Real-Life United States of Tara Doctor, Dr. Colin Ross: Alleged Malpractice

"Q. Okay. Just to make sure I have covered the bases and the record is clear, there is no known, reliable method for distinguishing between true and false memories by talking to a patient?
A. True, except for one little qualifier. Obviously, physically impossible memories. Setting that aside, no.
Q. Something like having a memory of being born would be an example of a physically impossible memory?
A. Right.
Q. And, as you have stated, there are no valid and reliable scientific studies indicating or demonstrating that human beings are capable of repressing a long stream of trauma or dissociating or blocking out through traumatic amnesia, a long stream of events, then accurately recovering those memories years later? There is no reliable demonstration of that particular phenomenon?
A. There's a couple of studies in the literature, but not sufficient to prove it. There's some data."
- Testimony of Dr. Colin Ross

"On or about April 30, 1992, [Dr. Colin] Ross told Ms. Tyo that she would have to leave Charter [hospital] in three weeks, but Ross acknowledged that at that point she might still be suicidal and might still want to mutilate herself. Subsequent to that conversation, Ms. Tyo went through a period she describes as deep denial. She denied she was MPD [Multiple Personality Disorder] or had participated in SRA [Satanic Ritual Abuse]. Ross and [Mary E.] Grundman, however, forced her out of her denial by assuring her that their diagnosis was, in fact, correct and the "memories" she'd recovered were true."
- Martha Ann Tyo v. Colin A. Ross, MD, et al...

According to one expert witness, it was the worst case of medical malpractice he had ever seen. The patient, Ms. Roma E. Hart, had been grossly over-medicated into a prolonged state of deranged confusion, during which time the offending psychiatrist, Dr. Colin A. Ross, had instilled her with exotic and perverse delusions: To wit, the rather implausible belief that her family was involved in an occult crime-ring dedicated to a supernatural evil, and that Hart herself had been forcibly impregnated by extraterrestrials, birthing a hybrid infant (presumably in the course of a routine alien abduction). The magnitude of Ms. Hart's mistreatment during her submission to psychiatric "care" brought her to the precipice of death on several occasions.

During her treatment Ms. Hart gave custody of her 10 year old daughter over to Child & Family Services so as to preserve the girl from clutches of her Satanic cult family. Thus Ms. Hart lost her entire family in one egregiously misguided moment; her parents unable to forgive her for the accusations of sexual Satanic Ritual Abuse, her daughter heart-broken by abandonment.

As you will read in the interview with Ms. Hart below, these are but a few of the annoyances she suffered as result of Ross's "therapy".

This bizarre malpractice by the hand of Dr. Colin Ross was designed to treat his unfortunate patient of the condition of Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD], a condition Ms. Hart now feels she never had, and many doctors argue doesn't exist. It is a condition that Dr. Ross himself has largely helped define and set the diagnostic and treatment protocols of. The theory of MPD, unsupported by science, is that an individual undergoing trauma "dissociates", recompartmentalizing the hurtful memories into separate "personalities", personalities that are unaware of one another.

Dr. Colin Ross's delusions are hardly concealed. He is a known conspiracy theorist who helped construct the Satanic cult hysteria of the eighties to mid-nineties. He has written and lectured regarding nefarious mind-control projects within the CIA, and even - in an interesting case of possible projection - speculation regarding the "iatrogenic [clinically produced] creation of Multiple Personality Disorder" by CIA psychiatrists. Following Dr. Ross's own vernacular, it might be appropriate to suggest that Ross has "dissociated" his own crimes of medical mistreatment, projecting them upon a "personality" he refers to as "CIA".

But Ross can not be dismissed as a marginal fool. Indeed, Dr. Colin Ross is an "internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of dissociation and trauma-related disorders". He is founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma, which "specializes in the management of psychiatric treatment programs and is currently contracted to provide management and treatment services to Timberlawn Mental Health System, in Dallas, Texas, Forest View Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Del Amo Hospital, in Torrance, California." Ross is "the author of over 130 professional papers and past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation", and acts as expert consultant for the Showtime television series The United States of Tara. Dr. Ross has acted as therapist for celebrity Rosanne Barr (who now also believes she recovered memories of childhood abuse), and Cameron West, author of the New York Times bestselling First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.

