the totally insane true story behind the 1970s film and book Sybil

I don't remember that movie being boring at all?!

Me either – at all – on fact, when I first saw it in the theater, I was *dying* for the DVD to come out, hoping the extras would add more layers. Which: they did. I devoured them, too. I have watched the movie so many times, but it fits in with my obsessions. I guess semi - party atmosphere, several drinks in, "Hey guys, let's watch this movie I love!" And the first 20 minutes is the 20% well-trimmed lawns of suburban New York, and news footage...I love it, but it has put everyone to sleep, while I just stay up and rewatch it. #anecdata

Pa Freidman's belated admission of guilt

but not of what he was accused of

great sentence there

Thanks. This (with Jesse's accusers recanting, saying they were coerced, why his father falsely confessed, apparently, and how the 2010 relaunch was cooked too, doc director long since convinced that the Friedmans were railroaded) rounds up the most recent info I could find, from June 24 (updates?)

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/capturing-the-friedmans-subject-seeks-to-overturn-1988-conviction-1201245697/

And this, from last summer, before the DA's O HE'S GUILTY AWRITE report, gives more detail, incl the director's "evidence reel," increasingly favoring Jesse, compiled since the DVD release. No doubt there's enough material for a sequel, or at least an extended reissue.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-05-29/news/jesse-friedman/

Since Michelle Remembers has been mentioned here...

http://idontevenownatelevision.com/michelle-remembers-w-poncho-martinez

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/us/debate-persists-over-diagnosing-mental-health-disorders-long-after-sybil.html

must read

/watch

debbie nathan posted something recently about the % of psychologists who believe in the therapy-assisted retrieval of repressed memories and it was staggering

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/dangerous-idea-mental-health-93325/

According to Amy, Castlewood peeled away her sense of what was and wasn’t true. The therapy focused on what the therapists felt were her other “parts” or personalities. “I was naming parts, mapping out parts on paper, drawing parts.” As she sat in a dark room with her therapist, disoriented by a litany of anti-depressants and under hypnosis, Amy began to visualize scenes of brutal, sexual torture by her father and others; she says she saw herself becoming pregnant at the age of 14; being naked on an upside-down cross while a crown of thorns was placed on her head at her grandmother’s house. Therapists assigned Amy readings of recovered memory autobiographies along the lines of Michelle Remembers, she told me. Group sessions featured testimonials by other Castlewood patients about the satanic abuse they suffered. The groups also spent time, she says, “watching movies on cults and in our over-medicated minds developing more false memories.” Amy claims these sessions were led by Schwartz.

this is just one example, from 2004!

yeah, it's so awful and sad.

and if you didn't already have reason to despise dr. phil, his show is still hosting people who claim to have recovered memories of ritual/satanic sexual abuse.

you really have to wonder about a psychological profession that allows these sort of things to go on, even if they're no longer mainstream.

from the article la lechera linked:

More troublingly, over 43 percent of practicing clinical psychologists think it is possible to retrieve repressed memories. Among Internal Family Systems therapists, 66 percent believe it is possible.

i'm already inclined to think that clinical psychology is a big scam (albeit one where the therapists are believers), this doesn't help.

i definitely don't think the whole field is a scam -- in spite of the stats you cited, the article noted that research psychologists widely agree about the deep falseness of recovering memories through therapeutic means (esp w/hypnosis) -- but it's a lot like teaching in that if you feed practitioners a bunch of garbage in their training, they will run that shit into the ground before they admit that it was wrong/ineffective/harmful.

it makes me sad for people in general.

and yeah dr phil is a disgusting charlatan
last time i watched his show (just to briefly see what people were still watching) he had steve harvey on and they were telling women why they couldn't find partners -- it was appalling.

from the article la lechera linked:

_More troublingly, over 43 percent of practicing clinical psychologists think it is possible to retrieve repressed memories. Among Internal Family Systems therapists, 66 percent believe it is possible._

Yikes. My therapist is an IFS therapist. If she starts talking about hypnotizing me, I'm out of there.

i definitely don't think the whole field is a scam -- in spite of the stats you cited, the article noted that research psychologists widely agree about the deep falseness of recovering memories through therapeutic means (esp w/hypnosis) -- but it's a lot like teaching in that if you feed practitioners a bunch of garbage in their training, they will run that shit into the ground before they admit that it was wrong/ineffective/harmful.

that's why i distinguished clinical (as opposed to research) psychologists

the basic idea behind "internal family systems" sounds like junk to me, and no sounder than the recovered memories garbage, just perhaps less obviously harmful at this stage.

although IFS sounds more like a home-security contractor

i'm basically highly skeptical of all psychodynamic forms of clinical psych. even when it seems "harmless" it's mostly a lot of speculative gobbledygook. i do accept the most basic premise of most therapy, that in many cases it's helpful to talk to people about your feelings. beyond that, i dunno.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model

i mean this sounds like garbage, does it interface at all with any empirical research about the brain and consciousness?

