2026 US Congressional Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Historical Information

 

2026 US Congressional Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments                                    

 

Articles: 

Historical Information:
Mind Control Documents & Links - Evidence mk-ultra occurred
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case,  Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/ 

Luna Announces Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Its Impact on Public Trust
https://oversight.house.gov/release/luna-announces-hearing-on-mkultra-experiments-and-its-impact-on-public-trust/ 

Congress Reopens the CIA's MKULTRA Files as Witnesses Call for Answers  https://www.military.com/congress-reopens-the-cia-mkultra-files-as-witnesses-call-for-answers 

The CIA's 'Heart Attack Gun': A Cold War Weapon for Targeted Assassinations
https://www.military.com/history/cias-heart-attack-gun-cold-war-weapon-targeted-assassinations.html 

Hektoen International  A Journal of Medical Humanities
Louis Jolyon West, M.D.: A dangerous doctor
https://hekint.org/2024/01/25/louis-jolyon-west-m-d-a-dangerous-doctor/ 

Documents Reveal Just How Crazy The CIA’s MKULTRA Mind-Control Program Really Was
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-01/2024-12-26_daylycaller.com-documents_reveal_just_how_crazy_the_cias_mkultra_mind-control_program_really_was.pdf 

Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA https://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/64 


Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Project MKULTRA, Subproject 35,” Top Secret, November 15, 1954, 13 pp.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32726-document-11-memorandum-director-central-intelligence-project-mkultra-subproject-35 

Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Successful Application of Narco-Hypnotic Interrogation (ARTICHOKE),” Classification unknown, 3 pp. Jul 14, 1952
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32721-document-06-memorandum-director-central-intelligence-successful-application-narco 

John S. Earman, Inspector General, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Memorandum for the Record, “MKULTRA Program,” Secret  November 29, 1963, 2 pp. Nov 29, 1963
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32732-document-17-john-s-earman-inspector-general-us-central-intelligence-agency 

PROJECT MK ULTRA, THE CIA'S PROGRAM OF RESEARCH INBEHAVIORAL MODIFICATION JOINT HEARING BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE AND THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON HEALTH AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH OF THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES UNITED STATES SENATE NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION August 3, 1977
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-hearings-95mkultra.pdf 

January 2015 An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability B.M. Disbennett
https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=rgsj 

 

Historical Information: 

Mind Control Documents & Links - Evidence mk-ultra occurred
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case,  Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/ 

Luna Announces Hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Its Impact on Public Trust  Published: Jun 23, 2026
WASHINGTON—Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) today announced a hearing on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments.” During the hearing, members will examine the history and timeline of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) MKULTRA project and its original classification and how the project meets the CIA’s obligation to protect the United States. Members will also analyze the intelligence community’s unwillingness to declassify information related to MKULTRA and how the lack of transparency has reduced Americans’ trust in government institutions.
“The intelligence community has covered up the nature and classification of the MKULTRA experiments for decades. Americans have been misdirected repeatedly and deserve transparency and accountability from the CIA. The intelligence community’s unwillingness to deliver the truth has fueled dangerous conspiracy theories and eroded public trust in the federal government. This hearing aims to explore the history of the MKULTRA experiments, how they have impacted Americans’ wellbeing, and how the intelligence community can win back trust,” said Task Force Chairwoman Luna.
WITNESSES:
Stephen Kinzer, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Tom O’Neill, Investigative Journalist, Author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
https://oversight.house.gov/release/luna-announces-hearing-on-mkultra-experiments-and-its-impact-on-public-trust/ 

Congress Reopens the CIA's MKULTRA Files as Witnesses Call for Answers
Congress revisited the program as calls for more file declassification and answers into unanswered questions remain decades later. Military Daily News Published Jul 6, 2026

More than four decades after Congress last took a deep look at the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program, lawmakers are once again asking how much the public still doesn’t know.
The House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing June 30 titled “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” The hearing revisited one of the Cold War’s most controversial intelligence programs while examining whether decades of document destruction and government secrecy have prevented a full accounting of what happened.
Witnesses included Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at Brown University and author of Poisoner in Chief; investigative journalist Tom O'Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties; and Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former National Institutes of Health official who appeared as the minority witness.