Like all conspiracy theorists, Ross seems to feel he has an understanding of the true cause of all Evil. Likewise, MPD feeds Ross's paranoid fiction as, not only a by-product of a sinister CIA plot, but as a medical condition that serves to explain and negate all others. Roma Hart gives an example of this over-valuation of the MPD diagnosis by Ross in a personal email to the author:

[...]I was regularly in seclusion [whilst an in-patient of Colin Ross], a lovely concrete walled and floored hole where I was locked in for days at a time.
Sometimes [I would be] thrown in, and I'd have the huge bruises to show for it.
[The seclusion room] was often used for "behaviour modification" I suppose.  You see, when I had seizures from the drugs [Ross had over-medicated], Ross told the nurses that I was just switching personalities to one called "Blue" that had seizures, so they should throw me in seclusion whenever that happened. One evening when [the seizures were] really bad Ross had the nurses take me down to the ward below and strip me before they dropped me onto the floor. That [particular] seclusion room had a bad fluorescent light that flickered really badly. I laid there until the next day when they put me in a wheelchair to take me back up to my other seclusion room.
Those nurses, as I told you before, followed Ross around like panting puppies and did anything he said. I remember when I had my blood pressure taken my nurse asked me if I knew why my blood pressure was so unstable. I was going to answer "the drugs?", but before I could say anything she said "it's because each of your personalities has its own blood pressure." And of course [there was] the time that I was nearly killed from an overdose on the ward and I barely made it to the nurse's station gasping for breath (respiratory arrest) [trying to] get their attention. The nurses became angry at me and demanded that I go back to my room. I fell to the floor and crawled back to my room still struggling with every ounce of my strength for every breath. This was extrememly frightening and I was so close to dying. I made it to my bed and the nurse took my blood pressure, she wrote it on my bed sheet as a matter of fact: 190/180. The following day after I regained consciousness another nurse came in and took my blood pressure: 60/50. Well, she remarked, you MPD patients are fascinating. You see, Doug, Ross had told the staff that night that I had "pulled myself in" and that it was an "MPD coma", not a real coma.

On the face of it, Roma Hart's accusations appear absurd. For this reason, the hyperlinks embedded in this article, showing corroborative sworn testimony and affidavits, are important. Thus, Ms. Hart's claim that Dr. Ross actually encouraged her toward suicide seems quite plausible when taken together with the sworn affidavit of Winnipeg resident George Bergen, who testifies that Ross's therapy drove his sister-in-law and at least four others to suicide, and the statement of Martha Ann Tyo (who also sued Ross for malpractice) indicating an eerily blasé attitude, on Ross's part, toward the possibility of his client's suicide (see quote from Tyo v. Ross above). That fact that Martha Ann Tyo, a patient in Texas (Hart was mis-treated in Winnipeg), tells also of being implanted with a conviction of Satanic Ritual Abuse and alien abduction does much to affirm that these beliefs were a product of Ross's mind rather than those of Tyo or Hart. So, though the documents cataloguing Dr. Ross's criminal incompetence are linked throughout, I shall - in the spirit of Ross's own book Bluebird, which seeks full-disclosure of CIA malpractice - list an index of some of the more important ones here:

1. Affidavit of Roma E. Hart regarding Ross's malpractice
2. Sworn affidavit of George Bergen regarding suicide deaths in Dr. Ross's care
3. Martha Ann Tyo v. Ross, et al.
4. Testimony of Thomas Brown regarding Ross's implantation of false memories in his wife.
5. Sworn affidavit of Robert Alexander Cowan attesting that Ross was fired from a Winnipeg Hospital.
6. Dr. Harold Merskey's assessment of Dr. Colin Ross's malpractice upon Roma Hart
7. Petition of the British False Memory Society seeking indictment of Dr. Colin Ross for violations of the Nuremburg Code
8. Dr. Alexander Bodkin's assessment of Dr. Colin Ross's malpractice upon Roma Hart
9. Selected quotes of Dr. Colin A. Ross, suggesting a mind disturbed
10. A list of Statutory Declarations attributing ruined lives to Dr. Ross's clinical techniques

Interview with Ms. Roma E. Hart
by Douglas Mesner (Process.org)

[note: the following is an excerpt.  The full interview transcript, as well as audio, can be found at www.process.org]

How did you come to be in the care of the genius Dr. Ross?

