Misleading: Mark Oppenheimer’s review of Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s in The New York Times Book Review

[Here is some context that Mr. Oppenheimer fails to provide:]

In the USA, prior to the 1970s, it was thought that child abuse was extremely rare, and that it happened to only one child out of a million. Literally, only 1 out of 1,000,000.

So when society found out that it was actually much more common than that, some people went to extremes, especially those looking for “repressed memories” and who believed in “satanic ritual abuse,” which were misguided fads.

Nevertheless, now, after the dust has settled, it remains a fact that child abuse is not one in a million. How common is it?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the leading national public health institute of the United States. It is a federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services.

According to the CDC:

—There were 678,932 victims of child abuse and neglect reported to Child Protective Services (CPS) in 2013.

—The youngest children are the most vulnerable with about 27% of reported victims being under the age of three.

—CPS reports may underestimate the true occurrence of abuse and neglect. A non-CPS study estimated that 1 in 4 children experience some form of child maltreatment in their lifetimes.

—About 1,520 children died from abuse and neglect in 2013.

The recent history of multiple personality disorder is similar to that of child abuse, which makes sense, since most adults with this diagnosis have a history of childhood trauma. Prior to the 1970s, multiple personality was thought to be extremely rare. But it was diagnosed more frequently in the 1970’s, and was overdiagnosed by some people in the 1980s and 1990s.

However, now that the dust has settled, multiple personality disorder is still more common than most people realize. According to DSM-5 (2013) (the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association) it occurs in about 1.5% of the people in the USA, which is about 4,500,000 people.

Of course, those are statistics for the most severe form of multiple personality, multiple personality disorder. This blog is about a milder, normal version of multiple personality, which, I estimate, occurs in 90% of novelists and 30% of the general population.

In recent posts, I discuss the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. In past posts, I discuss more than fifty other writers.