Much of the hearing focused on whether additional MKULTRA records still exist and whether victims have ever received meaningful accountability.
What Was MKULTRA?
MKULTRA was a CIA research program launched in 1953 to study methods of influencing or controlling human behavior.
At its peak, MKULTRA encompassed 149 known subprojects carried out at more than 80 institutions, including military bases, universities, hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies.

The CIA frequently used front organizations to conceal its involvement while researchers experimented with drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, amphetamines and scopolamine. Some experiments combined those drugs with hypnosis, electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and isolation.
The program also included safe houses that operated as brothels, where unsuspecting patrons were secretly dosed with LSD so agents could observe their behavior. Congressional investigations later found that some subjects suffered lasting psychological harm, and at least one death was directly linked to the experiments. Many experiments were conducted without informed consent.

The program remained largely unknown until the mid-1970s, when investigations by the Church Committee and subsequent Senate hearings revealed portions of its existence. Former CIA Director Richard Helms had ordered most MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973, leaving investigators with only financial records that had escaped destruction.
'Medical Torture'
Kinzer testified that MKULTRA represented one of the most extensive secret human experimentation programs ever conducted by the U.S. government.
“MK-ULTRA conducted the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been carried out by a U.S. government agency,” he testified. “By any standard they qualify as medical torture.”
Kinzer argued that Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who oversaw MKULTRA, deliberately sought out vulnerable populations referred to as “expendables" for experimentation. He testified that agency officials targeted prisoners, psychiatric patients and other people who were unlikely to attract public attention if something went wrong. Kinzer urged lawmakers not to view MKULTRA solely as history.....
Tom O’Neill focused much of his testimony on what he believes Congress still does not know about MKULTRA....

He also discussed years of research that formed the basis of his book Chaos. O’Neill examined psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, who conducted CIA-funded research and later became connected to investigations surrounding Charles Manson.
O’Neill stopped short of claiming the CIA controlled Manson or orchestrated the Tate-LaBianca murders. Instead, he argued that inconsistencies in government records and previously undisclosed relationships between West and MKULTRA officials justify additional investigation.
O’Neill believes the historical record remains incomplete because so many documents were destroyed before Congress could examine them. He also highlighted two other figures whose names surfaced repeatedly during his research: Jack Ruby and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ruby, who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, became a focal point because West evaluated Ruby while he was in custody. O’Neill testified that Ruby’s mental condition deteriorated rapidly after his arrest and questioned why West, who had connections to CIA-funded behavioral research, became involved in his case.
O’Neill argued that the circumstances surrounding West’s examination and his later proposal to transfer Ruby to his own care deserve additional scrutiny. O’Neill also discussed the government’s surveillance of King, arguing that intelligence agencies during the Cold War often blurred the line between legitimate national security investigations and intrusive domestic operations. O’Neill cited the government’s extensive monitoring of the civil rights leader as evidence of how broadly intelligence agencies operated during the era and why lawmakers should continue examining classified records from that period....

The existence of MKULTRA itself is not disputed. The CIA has acknowledged the program existed, and Congress investigated it decades ago. What remains disputed, however, is how extensive the experiments became, how many people were affected, and whether all surviving records have ever been made public.
Kinzer and O’Neill argued that unanswered questions remain because the destruction of records prevented investigators from fully reconstructing the program.... Whether Congress ultimately uncovers new information remains to be seen.  https://www.military.com/congress-reopens-the-cia-mkultra-files-as-witnesses-call-for-answers 

The CIA's 'Heart Attack Gun': A Cold War Weapon for Targeted Assassinations
Of all the secrets revealed by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured imaginations as vividly as the 'heart attack gun.'

US Military History Updated Jul 7, 2026 ....Of all the Central Intelligence Agency secrets revealed to the world by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured the American public's imagination as vividly as the agency's "heart attack gun."

