Joan Acocella began her 1999 book, Creating Hysteria:  Women and Multiple Personality Disorders, by reviewing the legal and professional proceedings against Dr. Diane Humenansky, a former-psychiatrist practicing in St. Paul, MN.*  In 1989, as the McMartin Preschool case wound down, with its legacy of occult child rape, Dr. Humenansky led a patient named Elizabeth Carlson to believe that she suffered from Multiple-Personality-Disorder because of past Satanic Ritual Abuse.

Dr. Humenansky had become more sensitive to MPD diagnoses after attending a number of professional conferences dealing with the subject, and after consulting with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist at the center of the famous Sybil case. Humenansky felt that she could readily spot a patient with multiple personalities.  She not only diagnosed Carlson with the disorder, but nearly all of her other patients as well.

These patients took the diagnosis seriously, and followed through with the psychiatrist’s treatment protocol, which included group therapy.  At some point during these processions, a particularly obnoxious patient began to dominate discussion.  The others felt put out by this, and asked Dr. Humenansky to either reign her in, or throw her out.  When Humenansky refused to take any action, they simply started their own therapy group.

It was this second group, away from Dr. Humenansky’s ability to monitor them, that soon realized some disturbing things that had to do with the treatment itself.  Not only were they all diagnosed with the same illness, but their professed experiences were nearly identical.  Moreover, their narratives echoed the plotlines of popular movies and television shows.  They then agreed that what they thought were memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse or whatever else had little in common with all of their other memories.  Many said that these ideas “seemed unreal” to them, although they truly believed them at one time.

Once they reached this point, some confessed that these confabulations resulted from the compliance to social demands made by both Dr. Humenansky and the group itself.  As Carlson herself noted, “One woman said, ‘I have a confession to make.  I made up an alter named Nikki because everybody else in the group had a Nikki and I felt left out.’”

I’d hope most people can see the problematic nature of Dr. Humenansky’s diagnoses and treatments without much comment.  After all, MPD isn’t contagious.  It doesn’t break out in epidemics; and that’s assuming that it even exists outside of iatrogenesis.  Most of us would scratch our heads wondering how a trained professional could see such a rare condition occurring in such numbers without good reason or corroborating evidence.   

Obviously, the diagnoses had no basis in fact.  Just as obvious, Dr. Humenansky did her patients a tremendous disservice, which required years of additional therapy just to get over the previous therapy.  In 1996, a jury officially thought this obvious, and awarded Carlson $2.3 million in a malpractice suit.  A year later, a second jury awarded another former Humenansky patient, Vynnette Hamanne, $2.6 million.  Shortly afterward, Minnesota’s medical board suspended Dr. Humenansky’s license for an indefinite period.

Acocella and other FMS proponets came to cite Dr. Humenansky as a case of psychiatry gone wrong.   Opponents of the FMS diagnosis would probably agree.  Just about any professional and layperson can see the harm done to patients under those conditions.

The problem is this instance might not prove that these patients actually had false memories so much as they had false beliefs that were very strong.  These beliefs were reinforced through the social dynamics of group therapy.  And as “Nikki” indicated, there were social pressures in group therapy to conform to these beliefs, and present them as memories. 

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*The link goes to an Amazon.com page listing the book.  You might find the reader comments especially interesting in that many of them dovetail nicely with the content here.