Mental Health or Therapy Crisis?

The October 16 Sunday NYT Opinion section dedicated its entire 18 pages to “America’s mental health crisis.” A selection of columnists took on a variety of issues from the personal to the political: “the overlap between bias attacks and mental illness” in a discussion of the Covid pandemic impact on the Asian community; can conservatives only get help from conservative therapists; the dismantling of the “recovered memory” movement; and “Does going to therapy make you a good person,” or the general push in society right now that we should all be in therapy. It’s these last two essays that I want to talk about.

Years ago, in the 1990s, when the “recovered memory” movement took hold, I had a first hand experience with it. According to the article in the Sunday Times, it was during the 1980s and early 1990s that therapists all over the country were helping clients “unearth” repressed memories of childhood sexual and emotional abuse. In 2005, Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally called the recovered movement “ the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

Mark and I were in a truck headed up the mountains with a friend and fellow activist to check out a timber sale that was being protested by the local land grant. I don’t remember (again, a common complaint) how the conversation got started, but the friend informed us that her father, an esteemed medical doctor back east, had sexually abused her when she was a child and had also tortured her by sticking her with needles. We, of course, were flabbergasted and didn’t know what to say, but she blithely went on and on about it explaining that her siblings didn’t believe any of it and nobody ever knew about it until she unearthed it in recent therapy. I guess our silence was emblematic of that insidious behavior called political correctness. We’d already concluded that our friend was a little crazy to begin with, what with her sometimes bizarre behavior, medical complaints, and beguiling intelligence, so we decided to let “abused” be the unprofessional assessment of causality.

This got me thinking about another encounter with abuse that took place right up the alley from where I grew up in Colorado Springs. In elementary school a Catholic family moved into the neighborhood with a passel of kids—seven—who became our best playmates, especially Beanie and Bunker, whose real name he would inform us was Edward Rodgers with a “d.” Beanie’s real name was Susan, and there were three other sisters I didn’t play with as much, but the really interesting thing about the family was the fact that their father was an FBI agent. He would be gone for long periods of time and sometimes the mother would ask my mother if our live-in “nanny,” the young business college student who traded room and board for watching us while our mother was at work, could spend the night at her house when she felt spooked. All we knew was that the mother was the “nervous” type and the kids were a bit wild and made our play lives much more interesting than it had been.

Then, as adults, my sister and I discovered that a movie, “Ultimate Betrayal,” had been made about this family in 1990 when the sisters revealed their FBI father, Edward Rodgers Sr., had sexually abused them when they were our playmates. All the sisters were leading dysfunctional adult lives and persuaded their older sister, Sharon, who had apparently repressed the abuse, to file a lawsuit against their father (Sharon and Susan filed the lawsuit and the other two sisters testified). Marlo Thomas, who portrays Sharon in the movie, had this to say in a 1994 article in The Washington Post: "This isn't a case of false memory or repressed memory. The other sisters said, 'I've known this all my life,' but Sharon wouldn't allow herself to admit that."

Edward Rodgers, who retired as an FBI agent and became a child-abuse investigator for the 4th Judicial District Attorney's Office (El Paso County) in Colorado Springs (unf*#!ing believable!), denied any of this ever happened. His three sons, including Bunker, denied it as well. He never showed up in court and the jury awarded the sisters $2.3 million that was never paid. Colorado’s US Representative Pat Schroeder introduced a bill in November of 1993 that would allow them to tap into Rodgers's FBI pension, but I couldn’t find any more information about whether that ever happened.

The last essay I read in the mental health NYT issue was called “Does going to therapy make you a good person.” The author, Mychal Denzel Smith, questions whether he decides to go to therapy because he actually needs therapy or because he should be in therapy because everyone else he knows is. The therapists he interviews concur with his assessment: their clients tell them “I just feel like I’m supposed to be here.” While the article goes on to explore whether this therapy craze has become a binary—in therapy good, not in therapy, bad, I must say that the whole idea of therapy gives me pause for thought after these two stories of abuse. Smith states in the essay: “But the biggest issue, which therapists themselves told me, is that the fixation on therapy as the go-to cure-all leaves little room for people seeking other forms of healing.”

I wish I’d had the chutzpah to suggest to my friend with recovered memory that maybe she should have looked into some other healing for herself.