Before I started seeing him, I was working constantly. I was a single mom, I had two jobs, I was going to University full-time, and I had hurt my foot really, really badly. So I got unemployment insurance, which only lasted a few weeks. One of my friends said, Hey, you know what? you can get it extended if you apply for stress. I thought, cool, why don't I do that? Extra money, get my unemployment extended. So I was at University, went the the University Student Psych Centre, figured I could get them to fill out the form for unemployment insurance. I saw one of the master's students there, who was a student of Colin Ross's. She said, what do you do when you get under stress? I said, Well, I just switch to autopilot and just keep on going - I'm a single mom, after all. And she goes, Autopilot?? Do you have a name for this "autopilot"? Her eyes went so big, and she said, My professor Colin Ross is an expert in Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD] and I would just love to work with him. I'll bring you to him and he will fill out the form for you. So she put me in the car, drove me down to see Colin Ross, and it was just about 15 minutes before he shook my hand and welcomed me to MPD therapy. Then I handed him the unemployment insurance form and said, fill this out for me please. And that was it. I was doomed since. That was it.

And how in that 15 minutes did he determine that you had MPD?

He had talked to that student councilor at the University of Manitoba - his student. She had told him that I said that I switch to autopilot when I'm under stress. He determined that she was absolutely correct, that [autopilot] was another personality.

To kind of work backward so people have an idea right from the get-go what we're dealing with: What are the permanent side-effects you deal with now from having been a victim - or patient - of Dr. Ross?

One of the the biggest problems I have is a permanent record in my medical file that lists me as 'Multiple Personality Disorder'. That comes to my face any time I go for any test, any time I have to go to the hospital for X-rays... you name it. It's right there. I'm never taken seriously for anything at all. It's on a permanent record for Child & Family Services because Colin Ross decided that my child was interfering with my therapy, so she was put into foster care. She was put into foster care and hidden from me and from my whole family from the time she was 10 years old to the time she was 18 years old. She has completely lost her family. I lost the most darling child. I was a single mother. She and I were so close. It was like we breathed at the same time. I lost my whole family. My parents were teachers. Because when you're diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, Colin Ross believes that 100% of the time, you have been sexually molested by your parents. He told that to Child & Family Services. My parents had to take early retirement from their teaching jobs. My family hates me. My parents were almost thrown in jail... And then, of course, there's always [the fact that] I had to drop out of University. My career was ended. I lost my home. I lost my friends. I lost every cent I had... Then, of course, there's the drug experiments that he did. He did massive and illegal drug experiments on me in the hospital. And I nearly died several times. I was in comas, I was in wheelchairs. I got down to like 55 pounds at 5 foot 5. I was so, so sick.

Which Drugs?

The main one was Halcion, although he combined a whole bunch on top of each other just very recklessly. No regard for human safety whatsoever. But Halcion: He had me up to 52 milligrams per day ["The recommended dose for most adults is 0.25 milligrams (mg). In some patients, a lower dose may be prescribed and the maximum daily dose should not exceed 0.5 mg." - From the Physician's Desk Reference [PDR] online] Four hundred times the maximum dosage. He explains that - he justifies that - in one of the court transcripts I sent you - it's really quite appalling - he justifies that amount by saying that I was a drug-user. He has told the hospital - Saint Boniface Hospital, where he treated me - that I was a heroin addict. And of course, that is why he had to use so many massive amounts of drugs. Now, I most certainly wasn't [a drug-user]. Just a few weeks before I saw him, I got up at six o'clock in the morning and I spent all morning, until 12:30 at the University, because I was a full-time student. Then I worked all afternoon until 6 o'clock at a daycare. Then I went home and took care of my child. On the weekends, I worked as a maid at Holiday Inn. I had two jobs, was a full-time University student, and I had a child to take care of. I had no time to be a heroin addict! I was a Pentecostal Christian fundamentalist. I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, I didn't allow it in my home. My brother and his wife were living with me. They weren't allowed to drink or smoke in the home. And yet, Colin Ross says, I gave her all these drugs because she's a heroin addict. What a crock! But there it is, on my medical record. And he keeps on saying that.

So clearly you were an out-patient. How often did you see [Dr. Colin Ross], and what was the "therapy" at that point?

I saw him twice a week for an hour to two hours. It was hypnotherapy. He made some tapes for me to listen to all day. He had me do 'dream-imaging', where at the end of each session he'd ask me to think about whether certain things had happened to me. My homework was to go home and dream about these things. I'd come back the next session and say, I dreamed about those things, and this was what I was dreaming. And he would always say, Those dreams you had are actually flash-backs of real events in your life. So it proceeded very quickly into insanity. So about two months after I started seeing him, I was committed into the hospital's Psych Ward.

So then you were an in-patient at that point?

I was committed, I was forcefully given injections of drugs, yes.

And for how long were you an in-patient?

I was an in-patient for two weeks, and then I went back in-and-out, in-and-out for several years.

What was your drugs regimen at that point?