You know, I pretty intentionally don't read about it because I suspect I'd think it sounded like so much garbage. I like this lady, though, because she has solid, useful advice about how to handle anxiety.

But just FYI I'm 1) not interested in debating this with you and 2) not going to change how I handle my mental health issues based on anything you say so if you were ginning up some convincing arguments maybe direct that energy at another thread.

yeah sometimes therapists who nominally subscribe to some dubious therapy can, in more practical terms, be helpful as therapists.

i wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything much less convince you to change therapists, just posting my immediate reactions to reading about this stuff.

and i guess i was curious why folks who subscribe to that model of therapy would be so much more inclined to believe in the debunked recovered-memory stuff.

Sorry. I'm a little defensive about my helpful quack therapist.

two things:

-- the screenwriter of Sybil was also the screenwriter for Rebel Without a Cause, and he just died at the ripe old age of 92
-- also, re false recovered memories -- good news for jesse friedman (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/after-a-guilty-plea-a-prison-term-and-a-movie-a-sex-abuse-case-returns.html)

Early in “Capturing the Friedmans,” the 2003 documentary that tells the harrowing story of a father and son charged in 1987 with the brutal sexual abuse of children on Long Island, one of the detectives on the case recalls her hesitation in the face of intense pressure from parents to prosecute quickly.

“Just charging somebody with this kind of a crime is enough to ruin their lives,” she said. “So you want to make sure that you have enough evidence, and that you’re convinced that you’re making a good charge.”

On Tuesday, the son, Jesse Friedman, who was released in 2001 after serving 13 years in prison, will be back in court, arguing once again for the disclosure of that evidence, which he says will help to prove his innocence. Twenty-seven years after he was first charged, prosecutors still refuse to give it to him.

From the beginning, the case was deeply flawed. The only evidence that Jesse and his father, Arnold, had abused anyone consisted of statements to the police by children and one of Jesse’s friends. Many of the statements were made after repeated or hourslong visits from detectives who would not leave until they heard what they wanted. None of the children had previously complained to anyone of any abuse.

It did not matter. The trial judge, Abbey Boklan, said “there was never a doubt in my mind” of Jesse Friedman’s guilt, even before she heard any evidence. Ms. Boklan, who previously led the sex crimes unit of the Nassau County district attorney’s office, said that if he chose to go to trial, she would sentence him to consecutive terms on each of the hundreds of charges he faced.

Both Friedmans pleaded guilty.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, similar cases were playing out across the country: extreme, often implausible allegations of mass sexual abuse of children by child care workers, leading to dozens of prosecutions and convictions. One federal appeals court has described the mood of the time as a “vast moral panic.”

The problem was that most of the charges weren’t true. Decades later, almost all the convictions of that era have been reversed.

Jesse Friedman’s remains on the books, as does his status as a violent sex offender, which affects where he can live, what jobs he can get and how he would raise any children of his own. (His father died in prison in 1995.)

But Mr. Friedman says he pleaded guilty under the threat of an effective life sentence if he were convicted at trial.

In the years since his release, Mr. Friedman has been developing a case to clear his name, with the help of his lawyers and the documentary’s director, Andrew Jarecki. Among other things, the prosecution’s only adult witness has recanted, as have five of the children who said they had been abused. More than two dozen eyewitnesses at the computer classes where the abuse was allegedly committed now say no abuse occurred. Many students told investigators this at the time, but prosecutors did not share that with Mr. Friedman’s lawyer.

The guilty plea, however, meant that the prosecution’s case was never challenged in open court. It has also hampered Mr. Friedman’s ability to present the new evidence.

Slowly, courts have begun to take notice.

In 2010, the federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said “the police, prosecutors, and the judge did everything they could to coerce a guilty plea and avoid a trial,” and that there was a “reasonable likelihood” Mr. Friedman had been wrongfully convicted.

