Psychiatrist who inf lamed a ‘satanic panic’
Db August 7, 1940 d March 20, 2024
r Bennett Braun, a psychiatrist who inflamed the 1980s “satanic panic” with his controversial treatment of multiple personality disorder, including in patients who alleged that he misused drugs and hypnosis while spawning false memories of devil worship, human sacrifice and child sex abuse, died on March 20. He was 83 and lived in Butte, Montana.
A charismatic psychiatrist who was often cited by the press, Braun rose to prominence while treating multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder. The condition was considered extremely rare before diagnoses mushroomed in the early 1980s, amid a wave of growing clinical interest that Braun helped stimulate.
He co-founded the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation; trained thousands of practitioners at conferences; and launched a first-of-itskind hospital unit in Chicago.
The unit treated “the worst of the worst”, Braun said, taking in patients referred by doctors from across the country. Virtually all patients had been sexually abused as children, according to Braun, who aimed to treat the condition by excavating repressed memories of childhood trauma, at times with help from hypnosis and medications.
Braun had several high-profile allies, but many experts considered his therapeutic ideas dangerous and unscientific.
The memories that Braun helped his patients recover could be shockingly lurid, involving satanic rituals, torture and systematic abuse by cloaked figures enmeshed in a purportedly globespanning cabal. Amplified by Braun, who shared the claims in lectures and interviews, the stories helped stoke what is commonly known as the satanic panic, in which thousands of unsubstantiated allegations of ritual abuse proliferated across the US.
The phenomenon began to take off after the publication of a 1980 bestseller, Michelle Remembers, by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and one of his patients (later his wife), Michelle Smith, who claimed to have recovered memories of satanic rites in which Smith witnessed human sacrifices and was held in snakefilled cages.
Before long, the claims were circulating with help from grocery-store tabloids as well as established news programmes. Braun appeared on a 1988 NBC primetime special hosted by Geraldo Rivera, spotlighting claims about the occult. He was also promoted by feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who thanked him in the acknowledgements of one of her books.
Discussing the alleged satanic abuses in public, Braun veered between caution and conspiracy. “If 10% of what we hear is true,” he told the Miami Herald in 1989, “we’re in deep trouble.” Interviewed by the Chicago Tribune a few years later, he warned that patients’ claims “have to be taken with a large grain of salt”.
At a 1988 conference, he declared that the Satanists had “a national-international type organisation that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the Communist cell structure”. He later alleged that cult members were trying to reclaim many of his patients, including by sending coded messages to their hospital beds in the form of flowers and cards.
“If the card is signed ‘Love you’, then that is a danger signal,” he said.
But authorities found few signs of conspiracy.
As public opinion shifted, some of Braun’s patients turned against him. He was sued by at least 11 of his former patients, including Patricia Burgus, who was treated by Braun for six years and spent more than two years in hospital. She had initially sought treatment for post-partum depression but, after being diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, came to believe that she had 300 personalities, was a high priestess of a satanic cult and had tortured, raped, murdered and cannibalised thousands of children.
At Braun’s suggestion, she allowed her two young sons to be hospitalised as well; according to journalist and cultural critic Joan Acocella’s book Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, they were treated for multiple personality disorder and “given stickers as rewards for producing memories of murder and cannibalism”. When Burgus’ husband went to a family picnic, he brought a hamburger back for Braun so that it could be tested for human flesh. (The results were negative.)
As her family’s insurance coverage dried up, Burgus left the hospital and started making trips back home to Des Moines. “That’s when my head began to clear,” she told the Tribune. “I began to add a few things up and realised there was no way
I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2000 people a year and nobody said anything about it.”
Convinced that Braun was responsible for planting false memories – including, she said, through suggestive questioning, hypnosis and hallucinations brought on by medications he prescribed – she filed a lawsuit against him, a colleague and the hospital, winning US$10.6 million in a 1997 settlement. It was reportedly the largest sum ever awarded in a psychiatric malpractice suit.
Braun denied any wrongdoing and called the settlement “a travesty”, saying that his insurance company had tried to resolve the case without his consent. He was similarly dismayed by a 2004 settlement with another former patient for US$7.5 million.
Bennett George Braun was born in Chicago on August 7, 1940. His father was an orthodontist and World War II veteran. Braun studied psychology at Tulane University. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1968 and said he saw his first case of multiple personality disorder in 1974.
Interviewed by the Tribune, he recalled that he felt a special connection to his patients “because as a young child I was the one everybody picked on. I’m the kind of guy who puts himself in someone else’s shoes”.
He also said he was drawn to the unconventional, both in and out of psychiatry. “I take pleasure in risks,” he told Chicago magazine, discussing his love of activities like skydiving, hang gliding, mountain climbing and scuba diving.
His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Jane Dubrow ended in divorce. He later married Joanne Graham Arriola, who died in 2022. Survivors include five children, according to his family’s obituary.
Braun’s Illinois psychiatric career ended after the Burgus lawsuit. State officials suspended his medical licence for two years beginning in 1999 and barred him from treating dissociative identity disorders for the next five years after that.
Declaring that he was “fed up with medicine”, he moved to Montana, fought wildfires and took an administrative job at a hospital. In 2003, he received a state physician’s licence and resumed his medical practice.
“I was broke,” he explained to the Associated Press. “I want to help people. That’s the most important thing in my life.” Braun was sued in 2019 by one of his Butte patients, who alleged that an improper drug treatment had caused a permanent facial tic. She also filed a complaint against the state board of medical examiners, saying that it should have known about the earlier malpractice claims against Braun.
He denied wrongdoing. The next year, he lost his licence to practise medicine in Montana.