Reporting Revives Bad Memories of Contentious Amnesia Theories

By Warwick Middleton, Martin Dorahy, Michael Salter
Weekend Australian
October 14, 2017

https://myaccount.news.com.au/theaustralian/subscribe?pkgDef=TA_SDO_P0415A_W04&directSubscribe=true&b=true&sourceCode=TAWEB_WRE170_a&mode=premium&dest=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/reporting-revives-bad-memories-of-contentious-amnesia-theories/news-story/1fbe43dcde079785e9dfffe3055535b8?memtype=anonymous

Recent reporting by Richard Guilliatt has raised questions about the credibility of adults reporting child sexual abuse (“Those Events Never Happened”, The Weekend Australian Magazine, October 4-5). Underlying this and other ­articles in The Australian has been a sense of unease or outrage about the accuracy of memories of ­severe abuse being retrieved after a period of being forgotten by some traumatised individuals.

Reading these articles, there is the feeling that we have stepped back into the past century, ­before science had a solid understanding of the effects of trauma on memory. The early to mid-1990s saw the rise of terms such as recovered memory therapy to characterise mental healthcare for sexually abused people as stirring up false memories of traumatic events.

Activists promoting this view lobbied the Victorian health minister at the time, Bronwyn Pike, into launching an inquiry examining the extent recovered memory therapy was practised in Victoria. The inquiry reported in 2005, finding that the term was not used by health professionals but was being used by lobby groups for political purposes.