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Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul R. Mchugh
Publisher: Dana Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 65893
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 300
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 1932594396
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.8914
EAN: 9781932594393
ASIN: 1932594396
Publication Date: November 15, 2008
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Product Description
In the 1990s a disturbing trend emerged in psychotherapy: patients began accusing their parents and other close relatives of sexual abuse, as a result of false “recovered memories” urged onto them by therapists practicing new methods of treatment. The subsequent loss of public confidence in psychotherapy was devastating to psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh, and with Try to Remember, he looks at what went wrong and describes what must be done to restore psychotherapy to a more honored and useful place in therapeutic treatment.
In this thought-provoking account, McHugh explains why trendy diagnoses and misguided treatments have repeatedly taken over psychotherapy. He recounts his participation in court battles that erupted over diagnoses of recovered memories and the frequent companion diagnoses of multiple-personality disorders. He also warns that diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder today may be perpetuating a similar misdirection, thus exacerbating the patients’ suffering. He argues that both the public and psychiatric professionals must raise their standards for psychotherapy, in order to ensure that the incorrect designation of memory as the root cause of disorders does not occur again. Psychotherapy, McHugh ultimately shows, is a valuable healing method—and at the very least an important adjunct treatment—to the numerous psychopharmaceuticals that flood the drug market today.
An urgent call to arms for patients and therapists alike, Try to Remember delineates the difference between good and bad psychiatry and challenges us to reconsider psychotherapy as the most effective way to heal troubled minds. (20081120)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Paul McHugh's "Try to Remember" December 1, 2008
Michael Pakenham (Baltimore, MD United States)
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
"Paul McHugh's `Try to Remember' is the most important record yet published of the "recovered memory" scandal. That was the exploitation of pathetic patients, and the perjury-poisoned criminal persecution of parents and caregivers, that tore at the hearts of American criminal justice and psychiatry from the 1980s onward. The perps were a deluded subspecies of psychologists and social workers, enrapt by an exaggeration of Sigmund Freud's perception of repressed memory. Their malpractice ranged from irresponsible to maniacal. They wrought incalculable -- and still ongoing -- horror on ostensible `victims' and utterly innocent `exploiters' alike. Dr. McHugh, chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and its hospital for 25 years until 2001, is one of the most distinguished psychiatrists living today. This book is obligatory reading for anyone connected with criminal justice, with psychological social work, or with education concerning the human mind and behavior. Beyond that moral mission, the book is an immensely readable and revealing tour of the state of cutting-edge, responsible psychiatry in America and beyond today."
---Michael Pakenham
(former book editor and literary columnist, The Baltimore Sun)
 In need of some fact-checking December 11, 2008
Lynn Crook (Richland, WA USA)
4 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book appears to be in need of some fact-checking. For example, on p. 113, author Dr. Paul McHugh begins a discussion of Burgus et al. v. Braun et al., a false memory malpractice lawsuit. However, what we don't learn is that in her deposition (pp. 912-914) on January 17, 1997, plaintiff Pat Burgus conceded that she had originated all her own memories, and that Braun had told her only what other patients had witnessed.
The author says on pp. 58-59, "Without [Dr. Elizabeth Loftus'] work, and the information about memory it provided, the FMSF would have had a weaker case to prosecute and a less effective model for demonstrating how fault memories develop."
However, Loftus' work has faced rather serious problems in court. For example, on October 26, 2006, Loftus was cross-examined by US Attorney General Patrick Fitzgerald in the Lewis "Scooter" Libby case. (Yes, he's the same Fitzgerald heading up the Illinois Governor Blagojevich case.) As Fitzgerald pointed out, the findings in Schmechel, O'Toole, Easterly,
and Loftus (2006) do not match the authors' conclusion. A similar inconsistency was brought out on January 4, 2007, when Loftus was asked about her conclusion in Loftus and Burns (1982) during a deposition (p. 180) in Liano v. Diocese of Phoenix.
The world might be a different place if Dr. McHugh had thought about why, just as a child turns off the water after washing his hands, a child would turn off all thought of what an uncle or the priest did to him.
