Satanic Temple Protests Pseudoscientific Therapies for Satanic Abuse and Witchcraft
While this sounds like a scene of “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” it was actually a street performance organized by The Satanic Temple to protest the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD). (For similar protests by the Satanic Temple, see here and here).
Their protest may strike some as silly, but the Satanic Temple is trying to draw attention to a serious issue. The ISSTD deals with highly controversial and discredited theories such as dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), repressed memories, and hypnosis. These theories were key to a panic in the 1980s over “Satanic Ritual Abuse” in which numerous people underwent therapy and became convinced that they had suffered abuse at the hands of Satanic cults.
Some even came to believe that their minds harbored repressed “cult programming” and that they could be a danger to their own children when this programming was triggered. In 1995, a former patient sued Bennett Braun MD, a founder and former president of ISSTD, claiming that he’d convinced her that she’d engaged in Satanic rituals, cannibalism, and infanticide. She received a $10.6 million dollar settlement. In 1999 Illinois state officials issued a temporary suspension of his medical license, yet he remains in practice in another state.
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