The Leadership Council
The Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence (f. 1998, formerly the Leadership Council on Mental Health, Justice, and the Media) is a Philadelphia based "non-profit" organisation composed almost wholly of pro-victimology psychoanalysts, academics of child abuse/trauma, psychiatric and mental health professionals.
The group's basic aim is to plan and conduct research, and liaise with the media, promoting the role of psychiatry in addressing child trauma. The Leadership Council's research, statistical manipulation and advocacy work has frequently sought to legitimise a series of profitable yet esoteric, unfounded and highly contested psychiatric trauma theories, including repressed memories and dissociative identity disorder. Many members of the Leadership Council are known for having agitated in favour of the discredited SRA phenomenon. The Leadership Council's work is most probably intended to provide a scientific basis for its members and their allies' paid work - a highly profitable institution to uphold in a national and local economy rooted so firmly in mental health. The organisation is notable for having published secretary Stephanie Dallam's poorly researched critique of Rind et al.
The current president is Joyanna Silberg. The Leadership Council's most notable president was the late Paul Fink - a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. At the time, the official HQ of the Leadership Council corresponded to the address of Fink's apartment, in a suburb of Philadelphia, within roughly equal walking distance of his place of work and Temple University - where Bruce Rind was working when he published his famous study.
Bruce Rind on LC composition
- Fink's group claims to be comprised of "many of the nation's most prominent mental health leaders" whose mission it is to "insure the public receives accurate information about mental health issues" (Leadership Council press release, May 24, 1999). In fact, the publications of its members suggest that the Leadership Council is composed mainly of professionals who advocate for the validity of repressed memories and multiple personality disorder (MPD) as well as for recovered memory therapy as the means to treat these alleged problems. Central to this focus is the belief that CSA is pervasively and intensely traumatic and pathogenic -- a belief that our meta-analysis challenged.[1]
Further analysis of the Leadership Council's political and professional agenda can be found on Ipce.[2]
Rebuttals of LC disinformation
- The Validity and Appropriateness of Methods, Analyses, and Conclusions in Rind et al. (1998)
- A Response to Ross Cheit's "The Legend of Robert Halsey"