Post date: Aug 21, 2011 6:5:6 AM
DAVID L. CALOF is a respected therapist in Seattle, Washington, and founder and editor emeritus of the professional journal Treating Abuse Today. His latest book is "The Couple Who Became Each Other: Stories of Healing and Transformation From a Leading Hypnotherapist." Despite the fact that he has never treated any relative of a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and for more than 25 years practiced without a single ethics complaint or lawsuit, proponents of false memory syndrome waged an intensive three-year war of harassment against him and his practice. His patients often had to cross a picket line just to get to their therapy appointments; He was forced to move his office several times; His attorney's wife and family were harassed, and he spent many thousands of dollars defending bogus lawsuits. He writes:
"Psychotherapy clients require privacy and confidentiality, not assault by offensive signs, threats by camera, stigma, or breach of privacy. They do not benefit from ad hominem broadsides against the clinical community. If we condone this new self-styled assault on psychotherapy in the name of scientific debate or freedom of speech while we ignore the rights of speech, privacy, and assembly for patients and clinicians, we might eventually lose the clinical container of psychotherapy itself to any aggressive third party who comes along with some ax to grind with the field of mental health." -- Notes from a Practice Under Siege: Harassment, Defamation, and Intimidation in the Name of Science, p. 185.