Remembering Mr. Carlson

His wife texted me from his phone. I saw her introduction in the text preview, and as I had never communicated with her before, I knew the news was not going to be good. Steve Carlson died of a heart attack last Friday, the 29th of May. Steve was 70 years old, and he would agree that he perhaps drank too much, and it was not uncommon that he would call me in the evenings when he did. Nonetheless, there is a particular brand of bitterness that is aroused at the experience of seeing an advocate for a cause, who worked with tireless energy for decades, pass on with no recognizable progress to that cause, despite his best efforts, and due entirely to the intentional spineless ignorance of those who could have, and should have, acted upon the information that Steve regularly provided them.

The cause — Steve’s cause — was Grey Faction. More accurately, Grey Faction took up a cause Steve had already been championing for decades — the battle for reform in the mental health profession to combat conspiracy theorizing therapists who propagate delusional beliefs in the clinical exorcism of “alternate personalities,” as said to be manifested in the condition of “Dissociative Identity Disorder” [DID].

Steve was a witness to the faddish rise of DID, previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, and he understood its relationship to the Satanic Panic. He witnessed first-hand the horrors wrought by pseudoscience on the lives of the emotionally vulnerable. Steve worked as a social worker in a hospital in Wisconsin during the height of the panic, and there he witnessed one Dr. Adams who — through coercive hypnosis sessions, sodium amytal, and leading interrogations — convinced a number of his patients that they had “repressed memories” of their victimization at the hands of a sinister, worldwide, underground Satanic cult.

Steve reached out to me years before I started The Satanic Temple, having read my little-seen writings about false memories, recovered memory therapies, and the conspiracy theories underlying the entire junk science of DID. When I first began appearing on television and other media as a voice of modern Satanism, Steve, unlike many of my “peers” at that time, did not choose to either denounce me or turn his back on me. That meant a lot.

In fact, Steve worked directly with Grey Faction on occasion, and he traveled with us to a conference of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) in Chicago one year where, as a social worker, he received continuing education units to sit in on a bizarre lecture that discussed the pressing clinical demands of those DID-harboring clients who are victims of Illuminati mind control. The hope was that we could provide this information to the American Psychiatric Association, and other accrediting and licensing boards, so as to get them to withdraw their support from the ISSTD’s harmful and deranged quackery. Of course it did not work. The bureaucratic cowards were not going to be pressured by a small group of people simply showing them that crippling delusions were being spread by conspiracy theorists to the vulnerable clients they were charged with protecting. It would take a lot more pressure than we could provide.

To that end, Steve attempted to sell his narrative… the one about Dr. Adams that was never properly told. He had some press clippings, and a video recording of a local news report about Adams, but nobody had really put the full story together, though it offered yet another case study in the insanity of DID specialists.

When Wisconsin cut funding to Adams’s in-patient Multiple Personality unit, according to Steve, Adams became convinced that his work was being undermined by the very Satanic conspiracy that was responsible for the Multiple Personality phenomenon by way of “trauma-based mind control.” Adams, of course, conveyed this perspective to his in-patients, convincing them that once the unit was shut down, they would be thrown out into the wild, and into the oppressive grip of soul-stealing, thought-controlling Satanists from whom there could be no escape. Two of these patients chose the bizarre suicide method of self-immolation.

Adams left Wisconsin to start a private practice in Ohio. In fact, there is a long tradition of conspiracy therapists encountering trouble in one state only to move to another to start afresh.

Adams became fixated with one of his female clients. What came next was available to be verified by court records, where I saw that Adams did indeed break into his client’s home one night whereupon he shot and killed her husband and kidnapped her for a drive about town for a while before he was arrested.

Adams was in the late stages of Parkinson’s when became aware of his case, and my attempts to correspond with him to learn more about his state of mind were replied to with fairly useless, brief, shaky hand-written letters imploring me to send magazines.

Steve pitched the story as a book, a documentary, a podcast, any form of media that could get the story out, he felt, would provide a fresh compelling narrative from which to explore the deeper problem of the ongoing mental health care misconduct by the ISSTD and other conspiracy therapists. He would tell every journalist and filmmaker that they could take his story and make it their own. He did not need any credit. He only wanted to see resolution. He wanted to right a wrong for the safety of those who stood to be harmed in the future.

When the publicly-funded Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault [WCASA] began peddling pseudoscience on their website, from bullshit books like Courage To Heal, which endorses ideas of repressed memories, to providing links to conspiracist non-profits that promote conspiracy theories in the name of combatting sexual abuse, Steve relentlessly petitioned for reason. He was ignored when he was not disparaged, but unlike the image-conscious cowards that most loudly wave the banner of “progressive activism” online, he was not dissuaded by the “optics” of going against those who falsely paint themselves as victims’ advocates while standing by and ignoring the destruction of lives around them that their inaction enables.

Just two days after Steve’s death, the BBC published an article about the dangers of daydreaming-gone-too-far that begins with an interview with “a psychiatrist and researcher” named Colin Ross. At least, “psychiatrist and researcher” is how the article defines him. I know him better as the blithering imbecile who once claimed he could shoot “paranormal” beams of energy from his eyes, but failed to prove it in a controlled setting. He is a past president of the ISSTD who has written about disembodied astral traveling alternate personalities, human/extraterrestrial hybrids, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and mind-control. His career has spanned decades of malpractice litigation that drove him originally to the United States, where he has shifted locations multiple times since. He is the doctor whose work “on behalf of victims of sexual abuse” has found him defending a rapist in court on the claim that alternate personalities had taken over the perpetrator’s senses. The doctor who once allowed a rapist to roam a women’s unit of the hospital he worked in. The list goes on. Yet nothing changes. He remains merely a “psychiatrist and researcher,” an esteemed expert in the eyes of the BBC and the world at large.

I will miss Steve Carlson’s calls, and I deeply regret that he would never live to see progress on the issue of officially sanctioned conspiracy therapists. May we yet dismantle the ISSTD in his honor.