During the Cold War, there was almost nothing the CIA wouldn't do to get a leg up on the Soviet Union, from simple operations such as intercepting and reading the mail of American citizens to more serious — and equally illegal — acts such as dosing "unwitting, nonvoluntary human subjects" with LSD and seeing how well they would hold up to interrogation. We know about these secret efforts because Congress investigated the agency — as well as the FBI, National Security Agency and IRS — in 1975 and released its findings to the American public. The results of the investigation were, to put it lightly, alarming.
Led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which became known as the Church Committee, was sparked by a series of startling revelations in the early 1970s. First, a whistleblower revealed the Army was spying on American citizens at home. Almost as soon as the dust from that discovery settled, The New York Times published a story reporting that the CIA had been spying on Americans for decades, keeping files on some 10,000 Americans it suspected of being foreign agents, including at least one member of Congress.

The Church Committee soon uncovered the CIA's robust assassination program, targeting anti-American leaders such as Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and, famously, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who survived numerous CIA assassination attempts.
But if the agency was going to kill world leaders, it couldn't look like an assassination, of course. The CIA needed the perfect weapon, and it found one in shellfish. Once extracted, the potent neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from a pistol, killing its victim with what appeared to be a heart attack. In a 1975 public hearing, Sen. Church showed the CIA's "heart attack gun" to the world.
The weapon itself resembled a Colt M1911 pistol with a scope, but it didn't fire .45-caliber bullets. Instead, it fired a frozen pellet of saxitoxin, a poisonous substance derived from shellfish that consumed toxic algae blooms. The pellet could be silently fired up to 100 meters away and would enter the body through a pinprick entry wound. The poison would then melt, and within minutes, the victim would be dead....

The heart attack gun wasn't a uniquely American invention: The KGB, the Soviet Union's secretive intelligence and internal security force, had a similar poison weapon. Bohdan Stashinsky, one of the KGB's hired guns, was known to have murdered two Ukrainian anti-Soviet activists, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, in the 1950s with a gun that sprayed cyanide in their faces, causing death within minutes. Their causes of death both looked like heart attacks. The CIA learned their true causes of death when Stashinsky eventually defected to the West in 1961.
The CIA's heart attack gun wasn't just shocking because it was a clandestine weapon of targeted assassination. President Richard Nixon had imposed a ban on biological weapons in 1969 and ordered the CIA to destroy its stockpiles of poisons such as saxitoxin. Gordon claimed he never received such an order. Others said the poisons were warehoused by CIA men who believed in the program. Enough saxitoxin to kill some 5,000 people eventually found its way into a storage room at CIA headquarters. (MKNaomi was formally halted in 1970, according to The New York Times.)

Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:

Of all the Central Intelligence Agency secrets revealed to the world by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured the American public's imagination as vividly as the agency's "heart attack gun."

During the Cold War, there was almost nothing the CIA wouldn't do to get a leg up on the Soviet Union, from simple operations such as intercepting and reading the mail of American citizens to more serious — and equally illegal — acts such as dosing "unwitting, nonvoluntary human subjects" with LSD and seeing how well they would hold up to interrogation. We know about these secret efforts because Congress investigated the agency — as well as the FBI, National Security Agency and IRS — in 1975 and released its findings to the American public. The results of the investigation were, to put it lightly, alarming.

Led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which became known as the Church Committee, was sparked by a series of startling revelations in the early 1970s. First, a whistleblower revealed the Army was spying on American citizens at home. Almost as soon as the dust from that discovery settled, The New York Times published a story reporting that the CIA had been spying on Americans for decades, keeping files on some 10,000 Americans it suspected of being foreign agents, including at least one member of Congress.

The Church Committee soon uncovered the CIA's robust assassination program, targeting anti-American leaders such as Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and, famously, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who survived numerous CIA assassination attempts.

