The Maliciously Well-Intentioned

There is a fringe organization for mental health professionals known as the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) that describes its mission as organizing “to develop and promote comprehensive, clinically-effective and empirically-based resources and responses to trauma and dissociation and to address its relevance to other theoretical constructs.” Their annual conferences have included lectures about the reality of Illuminati mind-control, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and other absurd conspiracy theories. Just under the veneer of the ISSTD’s professional presentation one finds an irresponsible subculture of therapists, social workers, and even clinical psychologists who trace the etiology of certain disorders to delusional QAnon-like narratives, raising a question of risk for their clients: are these conspiracists spreading crippling delusions to the vulnerable who have come to them for help?

There are, in fact, numerous documented cases of individuals suing ISSTD-affiliated professionals for engaging in pseudoscientific practices and cultivating in them fake, harmful, and delusional beliefs. If one is to confront any of the ISSTD faithful about this — as I have throughout the course of many years — one will surely, as I have nearly every single time, be accused of suggesting that all sexual abuse victims are simply lying about their victimizations, regardless of how distantly related this charge may be to any individual claim in question. The tactic has proven amazingly effective. While some of the ISSTD membership propagate bizarre notions of deranged supernatural Satanic world domination plots straight from the universe of Alex Jones, they will, when convenient, evade critical scrutiny by insisting that as their conspiracy theories center on alleged victims of “trauma-based mind-control” which utilizes sexual abuse against its victims, to question any component of their conspiracy claims is to question the damage done, or even the reality of, sexual abuse itself.

This all-or-nothing approach to broadly casting a wide, highly generalized net of a single moral cause over an entire category of claims also insists that certain kinds of claims are immune from the manipulations of opportunists and frauds. Thus we now have the nearly-comical genre of self-identified victims of MK-ULTRA which includes fragile male fantasists who tell Jason Bourne-style tales of their elite super-secret lives as near-invincible highly-trained assassins and spies… and they too are victims whose narratives must not be questioned, lest one wants to be known as a rape apologist.

As infuriating and plainly obscene as this all is, the ISSTD style of hijacking moral causes and giving broad exemptions to a vast number of questionable claims in their name, seems to have permeated and destroyed nearly all of activist culture. “It started with the best of intentions” is commonly the phrase (or a variation of it) used as a type of apology by those who dare explore this topic at all, often going to great lengths to convey that the author does indeed believe in the legitimacy of the core moral claim, even if she does not believe that some of those most insistently waving that banner are best serving the proclaimed cause.