Try to Remember December 5, 2008
James Gibbs (White Plains, NY USA)
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
What's wrong with psychiatry? How can we fix it? In this lively, provocative book, Paul R. McHugh presents the past history and present illness of the field. He draws a bead on recent fads -- 'recovered memory', 'multiple personality disorder', 'post-traumatic stress disorder' -- and scores a bull's eye with every shot. In the process, he reveals the weakening structure of American psychiatry (embodied in successive editions of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) and its exhausted Post-Freudian conceptual base ('cure by remembering'). But this is also a 'how to' book: McHugh advances a novel, coherent, and lucid plan for moving psychiatry and psychotherapy, at last, into the 21st century -- a plan based on the interlocking and reciprocal actions of disease, behavior, personality, and narrative in the life of the suffering patient. This penetrating, elegant book is a map and compass for contemporary psychiatry, revolutionary in its reach and implications.
A readable, logical, and coherent book about a devastating fad December 14, 2008
V. Anderson (New York, USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Try To Remember" is a devastating indictment of the recovered memory and multiple personality disorder fads that infected psychiatry in the 1980s and 1990s. The book describes psychiatric theory and practice in an engaging and understandable way, and contains numerous case studies and historical examples that provide a human context. It is a page turner.
This book has a personal relevance for me because my mother was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder when I was about 10 years old. I did not see any evidence of alters before she entered therapy, but the longer my mother was in treatment, the more personalities she developed, until she had dozens that created chaos in our lives. This went on until we moved to a new location, my mother stopped seeing doctors, and the alters just disappeared. They went away on their own, never to return.
Prof. McHugh describes this exact treatment path in numerous case studies in his book, and notes the common catchphrase that multiple personality disorder patients need to "get worse before they can get better." I remember those exact words from my mother's doctors, but she just got worse and worse, becoming delusional, abusive, and suicidal. The only thing that made my mother better was getting away from psychiatrists. My mother now believes that she was brainwashed with drugs and hypnosis, and I agree completely.
So, how did this all happen? Why was my family put through all of that misery? My mother saw many doctors in three states, so no one bad-apple practitioner was responsible. There was some widespread, systematic problem with psychiatry. "Try to Remember" provides some answers, explaining how poorly tested psychiatric theories and patients' assumptions about the limitless power of psychiatry led to disaster for families like mine.
The most interesting discussions for me were those describing the use of deductive vs. inductive reasoning in psychiatry and the fact that recovered memory doctors failed to see patients as individuals. Prof. McHugh describes how recovered memory doctors thought and how cultural forces made patients vulnerable to abuse. Although some of the material is technical, it is presented in a very understandable way, and the book is never boring.
I am very grateful for this book, although it brings up extremely painful memories for me. I hope that "Try to Remember" helps bring honesty and change to psychiatry.
Outstanding Book December 17, 2008
Charles T. Clark (Haverhill, MA ,USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a brilliant book by one of this country's foremost psychiatrists. Doctor McHugh exposes some of the "quacks" behind "recovered memories" scam that plagued the the fields of psychiatry and psychology in the 1980s and 1990s by providing an historical account of similar scams. Drawing on his own experience as a clinician, he then goes on to explain how this technique caused irreperable harm to both patients and to other victims who were falsely accused of sexual abuse. If McHugh stopped here, he would have written another good expose. But he goes further. He offers the reader rock-solid guidelines on how to avoid the pitfalls of psychiatry--how to avoid the "quacks" who are always out there ready to ensnare the unwary. This is a MUST-READ for anyone concerned with finding a psychiatrist who can truly helped to heal them or anyone who has already fallen into the clutches of a "quack" and seeks to escape from them. I have learned from this book an invaluable lesson in how to navigate the confusing healthcare system for qualified psychiatric care. Prior to reading this book I was completely in the dark as to how to find a truly good psychiatrist who could help me with my problems rather than the "phonies" that I had dealt with in the past.
A patient in Massachusetts
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