Cult of Madness

According to the affidavits of the experts in Hurt's case, they believe a combination of drugs -- she was prescribed Xanax, Prozac, and a sleeping pill -- hypnosis, contamination from the other patients, and assorted questionable therapeutic techniques primed Hurt to recall false memories of abuse.

During her hospital stay, Hurt was encouraged to read The Courage to Heal, a workbook that helps people recover childhood memories of sexual abuse and that was considered the bible of the recovered-memory movement. The book was written in 1988 by two laymen who claimed without any evidence that one-third of American women were sexually abused as girls and that many of them not only did not recall it, but also dealt with the trauma by developing different personalities.

Instead of focusing on problems with her husband or undergoing conventional therapy for depression, Hurt was lost in the past -- or some semblance of what she thought was her past.

"They said I couldn't get well until I remembered," Hurt says. "They convinced me that getting my bra fitted at the department store was sexual abuse if it had made me feel uncomfortable. They told me every boy who ever hugged or kissed me sexually abused me if the contact wasn't wanted."

Why couldn't Hurt see that her discoveries from therapy seemed, on the surface, dubious? "These people were broken-down and defenseless," psychologist and lawyer Chris Barden says. "We might get up and leave, but we're not desperate to get well. It is like what a chemotherapy patient is willing to put up with, because they want to get well. They believe the doctors that this is the way."

As early as 1985, the American Medical Association warned doctors of the risks of using hypnosis to help patients retrieve memories. It cautioned that subjects in hypnosis are more vulnerable to the effects of leading questions, that hypnosis can lead to confabulations and false memories, and that memories appear to be less reliable than non-hypnotic recall.

In her deposition in Hurt's case, Stanley denied using hypnosis on Hurt during her treatment. Although she destroyed Hurt's records a month before the suit against her was filed in May 1998, Hurt's Millwood Hospital records corroborate that she underwent hypnosis on numerous occasions. Furthermore, hypnosis experts claim that techniques such as age regression and guided imagery, which Stanley employed, can also induce a trancelike state that makes patients vulnerable to suggestion.

Stanley, who stopped working with sexually abused patients in 1994, admitted in her deposition that Hurt had no recollection of being sexually abused before Stanley treated her. Asked whether she believed her patient's memories of being victimized by 32 perpetrators were credible, she said, "Well, they were her memories; whether they were factual or not, I don't know." Stanley said she probably did not discuss with Hurt the veracity of the memories, because it "can be very damaging to the therapeutic relationship to doubt the patient."

If confronting a patient about the truth of her memories was damaging, not challenging them was equally traumatic. While hospitalized, Hurt twice attempted to cut herself, with her watch and with a paper cutter.

While hospitalized at Millwood, Hurt confronted her parents and several of her siblings with her memories of sexual abuse, specifically that her father used to rape her in the bathtub while they played a game called horsey.

"Dr. Stanley told me what to say, and I regurgitated it," Hurt says. "She had me write out the information, a list of all the memories and how I expected them to support me. I was shaking and crying while I was reading it. One of my sisters started yelling that it wasn't true. My other siblings told me that someone was putting this in my head. My parents were in shock. They had no idea what I was talking about. All they could think was that this wasn't Martha."

Hurt says Stanley had prepared her for her family's response: "She said they would either accept it or they were in denial. There was no third option -- that it might not be true." The therapist, says Hurt, convinced her she should not have contact with her family members if they remained in denial.

After Hurt was released from Millwood, she attended a weekly incest survivors' group at Stanley's office, an individual therapy session with Stanley, and marital counseling. Isolated from her family and depressed about her past, she lost her proofreading job and withdrew from friends.

Then, in early fall 1991, a woman in Hurt's incest survivors' group started talking about how her children were involved in a cult that handled snakes. Each session ended with a relaxation exercise in which patients were encouraged to close their eyes and envision themselves in a safe place. When Hurt did this, she suddenly had a memory of being in a pit of snakes.

She told Stanley about the memory and about a letter with a picture of a snake on it that she had sent her grandparents when she was a child. Stanley suspected that Hurt may have been involved in satanic ritual abuse, and the letter, she hypothesized, may have been Hurt's attempt to reach out and tell her grandparents what was happening, Hurt says.