The Eating Human Meatloaf Syndrome

Gary: Next week, Dave and Tom will continue with their discussion of The Occult Invasion. We hope you can tune in. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still ahead, answers to your questions in “Contending for the Faith” and in “Understanding the Scriptures,” Dave and Tom resume their discussion of God’s salvation.

Now, Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from the Denver Post. Illinois has moved to discipline a prominent psychiatrist accused of convincing a patient that she was a cannibal who ate human flesh meatloaf, a child molester, and a high priestess of a satanic cult.

Depressed after the birth of her second son, Patricia Burgus sought therapy from Dr. Bennett Braun. Burgus says the doctor, through repressed memory therapy led her to believe she possessed 300 personalities, ate meatloaf of human flesh, sexually abused her children, and served in a cult. In November, Burgus, 42, won a $10.6 million settlement in a lawsuit against Braun, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital, and another psychiatrist at the hospital, Dr. Elva Poznanski.

“I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it,” Burgus told the Chicago Tribune. The Illinois Department of Professional Regulation issued a complaint alleging Braun’s techniques almost destroyed the lives of Burgus and her family. Doctor Braun, 58, of Glenview, founded the International Society for the Study of Disassociation. He helped train many of the therapists who treat multiple personality disorder around the nation.

Mrs. Burgus said she was given sedative, hypnotic, and psychotic drugs in inappropriate doses. She was frequently hypnotized and sometimes restrained with leather straps to stimulate abuse memories, her lawsuit said. Burgus also said Doctors Braun and Poznanski persuaded her to hospitalize her two healthy children, then ages 4 and 5, for almost 3 years. Doctor Marlene Hunter, a Canadian psychiatrist who was president of the society Braun founded, said it was a situation where a therapist has done the best he could according to what he thought was right at the time.

Tom: Dave, some people, I mean, I’m sure they’re outraged by what they’ve heard, but some other people would say, “Well, $10.6 million—you know, that’s a big settlement.” This woman’s life and her family—this has been destroyed by these people.

Dave: Tom, I’m just—I’m nonplussed, you know? You find it impossible to comprehend how anyone could be so deluded. Two thousand people a year she was eating? That’s three a day, you know?

Tom: And you’re talking about the psychiatrist, right?

Dave: Well, I’m talking about her.

Tom: Okay.

Dave: But the psychiatrist himself or herself…

Tom: It was a man and a woman psychiatrist.

Dave: It’s…I’m sorry! This is part of the gullibility that we see everywhere. People are willing to put their lives, their minds—their eternal destiny, even—in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and common sense would tell you it isn’t true! And I see it in the church. Now this person was seemingly justifiable—she did the best she could. This—I think it was a man psychiatrist or psychologist who trained many people who are dealing with this area of multiple personality disorder.

Tom: Right. This Dr. Braun, who the suit was brought against, primarily.

Dave: Right. So, what about the other people that he has trained? This MPD, multiple personality disorder, this is an invention of Satan, I would say, but it’s very recent even among psychologists. You didn’t hear about this 30 years ago. Nobody talked about it. Now it’s an epidemic. This is in the church. There are Christian books that are being written about this.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Moody Monthly some time ago had a cover story about MPD, multiple personality—a woman named Sam who’d supposedly been involved in satanic cults and so forth. And it said that it took several years of therapy to uncover these multiple personalities. And then, of course, you couldn’t just leave—this is Moody saying this—you couldn’t just leave someone to prayer and study the Word of God and repentance and so forth to get delivered from this. What they needed was professional help, and they needed years of therapy. I’m sorry, I get angry when I see this! Professional? These are not—I don’t know what you would call this profession, but it is a fraud! And to come up with these ideas and then to foist this upon people…

Now, you see what happened. She was hypnotized. Hypnosis is an occult technique. It puts you in a highly suggestible state where you can come out with memories of things that never even happened. And, Tom, I have talked to parents, siblings of people, young women, mostly, who have gotten involved in this. They went to a Christian psychologist—he led them into the past. He showed them—convinced them that they’d been sexually abused by their father and grandfather or by their parents and involved in satanic cults and so forth. And their lives have been destroyed. The family’s been destroyed. They won’t talk to their parents. There are men who have gone to prison, who have lost their jobs. Now some of them are striking back, and the False Memory Syndrome Organization, as you know…

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Dave: …and they are striking back and they are filing lawsuits and getting some large settlements. But that this could go on in the church and the whole inner healing movement… The Sanfords—John and Paula Sanford and so forth—the many inner healings regress you into the past: go back, visualize, see Jesus coming along and so forth, and puts you on an endless search. What else is there back there that I’ve got to go back and find out, this trauma that has disturbed me? and so forth. This whole area of Christian psychology needs to be exposed and we have tried to do it, but it is very difficult to do it because they’re the big heroes now.

Tom: Well, the church—souls, people—their lives are being ripped apart by it.

One of the things that has grieved us, and we’ve seen it as we’ve followed this in the 20 years you and I have been together in looking at psychotherapy and psychology—but let me just give you an example. This is a field that proliferates—it really develops its own victims. And it increases. There’s a book called the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 1952 they listed 106 different mental illnesses; 1968, 182; 1980, 265; 1987, 292. Today in the fourth edition of this manual which psychotherapist and psychiatrists use to decide what is a mental disorder, they have over 300. One of them—I mean some of them are so outrageous. One of them is Oppositional Defiant Disorder. You know what that is?

Dave: You don’t want your therapy.

Tom: Yeah, or you don’t want to obey. Your kids don’t want to obey their parents and so on. And this is just outrageous. But we’re going to deal with this, Dave, if the Lord tarries, in programs down the line.