https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/us/bennett-braun-dead.html

Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed
memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel
what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on
March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.

Jane Braun, one of his former wives, said he died in a hospital from
complications of a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Mont., but had been
in Lauderhill on vacation.

Dr. Braun gained renown in the early 1980s as an expert in two of the
most popular and controversial areas of psychiatric treatment: repressed
memories and multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative
identity disorder.

He claimed that he could help patients uncover memories of childhood
trauma — the existence of which, he and others said, was responsible for
the splintering of a person’s self into many distinct personalities.

He created a unit dedicated to dissociative disorders at
Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago (now Rush
University Medical Center); was frequently quoted in the news media; and
helped to found what is now the International Society for the Study of
Trauma and Dissociation, a professional organization that today has more
than 2,000 members.

It was from that sizable platform that Dr. Braun publicized his most
explosive findings: that in dozens of cases, his patients discovered
memories of being tortured by satanic cults and, in some cases, of
having participated in the torture themselves.

He was not the only psychiatrist to make such a claim, and his supposed
revelations keyed into a growing national panic.

The 1980s saw a vertiginous rise in the number of people, children as
well as adults, who claimed to have been abused by devil worshipers. It
began in 1980 with the book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian woman
who said she had recovered memories of ritual abuse, and it spiked
following allegations of abuse at day care centers in California and
North Carolina.

Elements of pop culture, such as heavy metal music and the role-playing
game Dungeons & Dragons, were looped in as supposed entry points for
cult activity.

Such stories were fodder for popular television formats that reveled in
the salacious, including talk shows like “Geraldo” and newsmagazines
like “Dateline,” which broadcast segments that promoted such claims
uncritically.

The psychiatric profession bore some responsibility for the growing
panic, with respected researchers like Dr. Braun giving it a gloss of
authority. He and others ran seminars and distributed research papers;
they even gave the phenomenon a quasi-medical abbreviation: S.R.A., for
satanic ritual abuse.

Dr. Braun’s inpatient unit at Rush became a magnet for referrals and a
warehouse for patients, some of whom he kept medicated and under
supervision for years.

Among them was a woman from Iowa named Patricia Burgus. After
interviewing her, Dr. Braun and a colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed not
only that she was the victim of satanic ritual abuse, but also that she
herself was a “high priestess” of a cult that had raped, tortured and
cannibalized thousands of children, including her two young sons.

Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs sent Mrs. Burgus and her children to a mental
health facility in Houston, where they were held apart for nearly three
years with minimal contact with the outside world.

By then Mrs. Burgus, heavily medicated, had come to believe the doctors,
telling them she recalled torches, live burials and eating the body
parts of up to 2,000 people a year. After her parents served her husband
meatloaf, she had him get it tested for human tissue. The tests came
back negative, but Dr. Braun was not convinced.

Dr. Braun kept other patients under similar conditions at Rush or
elsewhere. He persuaded one woman to have an abortion because, he
convinced her, she was the product of ritualistic incest; he persuaded
another to undergo tubal ligation to prevent having more children within
her supposed cult.

The satanic panic began to wane in the early 1990s. A 1992 F.B.I.
investigation found no evidence of coordinated cult activity in the
United States, and a 1994 report by the National Center on Child Abuse
and Neglect surveyed over 12,000 accusations of satanic ritual abuse and
found that not a single one held up under scrutiny.

“The biggest thing was the lack of corroborating evidence,” Kenneth
Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who wrote the 1992 report, said in a
phone interview. “It’s the kind of crime where evidence would have been
left behind.”

Many people distanced themselves from their earlier enthusiasms; in
1995, Geraldo Rivera apologized for an episode of his show that covered
the falsehood. However, even in 1998, the NBC series “Dateline” ran an
episode claiming to show widespread satanic activity in Mississippi.

Mrs. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and her insurance company over claims
that he and Dr. Sachs had implanted false memories in her head. They
settled out of court in 1997 for $10.6 million.

“I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could
come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and
nobody said anything about it,” Mrs. Burgus told The Chicago Tribune in
1997.

A year later Dr. Braun’s unit at Rush was shut down, and the Illinois
medical licensing board opened an investigation into his practices. In
1999, he received a two-year suspension of his license — though he did
not admit wrongdoing.

Bennett George Braun was born on Aug. 7, 1940, in Chicago, to Thelma
(Gimbel) and Milton Braun. His father was a professor of orthodontics at
Loyola University. He graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor’s
degree in psychology in 1963 and earned a master’s in the same subject
in 1964. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois
in 1968.

Dr. Braun was married three times. His marriages to Renate Deutsch and
Mrs. Braun both ended in divorce. His third, to Joanne Arriola, ended in
her death. He is survived by five children and five grandchildren.

After temporarily losing his medical license in Illinois, Dr. Braun
moved to Montana, where he received a new state license and opened a
private practice.

But in 2019, one of his patients, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for
overprescribing medication that left her with a permanent facial tic.
She also filed a complaint against the Montana Board of Medical
Examiners for allowing him a license, despite knowing his past.

Dr. Braun lost his license to practice medicine in Montana in 2020.

Travoltron <Travoltron@fakeemail.com> wrote:

>https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/us/bennett-braun-dead.html

>Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed
>memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel
>what became known as the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and ’90s, died on
>March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.

What a complete fraud. No other psychiatrist at the time pointed out the
strong likelihood that the recovered "memories" were strongly
influenced, because his technique was shit.

However, bad psychiatry gets us good movies, like Three Faces of Eve.
Just remember it's all fiction.