Wait.” Stefan’s voice was hard suddenly. Bonnie and Elena turned back and froze, embracing each other, trembling. “What is your—your father—going to do to you when he finds out that you allowed this?” as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.

~ L.j. Smith

L.j. Smith Consequences Death Grief Humor Hysteria Risks

It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.

~ Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler Aversion Crowd Control Crowds Domination Faith Fanaticism Hatred Hitler Hypnosis Hysteria Knowledge Love Mass Suggestion Nazis Psychology Respect

All the repressed emotions and subconscious desires in time lead to some kind of psychological or physiological breakdown, if kept unchecked.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Abhijit Naskar Emotional Health Health Hysteria Inspirational Life Lessons Life Lessons Quotes Medicine Medicine For The Soul Neuropsychology Neuroscience Physiology Psychiatry Psychology Psychology Quotes Repressed Emotions Repressed Feelings Repression Therapy

[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

~ Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik Disaster Fear Hysteria Overreaction Panic Paranoia

Not only is the actual word hysteria gendered — it once referred to an exclusively female disease, a mental illness thought to be caused by a malfunctioning uterus — there is a very long history of critics using accusations or innuendo about women's mental health or emotional stability in order to shut down their political voices.

~ Sady Doyle

Sady Doyle Hysteria Hysterica Hysterical Female Hysterical Women Misogyny Politics Politics Of The United States Sexism Sexist Sexist Language

The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image.

~ Asti Hustvedt

Asti Hustvedt Hysteria Hysterics Image Photograph Women

Disclosures of childhood sexual abuse have frequently been discredited through the diagnosis of hysteria. In this view, women/female children were seen either as culpable seducers who were not really damaged by the sex abuse or as dramatic fantasizers projecting their own incestuous wishes onto the father. I will argue that this view pervades the false-memory movement and can be found, for example, in Gardner's work (1992).

~ Judith L. Alpert

Judith L. Alpert Biased Child Sexual Abuse Childhood Sexual Abuse Discredit False Memories False Memory Syndrome False Memory Syndrome Myth Fantasizing Fantasy Hysteria Hysterical Incest Melodramatic Mental Health Bias Mental Health Stigma Mental Illness Stigma Perjorative Sexism Sexual Abuse Stigmatized

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Child Abuse Child Protection Child Protection Law Control Crime Crisis Hysteria Incest Journalism Legal Media Moral Panic Organized Abuse Paedophile Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Network Pedophilic Police Power Psychiatry Rapists Ritual Abuse Ritualistic Abuse Sadistic Satanic Panic Satanic Ritual Abuse Sensationalist Sex Sex Offenders Sex Rings Sexual Abuse Social Workers Therapists Therapy

As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Hechler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organised abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organised abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organised abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organised abuse, police investigations of allegations of organised abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organised abuse have all generated their own controversies. These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalised fashion on primetime television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. in particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Child Abuse Child Protection Child Protection Law Control Crime Crisis Hysteria Incest Legal Media Moral Panic Organized Abuse Paedophile Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Network Pedophilic Police Power Psychiatry Rapists Ritual Abuse Ritualistic Abuse Sadistic Satanic Panic Satanic Ritual Abuse Sex Sex Offenders Sex Rings Sexual Abuse Social Workers

There are a range of useful and illuminating analyses of the media construction of organised abuse as it became front-page news in the 1980s and 1990s (Kitzinger 2004, Atmore 1997, Kelly 1998), but this book is focused on organised abuse as a criminal practice; as well as a discursive object of study, debate and disagreement. These two dimensions of this topic are inextricably linked because precisely where and how organised abuse is reported to take place is an important determinant of how it is understood. Prior to the 1980s, the predominant view of the police, psychiatrists and other authoritative professionals was that organised abuse occurred primarily outside the family where it was committed by extra-familial ‘paedophiles’. This conceptualisation; of organised abuse has received enduring community support to the present day, where concerns over children’s safety is often framed in terms of their vulnerability to manipulation by ‘paedophiles’ and ‘sex rings’. This view dovetails more generally with the medico-legal and media construction of the ‘paedophile as an external threat to the sanctity of the family and community (Cowburn and Dominelli 2001) but it is confounded by evidence that organised abuse and other forms of serious sexual abuse often originates in the home or in institutions, such as schools and churches, where adults have socially legitimate authority over children.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Child Abuse Control Crisis Hysteria Incest Media Organized Abuse Paedophile Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Network Pedophilic Police Power Psychiatry Rapists Ritual Abuse Ritualistic Abuse Sadistic Satanic Panic Satanic Ritual Abuse Sex Sex Offenders Sex Rings Sexual Abuse

I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Feminism Hysteria Independence

It’s better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use ‘em, abuse ‘em and utilize ‘em.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Abhijit Naskar Emotions Feelings Hysteria Managing Emotions Neuroscience Psychology Self Management

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of grand hysteria described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics...The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head...One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse.She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would see her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

~ Michelle Stacey

Michelle Stacey Abuse Amnesia Charcot Conversion Disorder Convulsions Dissociative Identity Disorder Eating Disorder Fancher French History Hysteria Involuntary Movements Jean Marie Charcot Medicine Mental Health Mental Illness Mollie Fancher Mpd Multiple Personality Disorder Paralysis Pierre Janet Psychological Psychology Psychosomatic Illness Science Spasms Trance Victorian Victorian Medicine

I lay there for three whole days, totally paralyzed. My friends helped me to the bathroom and anywhere else I needed to move; but I have very vague impressions of those days because it was a time of complete darkness for me. Somebody told me later that what I had was a form of hysteria: my body and my mid fled into paralysis. There was nothing wrong with me organically, but somewhere inside I suffered a complete breakdown.

