False belief states known in clinical populations
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Anorexia nervosa
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A thin person sees themself as fat.
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Autochthonous delusions
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Beliefs which crystallise out of a confusing situation or mental state, often
the mechanism of false confessions in interrogation.
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Belief in past lives
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One has lived before in different personae.
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Body Dysmorphic Disorder
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A strong belief that a part of the body is abnormal, unresponsive to reason.
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Personality Disorders
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Personality Disorders are characterised by a disturbance in inner life and
systematic distortions of perception and self-presentation.
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Cluster 'A'
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Paranoid and Schizotypal are most likely to be involved.
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Paranoid Personality Disorder (A) (hard–done–by, persecuted)
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The paranoid believes in the untoward intentions of others as a matter of
course. See also erotomanic beliefs and delusions.
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Schizotypal (A)
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Suspicious of others' motives, likely to draw idiosyncratic conclusions from
events and signs. Communicates with spirits in an altered mode of
consciousness, senses a presence.
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Cluster 'B'
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Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic.
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Histrionic (B) (dramatic exaggeration, drama queen)
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Anxious, concerned, and nervous, she presents herself as victimised,
manipulated, coerced, and physically or psychologically abused. May be
organised intellectually, assertive, with a justified agenda with facts,
figures, and opinions supporting her evidence, presenting herself as
justifiably outraged. However, when clarification is sought on the details,
becomes hostile, passively-aggressive and may make ethical complaints or
threaten suit.
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Borderline Personality Disorder (unstable) 'Fatal Attraction’
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Highly dysfunctional, may lose contact with reality and is prone to brief
psychotic breaks which are not recognised as such. May be most readily
identified by peculiar and bizarre descriptions of events in her history.
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Antisocial Personality Disorder (B) (delinquent, , criminal)
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Tells lies as easily as the truth, by habit or `for short term personal gain.
Involved in street kid allegations against carers and 'The Abuse Excuse.'
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Narcissistic Personality Disorder (B) (arrogant, grandiose,
entitled)
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Entitled to say what they want and take what they want, to override normal
people's rules, indulge in grandiose fantasies and exaggerate their past with
little concern for the truth. They will exploit the system to the utmost also
see pseudologia fantastica.
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Confabulation |
Product of therapy and other coercive conditions. When alcoholic, brain-damaged
and developmentally disabled persons fill in memory gaps with plausible
scenarios.
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Confusion
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Temporary state caused by misinformation or misinterpretation which might be
carried on.
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Chronic pain states
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Mistaken but tightly held beliefs about non existent disease causing symptoms.
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Déjà vu
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A sense of familiarity with a strange place.
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Delusions
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Beliefs inconsistent with culture, firmly held in the teeth of evidence to the
contrary.
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Delusional jealousy
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Recurrent or persistent belief that a significant other is unfaithful.
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Delusional memory
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Misremembering the past in accordance with present delusional state. Also
called retrospective delusion.
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Delusional perception
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Misinterpretation of real events in accordance with delusions.
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Dissociative states
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Belief and behaviour in accordance with ideas transmitted by hypnosis or
suggestion. Are easily generated in therapy. See Sibyl.
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Delusional Disorder
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A set of interrelated false but plausible firmly held beliefs for which
external evidence is lacking. 'Just knowing' something to be the case. without
being able to provide a reasonable source for that information.
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Erotomania
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Involves false beliefs about the erotic desires and intentions of others, that
another is secretly in love but cannot reveal it.
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Folie à deux, en famille
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Shared beliefs where dominant partner's influence is strong, sometimes
psychotic, sometimes malevolent. Provides the basis of the 'parental alienation
syndrome' associated with divorce.
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Ganser states
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On the borderline between hysteria and malingering, understanding but missing
for example two and two are five.
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Hysteria
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Unvalidated belief states achieved in a panic situation by short- circuiting of
reasoning.
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Hysterical beliefs
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Unvalidated beliefs which with short-circuiting of reasoning to explain
ambiguous phenomena.
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Hysterical contagion
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Several or more people sharing beliefs where each gets validation from another
which are unvalidated.
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Jamais vu
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An intense feeling of familiarity with a scene and conviction that one has been
there before, typically post epileptic.
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Mistake
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A belief acquired though acceptance of a mistaken source.
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Morbid jealousy
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Belief that a significant other is unfaithful. Often psychotic.
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Multiple personalities
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Belief that one has many alternate personalities, unaware of each other and
many different lives.
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Panoramic, experience
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An intense sensation of grandeur, importance, often associated with
psychotropic drugs.
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Paranoid Schizophrenia
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Bizarre delusions for more than six months in a psychotic individual.
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Paranoid state
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Tendency to perceive events as relating to the self, in a negative way, but
might be imputing 'significance' to the self.
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Pseudologia Fantastica
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Story–telling, not improbable, built upon a matrix of truth, enduring, not told
for personal profit but self-aggrandising. Distinct from delusions as the
person can acknowledge falsehoods.