I was given antidepressants, I was given tranquilizers of various kinds. At the end it was almost exclusively Halcion. The last year I saw him, he switched me off of Halcion onto 320 milligrams of Valium per day ["The usual dose, depending upon severity of symptoms, is 2 milligrams to 10 milligrams 2 to 4 times daily."]

And all the while he was telling you to recall your dreams as memories?

He would give me something to think about. I had homework to do. He would plant the thought in my head that this is what I was supposed to try to see if I could remember. Of course I would dream about it, because what else are you going to do when you're deep in therapy? When somebody tells you to think about this, you'll go home and you'll dream about it, you come back and you say, I had this terrible nightmare about what you said.
Ah, well, that's a flash-back. It really did happen.
And I would say to him, I don't remember that happening. The first time I saw him - the first visit, I told him - he asked, were you ever abused as a child? I was raised in the sixties by military parents, because my father was an aerial cartographer. They were very strict. I said, what do you mean by abuse? I mean, they were strict, but they never abused me. I made it very clear to him that my parents never, at any time, ever sexually abused me, or anybody. But he said it was normal to deny it.

So eventually you were made to come to agree that you had been sexually abused?

I was told by Colin Ross that I fit the description of somebody who was sexually abused... Even though I swore it never happened. He said, you fit the description. All people with MPD have been sexually abused [according to Colin Ross].

I know about Colin Ross. He has written [several conspiracy theory books]. How specific was his story for you? Did he develop a specific narrative for you that fit his conspiracy theory [and explained your supposed MPD]?

Oh, absolutely. As I said, my father was in the military. This was when I was a tiny little girl, he was in the Air Force. And for Colin Ross, for anybody who's ever been in the military, he just makes the immediate leap into CIA, for crying out loud. He asked me if the words - what was it? - 'beta'... 'gamma'... and, um... 'omega', I think it was [meant anything to me]. Those three. He said that children were put in to CIA experiments where they used goggles on [the children's] eyes and hypnotized [them]. [The CIA programmed personalities] were either one of those: beta, omega, alpha, one of those. One [of these designations programmed the child so that they] would commit suicide, one would be given the job to dispense disinformation, the other was [...] an assassin. I just thought 'gamma' sounds too stupid, 'alpha' sounds like alphabet soup, for crying out loud, I think I chose Omega, or something like that. I chose the one that sounded the least stupid to me, because I was just trying to cooperate with him. There was just no way you could argue with him. He'd always just twist things around. You couldn't possibly argue with him. He'd always just say that you fit the description, absolutely fit the description. It has to be this.

So in his mind, you had to be Omega, or Gamma, etc. You couldn't be None of The Above?

No. Not at all. No. He was very much involved in [the idea of] CIA mind-control nonsense. And then he would give you jobs to do, homework to do at home. You were supposed to close your eyes and you were supposed to visualize different parts of the city so that you could leave your body and travel around the city. Then you'd come back for your next appointment and he'd say, So did you go anywhere? Did you see anything for these out-of-body experiments he was putting you into? I would say, I don't think I did. I don't know. I tried the best I could. You'd just try to please him so much because he just had this charisma, and you'd want to please this guy. He was very affectionate with all of his patients. He would give hugs, he'd rub your back and rub your legs. In those days he was just so charismatic. He was such a good-looking young psychiatrist. All the nurses would just pander to him like puppies... So here we were: young women as MPD patients trying to please this handsome, young, charismatic guy who was giving [us] all of his affection.

And eventually he denied having ever given you drugs at all?

Yes, he did! One of the last times I saw him, I asked, Why did you give me all those drugs? And he looked at me, and he said with a straight face, I never gave you any drugs. I lived about a mile away from the hospital where I walked all the way home thinking, I must be so crazy, so completely delusional. Why would I think this if he never did [it]? I got to the drug store, and I went up to the pharmacist and I said, I know this is going to sound weird, but could you tell me if I've ever been given any drugs? He looked at me, because he recognized me, of course, and he said, I'll print off some pages for you. He printed off reams and reams of pages for me. Oh my goodness.

Why did he deny it?

I think he'd have to because it was - when I talked to a police officer a year later [he told me] - what [Colin Ross] did was criminal. The amount of drugs Ross gave me was criminal. [The officer] said if they could bring him into court they would charge him with administering noxious substances and endangering my life. I never could get him into court though.

And you have long-term effects from the addiction?

