Cult of Madness

In the course of filing suit, she was alarmed to learn that Charter had lost all of her hospital records. And she became utterly convinced that her former therapists had made her sicker, not better.

When Hurt's attorney Chris Barden asked Grundman in her deposition whether she believed that Hurt's memories, particularly of satanic abuse, were delusions, she said that was a possibility. But she believed they would deal with that later in therapy, which they never did.

"If you treated a patient who thought he was Napoleon, would you write down in great detail all his battle plans and how he made his uniforms and where he stored the horses, and would you fill up dozens and dozens and dozens of pages of what Napoleon planned to do with his men?" Barden asked Grundman. She said she would not.

In his deposition, Ross says that he believed Hurt's memories could have been delusions but that to confront his patient with that possibility would have been too traumatic.

Colin Ross is now head of trauma programs at Timberlawn Mental Health System of Dallas. Last year, he told an interviewer for the A&E cable channel show The Unexplained that patients could get worse in therapy if they are led to believe they suffered trauma that didn't happen. He discussed an MPD patient who, before coming to Charter, had believed she was victimized by a satanic cult. He said she had been a victim of false memories that had been cooked up in therapy and that made her worse.

The lawsuit has not been easy on Hurt. Several defense lawyers have brought up the ad as proof that she didn't have problems with her therapists until she saw the chance to make a profit.

"Even after I came to see [Galindo], there were still parts I believed," Hurt says. "I'm still hanging on to parts. You don't just drop it. I lost my husband, my kids, myself. I thought I was one person. No, you're this person. No you're these people -- 200 people. And then you realize you're not that person. It's a slap in the face."

Hurt's older children, now 19 and 20, have had a hard time re-establishing a close relationship with their mother. But this summer, her youngest daughter, who is 11, came to live with her. She and her ex-husband have even discussed getting back together, but he needs more time to be sure she is well.

"We have talked about reconciliation," says Bobby Hurt. "But there is so much water under the bridge. I do still love her, though. She's a wonderful lady. It's hard to fathom how seriously those therapists destroyed our lives. It has been devastating. It wrecked everything -- my marriage, my children's lives, the relationship I had with my in-laws. My poor children had no mother to speak of since 1993 -- and even before that when she began losing touch with reality."

Hurt can't stop blaming herself for what happened. "I'm flabbergasted," she says. "Why couldn't I say enough's enough? Why did I let someone allow me to lose my whole life? I went from having a loving, loving family and three kids to having nothing, to being on food stamps and welfare. That's quite a change. No matter what, I can't ever get these years back with my family and kids. Things will never be the same."