But if the agency was going to kill world leaders, it couldn't look like an assassination, of course. The CIA needed the perfect weapon, and it found one in shellfish. Once extracted, the potent neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from a pistol, killing its victim with what appeared to be a heart attack. In a 1975 public hearing, Sen. Church showed the CIA's "heart attack gun" to the world.

The weapon itself resembled a Colt M1911 pistol with a scope, but it didn't fire .45-caliber bullets. Instead, it fired a frozen pellet of saxitoxin, a poisonous substance derived from shellfish that consumed toxic algae blooms. The pellet could be silently fired up to 100 meters away and would enter the body through a pinprick entry wound. The poison would then melt, and within minutes, the victim would be dead.

Weaponized saxitoxin was the discovery of Mary Embree, who joined the CIA right after leaving high school in the 1960s. She began her career as a secretary, working to create small electronics and deliver passports and other documents to field agents. She was later moved to a project known as MKNaomi, with a mission that included stockpiling "severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of the Technical Services Division" — the agency's source for the specialized devices used in their spy operations. Her job was to find a poison that was undetectable, and saxitoxin was the silver bullet the CIA was looking for.

Though Embree discovered the right poison, the CIA still needed a delivery method that would allow an operative to literally get away with murder. Dr. Nathan Gordon, a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, discovered that mixing the toxin with water and freezing it would allow a poison dart the width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch long to be fired from a modified M1911.

Once in the body, the victim experiences paralytic shellfish poisoning, which can present as a tingling sensation, followed by shortness of breath, abdominal pain, choking and lack of coordination. The victim is paralyzed before dying of respiratory failure in a process that can take seconds. The only evidence of foul play would be a small red puncture wound, one not easily found by a coroner not looking for it. The cause of death would appear to be a heart attack, even to a medical examiner.

The heart attack gun wasn't a uniquely American invention: The KGB, the Soviet Union's secretive intelligence and internal security force, had a similar poison weapon. Bohdan Stashinsky, one of the KGB's hired guns, was known to have murdered two Ukrainian anti-Soviet activists, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, in the 1950s with a gun that sprayed cyanide in their faces, causing death within minutes. Their causes of death both looked like heart attacks. The CIA learned their true causes of death when Stashinsky eventually defected to the West in 1961.

The CIA's heart attack gun wasn't just shocking because it was a clandestine weapon of targeted assassination. President Richard Nixon had imposed a ban on biological weapons in 1969 and ordered the CIA to destroy its stockpiles of poisons such as saxitoxin. Gordon claimed he never received such an order. Others said the poisons were warehoused by CIA men who believed in the program. Enough saxitoxin to kill some 5,000 people eventually found its way into a storage room at CIA headquarters. (MKNaomi was formally halted in 1970, according to The New York Times.)
None other than then-CIA Director William Colby himself brought the famed heart attack gun to the infamous congressional hearing in 1975, describing it in clinical language as a "nondiscernible microbionoculator." Although he detailed how it could be used, he never revealed if or when it was ever used.

The Church Committee's findings eventually led President Gerald Ford to sign an executive order forbidding employees of the United States government to "engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." In the end, the CIA would just have to figure out how to eliminate its foreign adversaries without directly contributing to their deaths —as it did in Afghanistan, Argentina, Poland, Chad, Nicaragua and elsewhere....
https://www.military.com/history/cias-heart-attack-gun-cold-war-weapon-targeted-assassinations.html 

Hektoen International  A Journal of Medical Humanities
Louis Jolyon West, M.D.: A dangerous doctor  Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden  “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”
– The Nuremburg Code, Section on Permissible Human Experiments (1946)
Louis J. West, M.D. (1924–1999), was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a poor immigrant family. He enlisted in the US Army during World War Two, was sent to medical school at the University of Minnesota, and graduated in 1949. After a psychiatry residency, he served in the US Air Force until 1956. His studies of “brainwashing” and psychological torture helped exonerate American airmen who, after capture in Korea, confessed to or cooperated with Korean accusations against the US of war crimes, particularly those of bacteriological warfare. West’s testimony saved the Americans from courts-martial....