~ Diet Eman

Diet Eman Breakdown Darkness Hysteria Mind Power Paralysis Psychology Realism

My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Contrast Craving Depression Hysteria Vice

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Accusations Attack Authority Beliefs Blame Child Abuse Child Protection Child Sex Confabulation Cover Up Coverup Crime Cult Cult Abuse Debate Defence Denial Disbelief Discrediting Epstein Evidence Fairness Galton Horror Hysteria Injustice Innocence Investigation Just World Justice Karma Law Legal Media Memory Mental Health Miller Minimisation Miscarriages Of Justice Misunderstanding Moral Panic Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Rings Prosecution Recovered Memories Ritual Abuse Ritualised Abuse Sachs Safe World Satanic Ritual Abuse Scorn Self Efficiacy Sense Of Safety Sexual Abuse Sexual Violence Social Justice Social Workers Society Denial Testimony Therapists Toxic Trauma Traumatic Trust Understanding Victim Victim Blaming World View

Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Accusations Amnesia Attack Authority Beliefs Blame Child Abuse Child Protection Child Sex Chu Confabulation Cover Up Coverup Crime Cult Cult Abuse Debate Defence Denial Disbelief Discrediting Epstein Evidence Eye Witness Fairness Fantasy Galton Horror Hysteria Injustice Innocence Investigation Just World Justice Karma Law Legal Lie Media Memory Memory Error Mental Health Miller Minimisation Miscarriages Of Justice Misunderstanding Moral Panic Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Rings Prosecution Recovered Memories Ritual Abuse Ritualised Abuse Ross Sachs Safe World Satanic Ritual Abuse Scorn Self Efficiacy Sense Of Safety Sexual Abuse Sexual Violence Social Justice Social Workers Society Denial Testimony Therapists Toxic Trauma Traumatic Trust Understanding Victim Victim Blaming World View

Wait.” Stefan’s voice was hard suddenly. Bonnie and Elena turned back and froze, embracing each other, trembling. “What is your—your father—going to do to you when he finds out that you allowed th

~ L.j. Smith

L.j. Smith Consequences Death Grief Humor Hysteria Risks

Talkatives complain, cry, shout, brag, and are more hysterical about their lives than something else; don’t be a part of that tragedy! Perhaps it's been a while now that you have been complaining, crying and shouting about your labour pains. It's time to show us your baby!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Israelmore Ayivor Baby Brag Complain Cry Deliver Delivery Food For Thought Give Birth Hysteria Hysterical Israelmore Ayivor Labour Labour Pains Shout Talk Talkative Talkatives Talkertives Talking Tragedy

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Accusations Attack Authority Blame Child Abuse Child Protection Child Sex Confabulation Cover Up Coverup Crime Cult Cult Abuse Debate Denial Disbelief Discrediting Evidence Horror Hysteria Innocence Investigation Justice Law Legal Media Memory Miscarriages Of Justice Moral Panic Multi Perpetrator Multi Victim Organised Abuse Organized Abuse Paedophiles Pedophile Pedophile Rings Prosecution Recovered Memories Ritual Abuse Ritualised Abuse Satanic Ritual Abuse Sexual Abuse Social Workers Society Denial Testimony Therapists Victim Blaming

Sometimes I think the loneliness inside of me is going to explode through my skin and sometimes im not sure if crying or screaming or laughing through the hysteria will solve anything at all

~ Tahereh Mafi

Tahereh Mafi Hysteria Loneliness

I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria.

~ Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert Hysteria Ignorance

Money said, I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria.

~ Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert Hysteria Ignorance

It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma.But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited seduction by the father as the essential point in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the uncles who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that discretion had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently.p9-10

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Aeitology Child Sexual Abuse Childhood Sexual Abuse Cover Up Famous People Famous Psychiatrists Father Daughter Fathers Freud History Of Hysteria History Of Incest History Of Psychiatry History Of Psychology Hysteria Hysterical Dissociation Incest Lies Mental Health Neurons Neurosis Psychiatry Seduction Theory Sexism Sexist Sexual Abuse Sigmund Freud Society Denial Studies On Hysteria The Aetiology Of Hysteria

Roache's statement after his acquittal was dignified but his supporters were angry. They demanded to know why the case was ever brought, claiming that the actor was a victim of the hysteria created by revelations about Jimmy Savile. It's a curious conclusion to draw from a not guilty verdict; there are courtrooms where the conviction rate is 100 per cent but they tend to be in totalitarian states. In serious criminal cases in England and Wales, the rate is around 82 per cent, and I would be seriously worried if every defendant were to be found guilty.The Independent, 9 February 2014

