MIND CONTROL SERIES Ryerson CKLN Radio in Toronto: Producer Wayne Morris interviews Dr. Colin Ross Fourth in a series of broadcasts aired Sunday April 13, 1997 on CKLN-FM 88.l in Toronto Part 4 of transcript W.M. Are you familiar with Jennifer Freyd's work, with her theory of "betrayal trauma" which deals with child abuse? C.R. Actually, I wasn't going into this all here, but the main change in my thinking in terms of how I have been working with these people clinically over the last three years, has been shifting much more toward the "betrayal trauma" type way of looking at things ... that's not really directly related to mind control, but ... I like her theory a lot. I agree with it. For the listeners who don't know, Jennifer Freyd is the daughter of Pamela and Peter Freyd ... Pamela Freyd is the Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation -- they take the position that Multiple Personality Disorder is pretty bogus and all these memories that people are recovering in therapy are all false and are the result, basically, of mind control techniques by bad therapists. The Scientific Advisory Board of the FMSF which is a whole bunch of academics and experts who advise the Foundation and sort of speak on behalf of it ... includes Martin Orne and Joly West who had CIA top secret clearance; Harold Leif who is the personal psychiatrist to the Freyds also was a co-author with Robert Heath who did the brain electrode research at Tulane which was funded by the various branches of the military and CIA. About five of Martin Orne's co-authors or people that he thanks in publications of his going back into the 50's in different mind control research that he did are also on the Board. Margaret Singer who interviewed the Korean prisoners of war who had top secret clearance through the military to do that work is also on the Board. So there is quite a connection and overlap between the FMSF people (not all of them but a group of them) and all this military mind control research. W.M. Have you had any experience with the FMSF? I understand they have been fairly aggressive in intimidating therapists throughout North America. C.R. Well, I have had a bit of experience with the FMSF. I belong to the FMSF. I get their newsletter. I've been talked about, and have written in their newsletter. I set up a workshop in Houston where I spoke for a day and a half and Pamela Freyd, who is the Executive Director spoke for half a day. I have set up about five or six workshops with Elizabeth Loftus who is one of the leading members of their Advisory Board. I spoke at a meeting that Stephen Ceci was at ... and he spoke after me ... he commented very favourably on my talk. He is on their Advisory Board. So I've got a lot of contacts with some of these people which I consider to be very friendly, and I admire their work. I disagree with some of the things a little bit, but by and large, I agree with probably over half of what the majority of the people on the FMSF Advisory Board say. As I mentioned earlier, I have testified in court, basically much the same as any of those people would ... that here's an example of bad therapy which has created multiple personality out of nowhere and caused a lot of damage to a person and their family. In the FMSF "camp", not the organization itself, but in a sort of "camp" as it were, some real extremists have gone way overboard and very inflammatory in the way they talk and everything is all black and white ... the whole multiple personality field is totally bad and all the memories are completely false, so there's people in that camp who go way overboard. My view on them is that if you set aside some of the really political posturing and the most rabid politics that come out, and you just listen to the most basic message ... I agree with them. I think it has been incredibly helpful to the field ... not just Dissociative Disorders field, or sexual trauma therapists, but the entire mental health field. In the 1980's, there was almost zero teaching on how error-prone memory is, and almost no teaching at all about how to think about it, what to do about it, what guidelines we need. All these guidelines about false memories and memory not being reliable really only came out with the professional organization starting in 1994 and the FMSF spearheaded that, so a lot of the work they have done has been incredibly helpful and I agree with it. It is simply a fact that memory is unreliable. It's just when things get really polarized, and everyone is really insulting everyone else, it turns into a big war and it becomes ridiculous ... W.M. It seems that the survivors of abuse are again re-victimized by this type of argument where the focus seems to be proving that a memory is false or not, instead of actually finding out whether abuse happened or not ... C.R. It gets all politicized ... everybody gets very hot under the collar ... very defensive about it. Again in the FMSF, in the membership, I am sure that there are a whole bunch of people who are actually falsely accused. But I am sure there are also a whole bunch of people who are accurately accused, and are just trying to run a little scam and say it's false memories. That needs to be set aside if you are trying to look at it scientifically ... what are the issues about memory, and what is the best way to do therapy, and how do you have to balance things to have therapy that is more beneficial than harmful. If people would get off all of the ugly politics and have more of a rational, calm scientific discussion, it would be much better. Then you wouldn't hear the therapists saying the FMSF people are all just pedophiles and you wouldn't the FMSF people saying the therapists are all insane. W.M. In your opinion, how has the false memory debate affected therapy resources available for survivors in a general sense? C.R. It has affected it negatively ... because a lot of the therapists have become really paranoid and there is a lot of agitation in the insurance companies and the managed care companies in the USA about this kind of therapy now. The idea that most of the memories are false is really just a kind of basic stance of psychiatry throughout the entire 20th century really ... it is nothing new. W.M. How do you feel the debate has affected the way therapists deal with their clients? C.R. Well, I think it has been beneficial and harmful at the same time. It has been beneficial because therapists have had to get their acts together a little bit, and be more aware that memory is extremely vague and unreliable, and you can't just take everything at face value. I have written at