Some of West’s research on mind control was done as part of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Project MKUltra, from 1953–1973. Illegal human experimentation was done to develop procedures and drugs to weaken people and force confessions through psychological torture and brainwashing. These experiments were carried out at over eighty institutions, including military bases, schools, universities, hospitals, and prisons. Special brothels were established where customers were secretly dosed with psychoactive substances. The drugs tested included LSD, amphetamines, mescaline, psilocybin, and scopolamine. The drugs were combined, in institutional settings, with electroconvulsive (“shock”) treatments, hypnosis, isolation, and sensory deprivation. Several people died or were permanently damaged....
https://hekint.org/2024/01/25/louis-jolyon-west-m-d-a-dangerous-doctor/ 

Documents Reveal Just How Crazy The CIA’s MKULTRA Mind-Control Program Really Was    Eireann Van Natta  Intelligence State Reporter December 26, 2024

 

A new collection of over 1,200 documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) infamous mind control program, MKULTRA, was published by the National Security Archive and ProQuest on Monday.
The collection was announced 50 years after Seymour Hersh’s New York Times investigation illuminated the program’s abuses, according to the Archive. It was also published 70 years after the U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly & Company, became the CIA’s primary source of the psychoactive drug LSD, the Archive added.
The MKULTRA project was conducted in the 1950s, and most of the original records were destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms and head of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA’s Chemical Division Sidney Gottlieb, according to the Archive. Gottlieb would eventually serve as director of the agency’s Technical Services Division (TSD).

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-01/2024-12-26_daylycaller.com-documents_reveal_just_how_crazy_the_cias_mkultra_mind-control_program_really_was.pdf 

Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA
About this Collection
This collection explores the Central Intelligence Agency’s foray into behavioral and mind control experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Most commonly known as Project MKULTRA, which refers to the research carried out by the CIA and affiliated institutions between 1953-1963, this codename came to be used as an umbrella term for an array of scientific, psychological, and military endeavors that began well before the official start of MKULTRA in 1953 and that continued in the years after the project officially ended. In this collection, researchers will find many documents relating to MKULTRA as well as its predecessors, Project BLUEBIRD and Project ARTICHOKE, and its various sister projects and successors, including MKNAOMI, MKDELTA and MKSEARCH. This collection also contains records relating to investigations into the CIA’s mind control program, both by the Agency itself and Congress, during the mid to late 1970s. The set has been carefully curated to highlight the clearest, most substantive documents available on MKULTRA and to focus on those records that provide insight into the scope and purpose of the Agency’s mind control program.
Most of the documents were donated to the National Security Archive by John Marks, the author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a book widely considered to be the most authoritative recounting of the CIA’s involvement in behavior and mind control experiments. They consist primarily of CIA records Marks obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Another source for the collection are documents that the CIA released to the family of Frank Olson, an Army biochemist who died in 1953 after he was secretly administered LSD by a CIA employee and then fell from a 10th-story window. Congressional hearings and testimony and the CIA’s reading room were also researched to supplement the collection...

.
The collection includes records that managed to survive the agency’s “purge” of secretive documents, according to the Archive. The CIA conducted mind control research under Operations MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the Archive noted. The collection — CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA — is mainly composed of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents previously compiled by former State Department official John Marks.
“The MKULTRA program was shut down more than 40 years ago, and declassified information about the program is publicly available on CIA.gov,” a CIA spokesperson told the Daily Caller.  The Caller also reached out to the Archive but has not heard back as of publication.  “Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s  decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind,” the organization stated in its report....

Another document was seemingly written by the Technical Services Staff (TSS) Chemical Division after DCI Allen Dulles and other officials discussed whether using Georgetown University Hospital for certain experiments was worth the cost, according to the Archive. The officials requested that the TSS provide them with a list of advantages, the organization claimed.
The document detailed various “materials and methods” the group was working on, such as “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness.” Additionally, it included substances that would result in “physical disablement.” The document also mentioned the development of materials that create symptoms of diseases “in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering,” or the exploitation of a pretend or exaggerated disease for one’s personal benefit. The records also indicate that TSS was attempting to develop “physical methods of producing shock and confusion” along with substances that “alter personality structure” as well as a “knockout pill” for undercover drugging....