I did have - I talked to Peter Breggin about that - I suffered with Halcion withdrawal, really seriously bad Halcion withdrawal for 10 years. My family doctor, the neurologist, they'd all say, That's impossible. You can't be suffering from withdrawal for that long. It only lasts two weeks. And then Peter Breggin gave me a copy of his Prolonged Benzodiazepine Withdrawal Syndrome paper that he sent to the AMA. It's not as bad now as it was before. This has been like 20 years. Most of it is gone. There is some side-effects: Loss of memory, loss of concentration, and if I get really tired I'll start having seizures again. And I do have fibromyalgia as a result of an accident: falling on the ice when I went to pick up my daily prescriptions. The Pharmacist wouldn't let me have more than 320 milligrams of Valium per day. He wouldn't do that. I had to go all the way to the pharmacy, walk over there to pick up one day's prescription at a time. It was very icy. Up here in Winnipeg, it's very icy. I started having a seizure, and I fell on the ice, and I injured myself very badly. I had to have several operations and I have fibromyalgia - constant pain for that. One of the problems I have is I have a morbid fear of drugs now. Just a horrible, morbid fear of drugs, so while the pain clinics and my family doctor want to give all sorts of pain medication, I won't take it. I'm just too afraid. So I'm just going to be living in terrible constant pain for the rest of my life.

I was looking at the affidavit you submitted to The Queen's Bench - as it's called in Canada - and it mentioned a... sexual assault... in the hospital...

Yes. Isn't that disgusting? I think I already mentioned that he did illegal medical experiments on me. He likes to do experiments, this guy. He likes to do research. Well, he knew. He knew darn well that he was admitting into the hospital a dangerous sexual offender. He knew who that man was because he came to me and told me, after I had been sexually assaulted... It was Christmas, and, um, I'd gone to a funeral. I came back from the funeral, and I was terribly upset because my child's father had died. I couldn't go to sleep, so I just sorted magazines just to calm myself down. Everyone on the ward was a woman. That ward was totally women, except for that evening, while I was at the funeral, Colin Ross admitted this sexual predator - offender - onto the ward. He didn't tell the nurses. Didn't tell the Hospital. Didn't tell me, that's for sure. I came in from the funeral and I was sexually assaulted on the ward. The next morning, Colin Ross says, Oh, I'm so sorry. Yes, I have 5 video tapes of this guy, and all the information about his sexual offenses. He said, But I never thought he'd do that in the hospital. I didn't think he would.
...Well, I just - I'm claiming. This is just my claim [speculation]. I'm claiming that this was an experiment. Let's just put this sexual offender on a ward of totally female [inhabitants], not tell them anything, and see what happens. Well, I'll tell you what happens: He sexually assaulted me!
And I went to the press after that, when Colin Ross left my room. I phoned the police and I phoned the newspaper, and then they contacted the hospital. Later - it was a couple days later - there was a front page news article about it. President of the hospital confirmed that Yes, the man was prone to sexual assault, yes he was a dangerous offender. Yes, that was all true. And Colin Ross came in [my room]. He was furious. He was absolutely livid. He was just beat red. He came into my room and he yelled at me and said, Get the Hell out of here! But, you see, I was on such high levels of Halcion that if he had thrown me out that day, I would have died. So, he had to take me off just enough so that I could get down to 320 milligrams of Valium instead. And then I was kicked out of the hospital. On my own... Just to see if I'd live or die... [following the interview, Ms. Hart amended this statement. Ross did not apologize regarding the sexual assault, rather he said, "I believe you."]

With no referral to go elsewhere?

Oh, no. Not at all.

And as I recall, it took you a while to find a psychiatric assessment after that.

After he [Colin Ross] left Winnipeg, I tried, and no one would take me on as a patient because - apparently... I did go into the hospital to have a cardiac test done. When I was in the room with the cardiologist, he took my medical files on his desk - like a foot high - turned them around to face me so that I caould see them. Then he left the room for about 10 minutes. So I thought, Well, okay - just out of curiosity. I looked at the top paper, just at the top of the pile, and it was a letter from Colin Ross warning everyone not to treat me. I have copies of all my medical records, but I don't have that paper. When I had all my medical records copied from the hospital, I paid about $700 dollars for all the papers, all the transcripts. They wouldn't copy that one. I know it exists, because a cardiologist turned around so I could see it. So, no, I couldn't get anybody to help me. And then after [Colin Ross] left, down to Dallas, and I filed a lawsuit against him, no one would see me at all. So I went to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, talked to Pope, the guy in charge there. He said he couldn't force anybody to see me. So I went to my family doctor who contacted the Minister of Health, Chomiak. Now Chomiak arranged for me to go to London Ontario, because there was a psychiatrist out there who had formally debated Colin Ross - Known all about him. And he had agreed to do a psychiatric assessment for me. So I did have to get politicians involved, and there were arguments, during question period, on the floor to get me this kind of psychiatric assessment. That's how difficult it was to have done.