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Somatization
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A strong belief, in the absence of evidence, that one has a disease. in the
absence of evidence.
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Trance mediumship
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Induced dissociative state for a specific purpose.
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Toxic delirium
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Confusional state caused by fever, psychotropic drugs or toxins.
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Trans sexuality
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The belief that one's sex is incorrectly assigned. associated with action on
this belief.
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TRUE BELIEVERS
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SCEPTICS
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Personality Disorders |
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Most persons who are seeking attention by saying that they have been sexually
abused have Borderline and related Personality Disorder.
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Most persons who are seeking attention by saying they have been sexually abused
have Borderline and related Personality Disorder and multiple problems.
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Borderline Personality Disorder is actually complex Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder caused by repressed memories of CSA.
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People with Borderline and related Personality Disorders have a disturbance of
inner life and perception and are likely to perceive themselves as victims and
report having been sexually and otherwise abused.
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Borderline Personality Disorder has some features ion common with Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder so they must have a common cause: traumatic stress.
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Symptom similarity has no relationship to causation. It is illogical to reason
from effect to cause as any effect can have any number of causes.
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Borderline Personality Disorder is caused by CSA.
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No one has demonstrated a causal link between proved sexual abuse and to
personality problems in later life. |
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CSA has been repressed so it cannot be recalled but it manifests in the
personality and in life.
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Preoccupation with sexual and other abuse is a manifestation of Borderline and
similar Personality Disorders where disturbances of perception and inner life
are prominent.
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Therapists purport to treat 'memories'.
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The further diagnosis of false belief states is not in the repertoire of many
of the therapists.
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Up to 90% of Borderlines (Cluster B Personality Disorder) in clinical
populations have a history of child sexual abuse.
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In the early 1980s, about 10% of such patients gave a history of CSA; in the
late 1990s the number giving this history has risen to 90%.
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We rely on clinical experience, what our patients tell us.
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So did Freud until he stopped, having gained insight into how he was
encouraging these improbable disclosures.
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Reports of CSA are the equivalent of instances of CSA.
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No one has tried to validate these reports nor interview relatives nor assess
the credibility of the patients.
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Provide sufficient recognition cues and you will overcome resistance to
remembering.
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Repeated suggestive questioning can result in very vivid memories which are
false but which are still believed..
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Children, like torture victims, teach themselves to dissociate while they are
being sexually abused. and This leads to repression and not remembering it.
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Dissociation occurs during the 'remembering' not during sexual abuse, nor is
dissociating a plausible explanation for forgetting it happened.,
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People who have been abused show it in their lives and are now seeking help for
it as patients.
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People who seek therapy for past sexual abuse have many problems of living.
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Neither incidence nor prevalence of having been abused is known and, on some
estimates, by some criteria, range between 3% and 560% of the community.
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Neither incidence nor prevalence of having been abused is known and, on some
estimates, by some criteria, range between 3% and 60% of the community.
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At a prevalence of 3%–5%, one child in a class of thirty will be sexually
abused in childhood.
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One child in a class of thirty represents a big problem needing huge resources.
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Therapists doing memory work in the USA have over a million women per year
reporting that they were sexually abused. This involves an incidence of one
family in 25.
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Reports of CSA are not the same as instances of CSA. The incidence of reports
correlates to the number of available therapists.
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Memory |
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25% of post doctoral therapists in USA believe that memory is stored and will
replay like at tape recorder. They practise and encourage their patients’
memories in accordance with that belief.
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Reports of events which read like stage directions for a video or film are
fabrications and elaborations, not real memories which are far less detailed,
recalled in flashes and confused in time and sequence.
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Sexual abuse sets up new rules for memory.
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No reason why this should be so. This is special pleading to explain that
'memories' of sexual abuse are different from all other memories.
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Memory functions differently for sexual abuse. It is something else entirely:
‘traumatic memory’.: Sexual abuse is remembered through different pathways from
other kinds of memories.
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There is no reason to suspect this. Memory research reveals that children who
witness rape, suicide, and violence do not forget those traumas. Some forget or
fail to recall significant parts of real traumas, but one cannot assume a
trauma because of the absence of a memory of it.
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Memories of sexual abuse are true and recalled in substantial detail.
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Memory is frail, unreliable, fades with time, and very vulnerable to
suggestion.
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Never mind the context in which these memories emerged, or the events that
triggered remembering.
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Context and subsequent development are crucial as they enable psychiatric
diagnosis, identify contamination, suggestion, hysterical contagion and
motivation.
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What emerges in therapy is a previously repressed 'memory'.
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Anything we say is prefixed with ‘"I
know' or 'I remember'.
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Repression |
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Traumatic events are robustly repressed each time they happen, even if they
occur many times.
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No experimental evidence available to support this nor could one devise an
experiment to differentiate repression from ordinary forgetting.
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The fact is that memory was repressed because the event was so traumatic that
the patient dissociated at the time of these horrid events.