Legal documents were also released, including Gottlieb’s depositions by attorneys for Velma Orlikow. She was a patient of the Allan Memorial Institute, a Canadian facility where Dr. Ewen Cameron experimented on psychiatric patients in the 1950s and 60s. Cameron’s experiments were funded in part by the CIA’s MKULTRA program, according to the CBC.
The Archives noted that while MKULTRA had approval from the “highest levels,” there was little to no oversight of the program. (RELATED: Declassified Documents Claim CIA Secretly Collected Americans’ Private Data)
It was not until 1975 when the Church Committee investigated the intelligence community that various intelligence operations, including MKULTRA, were brought to public light.  Eireann Van Natta  https://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/64 


Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Project MKULTRA, Subproject 35,” Top Secret, November 15, 1954, 13 pp.
Description
The CIA’s Technical Services Staff (TSS) requests authorization for a project at Georgetown University Hospital that would provide cover for research under the Agency’s “biological and chemical warfare program.” Using a philanthropic organization as a “cut-out,” the CIA would partially fund “a new research wing” of the hospital (the Gorman Annex) and would use one sixth of the new annex to conduct “Agency-sponsored research in these sensitive fields.” MKULTRA, the memo observes, provides research and development funding “for highly sensitive projects in certain fields, including covert biological, chemical and radiological warfare” but does not specifically authorize funds to establish cover for these programs.
An attachment describes the rationale for the use of a university hospital as cover for conducting such experiments, noting that “competent individuals in the field of physiological, psychiatric and other biological sciences are very reluctant to enter into signed agreements of any sort which would connect them with this activity since such connection might seriously jeopardize their professional reputations.”

The Agency’s clandestine funding and use of the hospital would be channeled through the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, named for Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University Hospital who had been secretly working with the CIA since 1951. The Fund was used “both as a cut-out for dealing with contractors in the fields of covert chemical and biological warfare, and as a prime contractor for certain areas of biological research.” In addition to Geschickter, at least two other board members of the Fund were aware that it was being used to conceal the CIA’s “sensitive research projects.”
Agency sponsorship was “completely deniable since no connection would exist between the University and the Agency.” Three “bio-chemical employees of the Chemical Division of TSS” would be given “excellent professional cover” while “human patients and volunteers for experimental use will be available under excellent clinical conditions” and with hospital supervision.
The document was found among the papers of James Srodes, author of Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999), which are housed at the George C. Marshall Research Library of the Virginia Military Institute.
Source  George C. Marshall Research Library, James Srodes Collection, Box 8, Folder: “AWD [Allen Welsh Dulles]: Mind Control 1953-1961”

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32726-document-11-memorandum-director-central-intelligence-project-mkultra-subproject-35 

Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence, “Successful Application of Narco-Hypnotic Interrogation (ARTICHOKE),” Classification unknown, 3 pp. Jul 14, 1952
Description
In a memo to the DCI, the CIA Security Office reports on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” Using the cover of a “psychiatric-medical” evaluation, officials from the Security Office and the CIA Medical Office combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and, in one case, “a subsequent total amnesia produced by post-hypnotic suggestion.” In the second case, CIA handlers used “heavy dosages of sodium pentothal,” a barbiturate, “coupled with the stimulant Desoxyn,” a methamphetamine, “with outstanding success.” The officers involved believed “that the ARTICHOKE operations were entirely successful” and “that the tests demonstrated conclusively the effectiveness of the combined chemical-hypnotic technique in such cases.”
Source John Marks Collection, Box 6
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32721-document-06-memorandum-director-central-intelligence-successful-application-narco 