And it was Harold Merskey who did see you after that, right?

Dr. Harold Merskey. That's right.

You decided to file suit against Colin Ross after he left for Texas?

That's right.

So what compelled him to leave for Texas? I was looking at some of his [court] transcripts and I had fallen under the impression that it was a malpractice suit that had compelled him to leave for Texas when he did.

I sent you a copy of a Winnipeg Free Press article. In that Winnipeg Free Press article - this was 1991. It says that there was quite a lot of hostility against Colin Ross. The doctors in this city hated Colin Ross. There's this one time when I came out of one of my comas in the Victoria hospital. Colin Ross worked at the St. Boniface hospital. He wasn't allowed to work at the Victoria hospital. I was up in the ward and Colin Ross stopped by to visit me. The doctor who was taking care of me came in and that was the first time in my life I ever heard two doctors yelling at each other out in the hall. He just wanted Colin Ross to leave, and drop off the face of the Earth. He was so angry. There's a lot of doctors who just can't stand him up here. They're embarassed to say they even know who he is.

And that's what compelled him to leave for Texas?

Yes. Because he couldn't get any funding. Now, the Grey Nuns owned the St. Boniface Hospital. Sister Jean Ell is a Psychologist, and she'd done a psychological assessment of Dr. Colin Ross - there were an awful lot of complaints - and she told the board at St. Boniface Hospital that it was her opinion that he should be let go, but that they told her - the board at the Hospital - that he was bringing in a lot of research money. So, in spite of everything - they agreed he was crazy - he was bringing in so much money. It was only after the research grants dried up and he couldn't get any more money, that's when they told him to get out. And that's when he left.

And he still seems a bit crazy... to say the least. In a personal correspondence with James Randi, Randi tells me about Colin Ross's eye beams, and how they were set to experiment this to either prove or disprove [Colin Ross's assertion that he can project energy from his eyes]. Colin Ross backed out [of the experiment], said he'd get back to Randi, but never did. So maybe he has sense enough to back out of such an experiment, but to have made the claim [that he could produce eye beams] at all - you really have to wonder -

He has such a big ego though. He doesn't say that he's wrong. He just says that he needs to adjust his test for whatever the problem is. He doesn't admit he's wrong.

There was a point also where you went into Emergency in the same hospital you were receiving psychiatric care in, and they remanded you back to psychiatric. How did that happen?

This is when I was just a few days away from dying. I was so terribly sick. My blood pressure was down to 50 over 40, and there's a walk-in clinic just across the parking lot from the psychiatric center that is at the St. Boniface Hospital. Dr. Colin Ross wouldn't allow me to see any doctors - the residents, the students that would come to the ward. He wouldn't let anybody see me, and he told the nurses to ignore me. But I had passes. I was allowed to leave. So I almost crawled. Part of the way, I did. I crawled to the walk-in clinic and I saw a doctor there who told me, You need to go to emergency right away. I told him, I'm already in the hospital. So he contacted the nurses on the floor, he sent me back, and half-way across the parking lot, a doctor stopped his car, put me in his car, and drove me up to the ward. Colin Ross still refused to let the nurses treat me. So I called the walk-in clinic doctor and I said, You know, you called over here, and the nurses won't help me. So he had to call Dr. Colin Ross himself. Otherwise I would have died.

Did Colin Ross encourage you to take action against your parents under the assumption that they sexually abused you?

Yes. When I was at my most insane, under the most drugs, he encouraged me to get a rifle and go up and shoot them. He also encouraged me to kill myself constantly, saying it would be quite understandable. He would phone me late at night - and he did that to other patients too, because there was an MPD support group, and we'd all talk to each other and visit each other - he'd send us home with lethal amounts of drugs, phone us up at night, and encourage us to kill ourselves. One of the reasons I figure he did that was because he had this interest in the 'white-light' Near Death Experience. So after we'd come out of comas, or what-not, from drug over-doses, the first thing he'd ask us was, Well, did you see the light? That's all he was interested in. Some of the other women died though. But he really didn't care about that. He just said it was fate.

Some of the patients did die?

Yes. 12 of them.

12 of them?!

12 of them died in Dallas, too.

I did not know that.