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Dissociation, an hysterical phenomenon, is at the base of remembering. Studies
of hypnotism, trance mediumship, multiple personality, hysteria, brain
disorders, epilepsy and psychosis reveal that memory associated with these
states is qualitatively different from that found in laboratory studies of
healthy individuals.
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Sexual abuse can be forgotten, or not given consideration, and later recalled.
The rate of forgetting genuine abuse is in the order of 12 per cent of
validated cases.
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Sexual abuse, just like any other event, can be forgotten or recalled. The rate
of forgetting genuine abuse is in the order of 12 per cent of validated cases,
and these deny it ever happened.
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Is it a true or a false memory?
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It is rarely even 'memory,' It is better defined as a 'belief state'.
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What emerges in therapy is repressed or forgotten material, of which the
patient was either unaware or was not fully cognisant of its role in her life.
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'Pseudo memories' include beliefs based on fantasy , information from another
person, scenarios borrowed from television, films and books; the products of
guided imagining, delusions, dreams and nightmares; elaborations engendered by
therapeutic processes or by hypnosis or trance in a process known as 'hypnotic
pseudomemory production' inadvertently done by therapists; indoctrination,
inserted memories, mystical experiences, oedipal fantasies, plausible
explanations, reconstructed scenarios and unverified conclusions achieved by
short-circuiting in panic situations,; suggestion and lying for money.
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Money and Criminal injuries compensation are irrelevant as motivating forces
because as the claimant is entitled to compensation.
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There are no more disinterested complainants. Money, revenge, an explanation
for one's predicament and the desire to belong to a social movement are all
strong motivating forces. Belief is governed by desire and reason is , and
ought to be, a slave of the passions.
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Harm |
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CSA inevitably causes serious harm to personality development.
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25% to 50% of sexually abused children suffer no diagnosable effects
immediately after the sexual abuse. Studies fail to differentiate the effects
of sexual abuse from concurrent abuse and neglect that coexist.
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Sexually abused children need therapy to help them recover.
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Abused children who have follow up therapy do worse on many indicators than
those left alone.
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Trauma therapy for sexual abuse is necessary to assist recovery after traumatic
events.
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Trauma therapy is associated with greater morbidity measured as time off work
and continuing symptoms. It delays recovery. While it is affectively
satisfying, it is, at best, of little value-neutral.
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Prevalence |
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Sexual abuse of children was thought to be rare but memory therapists have
uncovered a massive hidden epidemic involving one family in twenty-five each
year.
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The sexual abuse epidemic is a cultural artefact caused by counting reports of
abuse as instances of abuse and rewarding those who remember abuse with money,
fame and unlimited attention.
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CSA is very common and incest can occur in seemingly normal families.
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CSA is rare compared with abuse and neglect. and when it occurs it usually does
so in association with abuse and neglect of children.
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Therapy |
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Untrue and implausible memories are a consequence of bad therapy.
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Untrue memories are an artefact of hypnotic trance formation and suggestion
which comes from culture, the vector of beliefs.
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Good therapists only get only true material and true memories
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What is good therapy and what benefits are reported from it?
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Only bad therapists cause their patients to generate false memories.
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Numerous retractors, now litigants, claim to have been virtually
hypnotised into developing false memories by the leaders of the recovered
memory movement.
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70% of patients in therapy for recovered memory were able to get corroboration
for their experiences.
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A report by the person whose information is to be corroborated to the effect
that a third party said something is neither evidence in science nor
corroboration in law. Corroboration involves a second, report, independently
provided.
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The accuser is to be believed, protected from character questioning and
encouraged with monetary compensation. The accused is guilty until proved
otherwise.
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The presumption of innocence, (the null hypothesis), is paramount. Sexual
charges should stand up to the falsification test like any other charges
or crimes.
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CSA can be diagnosed from behavioural signs, play therapy, the abused child
syndrome, and other behavioural characteristics.
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These are no more than witches marks and, where they have investigated, have
repeatedly been shown to be invalid.
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Child abuse is easily substantiated. DOCS substantiated 2,640 cases in 1999 in
NSW.
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The best anyone can do without an convincing and spontaneous report from a
child, and without physical evidence or confession, is to hold a hypothesis to
the effect that CSA might have taken place. This is somewhat different from
substantiated.
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Abusers of children are evil criminal persons who need to be identified and
punished.
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Perpetrators of CSA can have an abnormal personality, a hard wired sexual
preference, or alcoholism. and The problem needs to be treated as
an aberration for which the perpetrator might probably needs professional help.
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Let the jury decide if the allegations are true or false.
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Relevant experts should examine the evidence to see if there is a false belief
state or if hysterical phenomena account for the material.
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CSAAS , (child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome) accounts for true
remembering of real events and subsequently then denying these true memories
again.
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Karl Popper would say that this is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, so it is
nonsense. There is no possibility of denying a sexual abuse allegation after it
has surfaced.
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Claimants were awarded tens of thousands of dollars in compensation for having
been abused.
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Claimants are being awarded millions of dollars against therapists in
compensation for having had their lives and families destroyed by false
memories, clinically implanted or therapeutically enhanced.
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