Panic Among Conspiracists as a Satanic Panic Pseudoscience Comes Undone: A Chat With Grey Faction's Evan Anderson

For well over 40 years, an irresponsible, pseudoscientific subculture of the mental health profession has insisted that Dissociative Identity Disorder [DID] (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder) has always been, and always will be, a direct result solely of extreme traumatic events that are — because they are so unbearably painful to those who experience them — "repressed" in the subconscious mind. Repressed traumatic memories, the advocates of this theory posit, are what fracture the mind and form the core of "alternate personalities" that are intermittently foregrounded. There is no real credible evidence for the "trauma model" of DID, while there is plenty of evidence that "therapeutic" interventions predicated on revealing hidden traumas are harmful and misguided, leading to the confabulatory cultivation of “memories” for traumatic events that never were. "Recovered memories" formed the evidentiary basis for Satanic Panic claims of intergenerational Satanic cults that employ "Satanic Ritual Abuse" in an intentional effort to create mind-controlled multiple personalities. The primary modern professional proponents of DID's Trauma Model, the International Society for the Study of Trauma & Dissociation (ISSTD), suddenly find themselves battling a new conception of DID that seems to be gathering momentum in communities that identify with the diagnosis. At the same time, their paranoia regarding The Satanic Temple's Grey Faction is tearing them apart. I spoke with Grey Faction's director, Evan Anderson, for the details…