Yes. Laura Pasley used to work for the police department, she also sued him down there... no, she sued one of his colleagues. But she was in the police department, and she said, yes, it was the same number that died down there too.

So - your malpractice proceedings: You didn't end up even getting a settlement, did you?

No. Because I am on welfare disability, the only money I could raise for lawyers was just through begging people that I was given contact numbers for. [I would be told] This lawyer hates [Colin Ross], this doctor hates him. And this other man - his daughter died under Colin Ross's care, and he helped me with some money too. So I did manage to drag it through the system for 11 years with 4 different lawyers. But, because my second to last lawyer did such an atrociously bad job - and he admitted to his negligence to the Law Society - it was dismissed due to delay. And then Colin Ross's lawyer managed to have the costs awarded against me. So I owed Colin Ross something like 100 to 200 thousand dollars - something astronomical. So I had to appeal that. So I had to raise another 5 thousand dollars to appeal that, and then the Law Society threw in another 20 to 30 thousand dollars to pay the lawyer to help me appeal that, so I would have the costs removed. And that was Judge Sinclair's order that I sent down to you. It says that, reason for dismissal due to delay, fault of my counsel. And the costs were taken off. I didn't have to pay the costs.

I saw somewhere - I believe it was online, and not one of the documents that you sent me - that you were at a proceeding saying that your case [against Colin Ross] had carried on 8 years as you were trying to extend the Statute of Limitations in your case due to your [previous] lawyer's incompetence.

I went 4 months over the Statute of Limitations.

Is there still hope for you getting any satisfaction out of this.

None. No. All I can do is spend the rest of my natural life hounding him as much as I can, so I can expose him for the fraud that he is, and hopefully save the lives of as many people as I can.

I've talked to a few other recovered memory detractors who seemed to feel a sense of loss from leaving their support group [of MPD patients or Ritual Abuse survivors]. It sounds like you dealt mostly with Colin Ross, or did you have anything like a support group that talked about experiences with Satanic Ritual Abuse, or whatever conspiracy theory was being held onto?

He set us all up in an MPD support group called the MPDers, and he tried to get us registered as a charity so we could go and raise money for him.

That's inventive!

We were supposed to approach businesses, and he told us which ones - nice big ones - and we were supposed to approach businesses to raise money for his research. And he was going to have us registered as a charity. So that's what his MPD patients were doing for him.

And what exactly did he say his research was?

Multiple Personality Disorder and [that research into alleged] mind control experiments with the CIA - and Satanic Ritual Abuse, for crying out loud! He explained this to me the first month I started seeing him. There was a sign above the planetarium, and I saw it on my way to see him. It was the silliest thing. It was going toward Christmas and they were talking about the star of [Bethlehem], and that made [Colin Ross] start commenting about aliens. The star [of Bethlehem, according to Colin Ross] wasn't really the star of Jesus - it was an alien ship that they were really seeing. So then he explained that lots of people had been abducted by aliens, and that women had been abducted by aliens and impregnated by aliens, and they have these alien babies. Now, I think I already said to you that at that time when I started seeing him I was a Pentecostal Christian Fundamentalist. I belonged to Church, was a Sunday School teacher. All I could think was, How horrible! How could God let that happen? And what about the baby? Would it have a soul? So, in my mind, I was horrified. Completely horrified. I wouldn't even talk about it. I couldn't even talk about it. I just didn't want to talk with anyone. But then, a few years later - I think it was 1990, somewhere around then - he came up from a conference in Chicago. He'd seen [infamous MPD therapist] Bennett Braun and the International Association of Dissociation and MPD, and that. He came in the hospital to see me and he said, Oh, I have great news for you! He was so excited, so happy and bubbly. I looked at him and thought, Good. Great news. What is it? And he said, You know that baby that you had? The half alien baby? It didn't die! Thinking that it had died was [according to Colin Ross] the only way that I could resolve it in my mind, so that I wouldn't have to worry about the soul. So he thought for me, telling me that it didn't die was going to be some good news. I looked at him absolutely horrified. I said, What are you talking about? At the conference he'd just been to, it had explained why all of the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases that they'd always talk about, where women give birth to these babies and they kill the babies - but nobody can ever find the bodies of these babies - [the conference Colin Ross attended explained that] the reason they can't find the bodies of these babies is because the bodies of these babies are beamed up into spaceships, and they're raised in the spaceships until they're 18 years old. Then they're beamed back down to earth and given jobs with the CIA. This is all to form a New World, and all that. So it's really the aliens who are impregnating the women, while they're CIA mind-controlled, and then they give birth at Satanic rituals. It's a big circular thing. It's the craziest circular thing I ever heard in my life. But I was horrified. I burst into tears. I couldn't believe he just told me that my alien baby was alive. But he was so confused. He didn't know why I wasn't happy.

