In recent years the subject of satanic ritual abuse (SRA) has incited widespread controversy focused primarily on whether or not such abuse actually occurs. Much like child sexual abuse, SRA was initially dismissed as an isolated or even imaginary phenomenon. Although there is increasing evidence that ritual abuse does take place, clinicians working with individual patients cannot be sure whether they are dealing with fact or fantasy. Dr Colin Ross, an expert in the treatment of dissociative disorders, has encountered more than three hundred patients with memories of alleged satanic ritual...

The purpose of this book is to provide understanding of the relationship between childhood trauma and serious mental illness. Dr Colin Ross, one of the most respected North American authorities on Multiple Personality Disorder, writes that his MPD patients have taught him that virtually all psychiatric symptoms are potentially trauma driven and dissociative in nature. He believes that MPD research will shift the paradigm of psychopathology in the direction of a general trauma model, and away from the two dominant schools of twentieth-century psychiatry, the psychoanalytical and the...