Editing Satanic panic (section)

== False memories ==
One explanation for the SRA allegations is that they were based upon [[false memories]] caused by use of discredited suggestive techniques such as [[hypnosis]] and [[leading question]]s by therapists underestimating the suggestibility of their clients.<ref name="Loftus Ketcham 1996 p. 85">{{cite book | last1=Loftus | first1=E. | last2=Ketcham | first2=K. | title=The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse | publisher=St. Martin's Press | year=1996 | isbn=978-0-312-14123-3 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=13JZozT2kMYC&pg=PA85 | access-date=24 January 2021 | page=85}}</ref> The altered state of consciousness induced by hypnosis rendered patients an unusual ability to produce [[confabulation]]s, often with the assistance of their therapists.<ref>{{cite book |author=Ellis, Bill |title=Raising the devil: Satanism, new religions, and the media |publisher=University Press of Kentucky |location=Lexington, Ky |year=2000 |pages=[https://books.google.com/books?id=oLcqlypMCe8C&pg=PA87 87–97] |isbn=978-0-8131-2170-3}}</ref>

[[Paul R. McHugh]], professor of psychiatry at [[Johns Hopkins University]], discusses in his book ''Try to Remember'' the developments that led to the creation of false memories in the SRA moral panic and the formation of the FMSF as an effort to bring contemporary scientific research and political action to the polarizing struggle about false memories within the mental health disciplines. According to McHugh, there is no coherent scientific basis for the core belief of one side of the struggle, that sexual abuse can cause massive systemic repression of memories that can only be accessed through hypnosis, coercive interviews and other dubious techniques. The group of psychiatrists who promoted these ideas, whom McHugh terms "[[Mannerism|Mannerist]] Freudians", consistently followed a [[deductive reasoning|deductive approach]] to diagnosis in which the theory and causal explanation of symptoms was assumed to be childhood sexual abuse leading to dissociation, followed by a set of unproven and unreliable treatments with a strong [[confirmation bias]] that inevitably produced the allegations and causes that were assumed to be there.

The treatment approach involved isolation of the patient from friends and family within psychiatric wards dedicated to the treatment of dissociation, filled with other patients who were treated by the same doctors with the same flawed methods and staff members who also coherently and universally ascribed to the same set of beliefs. These methods began in the 1980s and continued for several years until a series of court cases and [[medical malpractice]] lawsuits resulted in hospitals failing to support the approach. In cases where the dissociative symptoms were ignored, the coercive treatment approach ceased and the patients were removed from dedicated wards, allegations of satanic rape and abuse normally ceased, "recovered" memories were identified as fabrications and conventional treatments for presenting symptoms were generally successful.<ref>{{cite book |last=McHugh |first=PR |author-link=Paul R. McHugh |title=Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash over Meaning, Memory and Mind |publisher=Dana Press |year=2008 |isbn=978-1-932594-39-3}}</ref>