great length about how to strategically plan therapy so that if you do the same thing, no matter what percentage of the memory is true or false ... most of the time you don't know for a fact ... so it has been very helpful in that way. But it has been very harmful in that it has just given an excuse to all kinds of people who just don't want to deal with abuse anyway to say "ah, it's all false memory" and it has made the therapists defensive and it has taken a lot of time and energy away from treatment onto worrying about whether you are going to get sued or not. But there are sort of opposite sides of the same coin. You can't have therapists finally getting the message that they have to be more careful without also having therapists who are more paranoid about being accused. W.M. For the benefit of other therapists who might be listening, is there a way to recognize signs of possible mind control experimentation? Are there signs that come up again and again in survivor accounts? C.R. You mean actual military and intelligence mind control? Or ... because mind control can be done informally and unwittingly by just a pedophile father at home ... or it can be done by any one of the known destructive cults or it can be done as part of a military research project. It depends on which level you are talking about. W.M. I am speaking specifically of government funded military mind control experiments ... C.R. No. There is no kind of ... if a person comes in with a sore left elbow, that's a sure sign. There's no kind of sign or symptom like that that will automatically clue you off ... but there is probably going to be some sort of Dissociative Disorder, and it's not so much that you go after it ... as the person starts giving you memories of ... it wasn't some sort of stereotyped satanic type thing in the woods ... they actually start telling you something that sounds like medical research of some kind, experiments of some kind ... it is either at a university or a hospital or a military base. Really, the bad plan is to start specifically asking questions ... you have to wait for the person to start describing that kind of stuff and if they describe that kind of stuff, you just follow normal kind of therapy procedures where you just say, can you tell me a little more about that, or I don't quite understand this, or could you clarify that, or what does that mean to you? Why is that important to you? How is that affecting you now? How does that tie into the problems we are working on now? You really just handle it using basic, sensible therapy techniques. There is not a special set of strategies or techniques for mind control as such ... these people are basically human beings who have been hurt and have problems. You need nbto use the same basic therapy you would use otherwise. My personal conclusion is that probably the majority, a vast majority of satanic abuse memories that I have heard which involve hundreds and hundreds of babies being sacrificed ... the vast majority of that can't actually be real. Some of it could be. But the techniques and strategies that I use in therapy with people with satanic ritual abuse memories are pretty much identical, the same strategies with people who don't have those kinds of memories. The same applies to the military mind control people the way I go at it. I use the same basic strategies, principles and techniques. I don't really focus on the memories as the main problem. W.M. In your opinion, do you think there are any links between the accounts of ritual abuse and mind control experimentation? C.R. Nothing documented. The link is in the mind control experts -- the people who are contractors for the CIA and the military who understand the mind control techniques, therefore the military wants to tap into their expertise. They also tend to be people who are experts on mind control techniques and destructive cults. But a direct connection between the cults and the military ... the only book I know about that is a book called "Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?" written by a man named Michael Myers, published by the Edwin Mellon Press. He presents a lot of solid documentation that is not quite 100% conclusive, that the CIA was heavily involved in Jonestown. W.M. You went into a fair bit of detail about that in your lecture that we recently aired ... C.R. Just to give a little smattering of the kinds of things -- one example is that the People's Temple run by Jim Jones, was based in Ukiah, California which is north of San Francisco, and then they moved down to the jungle in British Guyana. Before I read this book I never really thought about how did they go about choosing that site? It turns out that that site in the middle of the jungle in British Guyana, immediately before Jim Jones moved down there, it was the site of the CIA Shalom Project which was a program for black, ex Green Beret military people to train mercenaries for Angola, which obviously couldn't just be a coincidence. Then there is just a wealth of other detail connecting all kinds of things in ... W.M. In your sense, who do you think is behind all of this? C.R. I am not really much of a conspirary theorist ... I just think that it boils down to the typical normal stuff that controls the rest of the world so it's got to do with the military, and the government, and banks, and helicopter sales, and spying ... so it's no different from who runs radar, or who runs jets, or who runs anything else ... a lot of it is just military contracting and government, big business ... I don't personally subscribe to a special conspiracy theory like ... I don't think there is one ... from the evidence I see ... I don't think there is any one little group of people who meet in some room in the Pentagon who are pulling all the strings on all of this. I think it is much like the Federal government. It all kinds of little groups working at cross purposes and there is no one grand master designer kind of thing. W.M. The old boys' network ... C.R. Yeah. The old boys' network is the way I describe it. One reason I think of it this way is, there doesn't have to be one huge ... obviously there is a conspiracy in a sense in that there is secret funding of mind control research, and there are files that are kept from the public ... but in terms of the stuff that is actually documented ... there didn't have to be that huge of a conspiracy because they just went ahead and published it in the medical literature anyway. The conspiracy is really the sort of old boys' network, everybody just sort of looks the other way, everybody just knows they are