By Jill Dellamalva
Arizona Daily Wildcat
March 13, 1998

Panic on the streets of Tucson

I was sitting comfortably at my window seat on a flight from Pittsburgh to Phoenix last January. To fight off boredom, I always pick up a magazine in one of the airport shops to get me though the part of the flight between takeoff and the movie.

That time I bought Rolling Stone. I love music and reading about it, so as I leafed through the glossy pages, I was kind of surprised to see a long article about the high possibilities of killer flus attacking major cities in the U.S. as soon as next year. Interviewed were scientists from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as other officials who talked about which citizens would get to go to some secret place for protection (like government workers, teachers, etc.). The article also mentioned how easy it would be for someone with a killer flu to get on an airplane and infect all of the passengers by the time the plane landed. So how did I feel after reading that?

Oxygen mask, please.

I don't recall the rest of the details mentioned in the article. I threw the magazine away when I got off the plane. The article seemed to be saying that one virus or another was going to wipe us all out sooner or later, so all life was pretty hopeless. The hypochondriac in me needs to stay away from things like that.

But the focus of my column isn't on killer viruses or magazines. It's about hysteria.

Think about what might happen if everyone on my flight had been handed a copy of that article as soon as the plane took off. Maybe some man would start feeling a little feverish, or some woman might sneeze and everyone around her might turn their heads in the other direction. What do you think?

Now, I'm going to completely switch topics and tell you another story.

In the Feb. 8 edition of the Tucson Citizen, reporter Carla McClain wrote that in Tucson alone, there are about 10,000 cases of "true multiple personality disorders." Kind of scary, huh? In her article, McClain quotes Tucson psychiatrist Dr. Brad Evans as saying that the brain's repression of traumatic events and its creation of multiple personalities to deal with them are too often misdiagnosed.

"It's as if the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health should all come to Tucson because of this massive outbreak of multiple personalities here," Evans told McClain, "By these numbers, it's a raging epidemic. It's way overused, a complete misuse of it."

In another article written by McClain, I discovered that a Tucson psychiatrist named Dr. Donald C. Garland Jr. is under investigation by state authorities as well as the Arizona Board of Medical Examiners.Garland allegedly implanted incorrect memories of satanic abuse in a patient and, in turn, destroyed her relationship with her family.

But Garland is not alone. He's among many other psychotherapists in the U.S. being attacked for using a treatment called "repressed memory therapy." This treatment is used to uncover memories of child abuse by family members. Apparently, memories of satanic and cult rituals sometimes enter the mind of a patient who has never had such memories before.

And that's what happened to one of Dr. Garland's patients. The patient's mother, whom the patient has refused to talk to for the past seven years because of the memories, filed a complaint against Garland in 1996, thus leading to his investigation. The thing that surprises me is that the patient was seeking aid because she had separated from her husband after finding out he'd had an affair while she was pregnant. According to the Citizen, Garland's records showed that the patient had developed "hundreds" of different personalities.

Does this mean that if I go to a therapist with a similar problem, I could, all of a sudden, find out that my parents were satanic cult members and that I am really 100 different people?

Not quite. Evans told McClain that in many cases, the therapist's minimal training is at fault. Or sometimes it is simply the patient wanting to make the therapist happy by answering positively to his or her suggestions of what might be wrong. In this case, the answer is not yet known.

So who is generally at fault? I would say both parties - the patient and the doctor - in some cases. So before you start suing your therapist or accusing your mom or dad of wearing devil horns, take a deep breath and think reasonably. Ten thousand is an awfully big number, Tucson.

Oh - and the next trip I take, I think I'll pass on the music magazine and just listen to my Walkman.

Jill Dellamalva is a junior majoring in creative writing and journalism. Her column, "Some Might Say," appears every other Friday.