Yes, false memory is real, but not for victims of Ghislaine THE MIND DOCTOR

There were plenty of awful, horrifying things to come out of the Ghislaine Maxwell case. It turned my stomach listening to the way young girls were trafficked and abused. But another aspect of the trial that sickened me was the way the defence tried to discredit the brave testimonies of the victims by claiming they had ‘false memory syndrome’.

This is a hugely controversial subject within psychiatry, and too often it’s used as a way to introduce doubt into the minds of a jury and give a medical-sounding reason as to why someone might falsely accuse someone else.

There’s no doubt that our memories of events can be surprisingly bad, and this is very well supported by evidence.

Despite what we might think, our minds are far from infallible and we are bad at accurately recalling details.

Any psychologist will tell you, more fool the person who absolutely, unquestioningly believes their own recollection of events. Study after study shows that our memory is atrocious; we forget things, invent things, conflate events and play around with timings in our minds.

Over time, our recollections are routinely flawed.

AreAlly fascinating study was conducted after 9/11. researchers interviewed people, asking them to recall where they were and what they were doing at the time of the terrorist attacks in New york.

years later, the researchers went back and interviewed the same people again, asking the same questions. But the answers were astonishingly different — around 60 per cent of the details had changed.

So more than half of what people recalled was wrong, yet they swore blind that this is what they had experienced and, indeed, what they had originally told the researchers. But — and this is the incredible part — when the researchers confronted the interviewees with this, they were adamant that the most recent version of events they had shared with the researchers was, in fact, the correct one.

When they were played back recordings of the first interviews, the participants sat stunned and confused and said things such as, ‘I don’t know why I said that; it’s not true’ and still stuck to their new version of events.

False memory syndrome draws on this notion that our memories are fallible, but takes it one step further. rather than recalling events incorrectly, the theory goes, the entire thing is a fiction.

In the 1990s, a type of therapy, called recovered-memory therapy, whereby therapists would attempt to retrieve repressed memories of traumatic events, became popular.

It was thought individuals who had experienced severe trauma sometimes dealt with this by repressing it to the extent they forgot it had even happened.

The role of the therapist was to try to uncover these hidden memories and explore the related trauma. What this therapy method failed to take into account was how suggestible people are, and how easy it is to conjure up memories of events that never actually took place. The practice was widely condemned for being unreliable, and itself traumatising — not least for innocent people who were being wrongly accused. The term ‘false memory syndrome’ was used to describe these ‘recovered’, but entirely untrue, recollections. Now, however, it’s more broadly used as a term to discredit testimonies of victims of abuse. Dr elizabeth loftus, a psychologist and well-known expert in memory, told the court in the Ghislaine Maxwell case that people ‘can be subjected to post-event suggestion’. This is certainly true. hearing things on the news, talking with friends afterwards and so on all helps us to add details that might not be based in truth, and we edit and manipulate the memory to suit our understanding of an event, often to portray ourselves more favourably.

however, when Dr loftus was cross-examined she conceded that, while ‘peripheral memories’ from a traumatic event may be forgotten, the event’s ‘core memories’ — the recollection of the actual, key event — may in fact become stronger.

There’s no doubt that some people, for a variety of reasons, confabulate and lie about being the victim of abuse.

There’s also no doubt that our memories are often inaccurate, vague or confused.

But the idea that you could misremember being a victim of sex trafficking and rape is quite something else.

To rely on this as a defence, to cast a shadow over the brave testimony of the victims, feels desperate and distasteful.

I’m so pleased the jury saw through this.

DAVID BECKHAM has again missed out on a knighthood. There’s no doubt he’s done good things for charity, but often I think of the nurses I work with, who care for people with severe mental illness and go above and beyond to help them — yet get no recognition. They deserve honours far more than any celebrity.