I do find it funny that he actually wrote an article about the iatrogenic creation of Multiple Personality Disorder within the CIA, and I also see articles by people like Corydon Hammond, who was trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, talking about how not to lead people to believe things that are not true. They seem to be doing just the opposite, or exactly what they describe or proscribe to other people doing.

The tapes he had me listen to - he made me hypnosis tapes - I'm walking around the University listening to these hypnosis tapes, and I'm taking these drugs, and of course I couldn't complete my courses, I had to drop out. And it just made me completely crazy, all this mind-control, all day long, all night long, this constant mind-control. The constant visits to his office. It was just ridiculous. That is mind-control.

...And the drugs, and the hypnotherapy.

I don't know how he got away with the amount of the drugs he used. He claimed it was okay, because I had questioned him about that. I said, Are you sure this is safe? I wasn't completely stupid, I wanted to be sure it was safe. He said, Oh, yes, yes, it's perfectly safe. Now, I've learned since then that he's said the same thing to other patients: Oh, yeah, sure, it's all safe, I checked it out. Very same words to them. But then I find out later, no, it was never checked out, no one ever approved it, no one ever did this before. It was never safe. He was just lying. So any consent he ever got from anybody for any drugs he gave them was never informed consent. So he's violated the Nuremburg Code. He's violated the Nuremburg Code automatically by not getting informed consent, by doing illegal medical experiments on people with no informed consent.

So I'm still having trouble understanding what was it he believed was the therapeutic part of this? You had your drugs, and you had your 'homework' to remember things, but what then? What, after remembering it? Where was the effort to try and bring you back into unity with your 'core self', or your 'real personality', or whatever is they call it in the vernacular [of Multiple Personality Disorder]?

There was no desire to help anybody. There was only a desire to see how far you could get away with doing whatever you wanted to do. It was treating us like white rats. Some of the patients died. With me, I got so completely insane, because of him. So he had tried to have me locked up in a permanent psychiatric ward outside the city limits. And that's where you go when you're like criminally insane. He had tried to do that, but they wouldn't take me.

How did you come to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [FMSF]?

I was listening to the radio, and I heard that there were a couple of support group members on the radio, and they were talking about False Memory Syndrome. It just sounded so much like what I had. This was about a year after Colin Ross left, so... 1992. Two years after he had left. FMS wasn't even formed as an idea of a syndrome until 1992, there were no support groups until 1993. So it was '93 when I heard the radio program. By the time that I'd found lawyers and doctors who could explain it to me, it was four months after the statute of limitations had expired. So it took that long for me to understand that this was what was wrong, that this was what happened to me.

So you didn't come to a sudden realization that all this about Satanism and alien abduction was crap? You kind of always had that feeling in the background to begin with?

Well, I had read a magazine article where a woman said she thought she was MPD but really wasn't, it wasn't true. I thought, Hmm, I wonder. I read it and threw it away. It wasn't something I was using as evidence. You know, I don't still have it. I read it and threw it away. So there was that little thought in my mind. But I was still worried my parents were going to kill me. I was still quite certain that they belonged to a satanic cult, and they were going to murder me. So I wasn't out of the grip of this nonsense still. I was still very fearful. When I was sitting in my living room, in the apartment I had downtown, if lights flashed from the traffic, and they would flash on the windows, my heart would jump because I would think it was an alien spaceship or something. I was still completely, totally crazy. But there was still that one 'maybe'. So I would go back and forth thinking, Am I? Am I not? Am I crazy? Am I delusional? I was very confused. So desperately confused.

But you eventually grew more skeptical of those claims. Was it a slow process, or a realization?

In 1993 when I heard that radio program with the FMS support group - I contacted them, and they gave me a bunch of stuff to read. I put it on top of my microwave. I probably had a foot-high pile of stuff on my microwave. I never read it. I just put it in a pile, and I would never read it, because I was not quite sure that they weren't a part of the satanic cult or not. I didn't know what was true and what was not true. I was open-minded, but I was scared. I was very scared. Scared of my own shadow.

Now you work with [the FMSF], don't you?

I do. I do. One of the few retractors that they have there. Think they've got, maybe, a few hundred retractors. So I'm open to anybody who's been falsely accused, or wants to retract, or is interested at all. I'm open to talk to anybody who wants to talk about it.