not supposed to comment on it kind of conspiracy. It's not that anybody has to send a memo to every psychiatrist in North America saying "keep this secret" ... everybody kind of looks the other way, steers around it, doesn't rock the boat, doesn't make waves. W.M. I've just got a couple of more questions. I am wondering how a person undergoes the healing process ... who has been traumatized as a child, or has participated in the mind control experimentation. What is the process of healing? C.R. Some people are probably too damaged to ever heal. Nobody should claim that they know how to help everybody. Or some people are damaged and they have the ability to heal, but I am not just going to describe how that should be done. They need to go to somebody else. But the people we work with, Multiple Personality, who all describe really traumatic childhoods, we don't really focus on the memories as such. What we deal with is how these different personalities, working together as a sort of inner family, are getting along with each other, or mostly not getting along with each other. We try and get them to have more open communication in cooperation with each other. Have more of a problem-solving, strategizing kind of approach to life instead of all this conflict and fighting and amnesia. And then we work on building up more healthy, more flexible ways of coping with life ... and that's just in a nutshell. To describe it in detail ... that's why my book is 400 pages long. It takes quite a while. W.M. You mentioned, particularly in tests that you have done, a lot were able to integrate these personalities into a kind of a whole. Is that really the goal of the healing process? C.R. Well, it's the goal in one sense, to be ... we are just talking about people with Multiple Personalities. The vast majority of people who were involved in mind control experiments, and the vast majority of people who were abused as children don't have Multiple Personality. I just specialize in that little sub-group, a little island in this whole sea of trauma ... the reason integration is a goal for them is basically it is normal and desirable to be sort of an integrated human being. If you had a reasonably normal, healthy, happy childhood, adolescence and you have a reasonably happy, healthy, normal adulthood ... you are going to be integrated. You are not going to have Multiple Personalities. But the other reason is because it works better. It's not that integration is this big goal in and of itself, it's just that integration is a way to get to the goal of far, far, far less symptoms ... much more happy, settled state internally, much better interpersonal relationships, much better functioning in the workplace, and a huge reduction in the amount of mental health care resources you need. W.M. You mentioned that you are about to release a book about mind control. What specifically will the book deal with, and when will it be published? C.R. I am just finished the second draft of the third draft of the book ... so it's been through three complete changes. And now the final one, I've done a pretty extensive re-write of it and I've got a little bit more information that I am just sort of digesting and waiting to come in from one of the universities ... that I got some information from ... and I will probably go at it one more time stylistically, and then we will see if we can get a publisher to bite on it. So I am hoping that it will be out before the end of 1997. W.M. What specifically are you dealing with in the book? C.R. Basically everything we have been talking about, and the main points are going to be that the US military and the CIA have been creating experimental multiple personalities, that's an established fact because of the documentation. The extent that those people were used in operations is still not fully known. The fact that you can create artificial multiple personalities to me proves both that it can be created artificially and also that it is likely to arise spontaneously, and I go into that in detail. All this other crazy mind control research ... I use that to set the context to make it believable that multiple personality was created by the military ... because if you just hear that out of nowhere, it just seems too much to be believed. But when you have that whole context then you realize that really it just fits in nicely. Then the other part is to try and stimulate either a presidential commission or some sort of public enquiry into this and get the medical ethics of it really tightened up to make sure this stuff is not ongoing. And get some recognition and compensation for the victims. That's basically the gist of the book. W.M. Do you have evidence of experimental brain surgery implants being done on epilepsy patients? C.R. Well, there are two answers to that question. One is that all this documented brain electrode implant research that I have described ... some of those patients actually had epilepsy, and in a whole bunch of them epilepsy was kind of a phony rationale for putting electrodes in. So when you read that literature, a lot of the time they will describe the patient as having epilepsy, and then sometimes they actually put brain electrodes in just for either psychiatric reasons which were basically bogus reasons, or purely experimental reasons. But epilepsy is one of the rationales for putting brain electrodes in. That is totally documented. W.M. And would these people be informed that they were to receive brain implants? C.R. Yeah, but the explanation for why that was scientifically justified and the informed consent procedure was really iffy ... W.M. What literature is available on this subject? C.R. There is a book called "Violence and the Brain" by Vernon H. Mark and Frank R. Ervin (Sweet?), 1970-72, it is a little bit hard to get. Or if you go into ... part of the problem is that you can't do computerized medical searches prior to 1966 ... but if you go to the medical literature in the period 1955-1970 and you look for publications by Robert Heath, Tulane University or Jose Delgado at Yale you will find those scattered around the medical literature. Or you just do literature searches on brain electrode implants. Then there is a huge literature on LSD. It's just a matter of going to the library and really searching around. Or, in the book, I will reference a lot of it. W.M. Well, I would like to thank you very much Dr. Colin Ross for joining us on CKLN. It has been very illuminating talking to you, and I wish you all the best with your new book. C.R. My pleasure, and thanks for doing the series on this ... ...end of tape.....