~ Joan Smith

Joan Smith Alleged Child Sexual Abuse Conviction Court Historic Historic Child Abuse Historic Crime Hysteria Hysterics Injustice Justice Law Legal Not Guilty Paedophiles Pedophile Rape Rape Culture Trial Witch Hunt Witchunts

The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse doesn’t happen - that it is our illicit desires that drive us crazy. A century ago, Freud recoiled from his own theory of the sexual seduction of children and projected the problem back into the patient. He claimed in his Aetiology of Hysteria that clients, typically women, were describing their fantasies, not facts, not ‘real events’. P3

~ Beatrix Campbell

Beatrix Campbell Asylum Child Abuse Crazy Discredited Events Facts Fantasy Freud Health Hysteria National Health Service Patient Pedophile Projection Rape Real Sexual Abuse

You can tell a lot about a society by what it fears.

~ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius Anxiety Fear Hysteria

Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? Youtake delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves.You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. Theyare my old friends. I have heard you mention them with considerationthese last twenty years at least.

~ Jane Austen

Jane Austen Histrionics Hysteria Irony Nerves Sarcasm

When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.

~ Les Murray

Les Murray Blindness Conversion Disorder Dissociation Dissociative Hysteria Hysterical Dissociation Mental Disorder Mental Illness Neuoroses Neurosis Neuroticism Pol Pot Psychogenic Psychosomatic Trauma Trauma Survivors Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress Traumatized

The implication that the change in nomenclature from “Multiple Personality Disorder” to “Dissociative Identity Disorder” means the condition has been repudiated and “dropped” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association is false and misleading. Many if not most diagnostic entities have been renamed or have had their names modified as psychiatry changes in its conceptualizations and classifications of mental illnesses. When the DSM decided to go with “Dissociative Identity Disorder” it put “(formerly multiple personality disorder)” right after the new name to signify that it was the same condition. It’s right there on page 526 of DSM-IV-R. There have been four different names for this condition in the DSMs over the course of my career. I was part of the group that developed and wrote successive descriptions and diagnostic criteria for this condition for DSM-III-R, DSM–IV, and DSM-IV-TR.While some patients have been hurt by the impact of material that proves to be inaccurate, there is no evidence that scientifically demonstrates the prevalence of such events. Most material alleged to be false has been disputed by someone, but has not been proven false.Finally, however intriguing the idea of encouraging forgetting troubling material may seem, there is no evidence that it is either effective or safe as a general approach to treatment. There is considerable belief that when such material is put out of mind, it creates symptoms indirectly, from “behind the scenes.” Ironically, such efforts purport to cure some dissociative phenomena by encouraging others, such as Dissociative Amnesia.

~ Richard P. Kluft

Richard P. Kluft Diagnosis Disinformation Dissociative Amnesia Dissociative Identity Disorder Dsm Evidence False Hysteria Hysterican Neurosis Mental Disorder Mental Illness Misinformation Misleading Multiple Personalities Multiple Personality Disorder Psychiatric Bible Psychiatry Rumor

My very core clenches and spasms, my hips with a mind of their own, lurch. It is as if I no longer have control of any part of my body. ‘Ugh,’ I continue to groan in relief. And then, slowly, the rush is over and I am able to part my eyelids again. David is still looking at my face, a light sheen of sweat on his brow indicates that his task was not without effort. Finding his gaze too forthright in the currentcircumstances, my eyes move to the arm that still dwells beneath my skirts and thehand that clings viciously to his sleeve. My hand.

~ Ayana Prende

Ayana Prende Doctor Erotica Female Hysteria Historical Hysteria London Massage Romance Victorian

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

~ Charles Mackay

Charles Mackay Delusion Hysteria Madness

An old dream with a shiny new veneer. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and antiquated hysteria.(The Chymist)

~ Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti Antiquated Hysteria Madness Obsolete

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)

~ Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti Hysteria Insanity Melancholy Mysticism Sanity Sardonic Transcendence

In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?

~ Michael Salter

Michael Salter Allegations Britain Child Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Confabulation Contempt Denial Disinformation Epidemic False Allegations Hype Hyperbole Hysteria Jean La Fontaine Journalists Mass Media Media Misinformation Misrepresentations Moral Panic Nazis Organized Abuse Report Ritual Abuse Ritual Abuse Myth Ritualistic Abuse Satanic Panic Satanic Ritual Abuse Scapegoating Sceptics Sensationalism Sexual Abuse Skeptics Social Workers Society Denial Therapists

The history of hysteria is a history of the relation between the colonizing father and the colonized devalued other.

~ Judith L. Alpert

Judith L. Alpert Biased Colonized Dehumanize Devalue Devalued Discredit Hysteria Hysterical Melodramatic Mental Health Bias Mental Health Stigma Mental Illness Stigma Perjorative Sexism Sexual Abuse Stigmatized

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

~ Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Confusion Hysteria Love

It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.

~ Olivia Sudjic

Olivia Sudjic Hysteria Infatuation Obsession Olivia Sudjic Sympathy