That concern was echoed by the only person outside the Nassau County district attorney’s office to have seen the full 17,000-page file in the Friedman case — a state trial judge named F. Dana Winslow. In 2013, after reviewing the file along with new pieces of evidence, Mr. Winslow ordered prosecutors to turn over “every piece of paper” generated in the case against Mr. Friedman, with a handful of names redacted. That has still not happened.

At Tuesday’s hearing before a state appellate court, the district attorney’s office is expected to argue that disclosing the file would violate the privacy and confidentiality of witnesses. But any privacy concerns can be dealt with by redacting their names.

Mr. Friedman may or may not be able eventually to establish his innocence, but that determination is for a court to make, not for the prosecutors who tried the case in the first place. (The same lack of independence pervades a three-year, 155-page report the district attorney’s office released in 2013, which, it said, confirmed Mr. Friedman’s guilt.)

There is no good reason for Nassau County’s acting district attorney, Madeline Singas, to continue to hide the record in this case.

There have long been grave questions about the prosecution and guilty plea. And innocent people plead guilty surprisingly often. At the very least, Mr. Friedman — whose life has already been ruined — should be given a real chance to prove his innocence in court. If the Nassau County district attorney’s office is so confident of his guilt, and of the legitimacy of its prosecution, what is it afraid of?

so what's up with the franklin savings and loan deal? i can't find any reliable source of information about it.

i saw this AWFUL stupid documentary at a film festival a couple years ago. or maybe it was in 2014. it mentioned that. but this thing was so pro-child abuse hysteria so i was left believing that the franklin savings and loan child sex ring was fake even though i had not read or heard anything about it being fake before.

it must have been last year. it was called "who took johnny." the movie could have been good if it was more of an exploration of how this suburban mother went crazy after her child was abducted, and i was prepared to treat it as such, until the director q&a at the end that made me so mad i left.

now that i'm googling i find out it is made for msnbc but they kickstarted for a full length film

wow that must have been a really bad q&a! documentaries that have a clear platform kinda make me sick.

unless they are harlan county USA

Harlan County USA is so good.

I hate documentaries with an agenda, too. Propagandumentaries? I mean, all documentaries have a point of view, whether the film maker tries to be invisible or is wallowing in the mud under the boat in the jungle with everybody else, but shit that feels like getting whacked in the face with a two-by-four of IMPORTANT MESSAGE is so tiresome. It's probably all Morgan Spurlock's fault.

Netflix is LOUSY with that kind of garbage.

amazon prime too

it's like all there is on netflix anymore. i don't hate all of those kinds of things, harlan is one of my faves but i don't think it's even in the same category. but yeah i know what you mean. like this guy thought he was raising awareness about child abuse or something.

yeah harbl, I haven't seen that documentary, but that's kind of what I thought based on the horrible websites that mention the scandal

there are plenty of great "committed" documentaries

the problem is there's a huge market for documentaries that tell people things they want to hear--on the left, right, and in between--and so a lot of slapdash documentaries get made and watched.

i think michael moore probably bears a lot of blame in that regard

ugh http://www.perthnow.com.au/entertainment/movies/leonardo-dicaprio-to-play-man-with-24-personalities-in-the-crowded-room/story-fnki18t0-1227244960946

uuuuuuuugh
billy milligan

good god he looks just like Orson Welles

give the man 24 oscars!

New 2-part David Aaronovitch radio documentary on the origins and spread of SRA panic (including Debbie Nathan as an interviewee):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05vx63j
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wxx6z

will i learn anything if i've already read her book?

much deeper focus on the UK aspect, and how it moved from the US to the uk

v interesting so far

What I found fascinating(and disturbing) was the psychology professionals interviewed who still refuse to countenance the idea that that the ritual abuse scares were anything other than genuine. I mean, this isn't like hack writers making up phony devil worship bullshit to sell some trashy paperbacks, they really believe it with a frightening amount of conviction. I just can't even think how you could begin to consider yourself fit to judge the mental health of others, while also believing that secret societies of Satanic murderers are a real threat to our way of life.

Honestly, I could've shaken that bloody woman Joan Bakewell was talking to. Delusional, dangerous idiot.

Currently reading After Sybil, the collection of Shirley Mason's letters from her former student/penpal. It's sheer pleasure if you enjoy reading between the lines, as the book's compiler/author seems to have bought the entire Sybil story wholesale. She also added these sad/charming little quotations at the bottom of every page, and some of them are from about.com and wikipedia.

omg