissociative identity disorder, is part of a whole network of therapists who promote these same strange, unscientific ideas. To watch Ross spewing this nonsense on that old TV show is to take a time machine to an era when people sincerely believed that the nation was beset by roving bands of lunatics who tortured and killed children at the behest of Satan. Known as The Satanic Panic, this all pretty much died down in the 1990s, although it never really stopped completely. These days, therapists like Colin Ross and his cronies at the ISSTD are helping to provide the pseudoscientific justification for QAnon and Pizzagate and anyone who thinks that America's problems are the result of a satanic Deep State…
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