John S. Earman, Inspector General, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Memorandum for the Record, “MKULTRA Program,” Secret  November 29, 1963, 2 pp. Nov 29, 1963
Description
This memo records a meeting held in the office of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Gen. Marshall Carter to settle the one major point of disagreement among CIA officials over the inspector general’s MKULTRA recommendations: whether to continue with the testing of MKULTRA substances on unwitting U.S. citizens. Others present were Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms, CIA executive director (and former inspector general) Lyman Kirkpatrick, current CIA inspector general John Earman, and Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD).
Both Gottlieb and Helms “argued for the continuation of unwitting testing,” while Earman, Carter and Kirkpatrick disagreed. Carter was concerned with the “unwitting aspect,” and a discussion ensued “on the possibility of unwitting test on foreign nationals,” which “had been ruled out” due to opposition from “senior chiefs of stations” as “too dangerous” and who said they lacked “controlled facilities.” Earman finds this “odd,” emphasizing the slipshod nature of some of the safehouses used for unwitting tests in the U.S.
Concluding the meeting, the participants agree that if the Directorate for Plans determined “that unwitting testing on American citizens must be continued to operationally prove out these drugs, it may become necessary to place this problem before the Director [of Central Intelligence] for a decision.” The attached cover memo from 1975 indicates that the DCI decided to defer a decision on testing U.S. citizens for one year and requested that until then the Agency “please continue the freeze on unwitting testing.” The authors of the cover memo found “no record … that this freeze was ever lifted.”  Source  John Marks Collection
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32732-document-17-john-s-earman-inspector-general-us-central-intelligence-agency 

PROJECT MK ULTRA, THE CIA'S PROGRAM OF RESEARCH INBEHAVIORAL MODIFICATION JOINT HEARING BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE AND THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON HEALTH AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH OF THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES UNITED STATES SENATE NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION August 3, 1977
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-hearings-95mkultra.pdf 

January 2015 An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability B.M. Disbennett (Disbennett, B.M. (2015) "An Analysis of CIA and Military Testing of LSD on Non-Consenting U.S. Service Members and Recovery Through the VA Disability System,"Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice: Vol. 3: Iss. 2, Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.70658/2693-3225.1058  Available at: https://ir.law.utk.edu/rgsj/vol3/iss2/4 
....This paper will explore the top-secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) human medical experiment, MKULTRA, and the possible avenues of relief for service members involved in the project....This article will take a brief look into the history of human medical trials, followed by a history of the CIA program MKULTRA, and other related programs. Next, it will explore case law that bars veterans from constitutional remedies as well as tort remedies against the U.S. government. Finally, the article will discuss challenges for veterans in the VA disability compensation system to determine if MKULTRA victims could successfully seek service-connection. Ultimately, a veteran attempting to recover damages from MKULTRA testing will likely be unable to prevail under a constitutional analysis, but an MKULTRA victim may be able to seek service-connection under the VA.
https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=rgsj 

SMART Ritual Abuse Newsletter - Issue 189 - July 2026 - Online at: https://ritualabuse.us/2026/06/issue-189-july-2026/

 

SMART Ritual Abuse Newsletter - Issue 189  - July 2026 - Online at: https://ritualabuse.us/2026/06/issue-189-july-2026/

                          

Information in this issue includes:
The 2026 Online Annual SMART Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference August 15 - 16, 2026

If you are interested in attending our conference or getting on a mailing list, please write: smartnews@aol.com https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/

 -  Ritual Abuse as Mind Control – Wendy Hoffman
 -  Introduction to Neurofeedback for Trauma – Joshua Moore
 -  Recovery Pathways – Randy Noblitt
  -  A Survivor’s Spiritual Journey – Neil Brick
 -  Family-Based Human Trafficking, Ritual Abuse, and Coercive Mind Control - Iain Bryson

 

The Survivorship Trafficking and Extreme Abuse Online Conference May 2026       

Conference Presentations Available Online https://survivorship.org/the-survivorship-trafficking-and-extreme-abuse-online-conference-2026-presentations

 

Articles: 

 

- Shining a light on Organised Ritual Abuse - The reality of organised ritual abuse - Elly Hanson
- Breaking the Silence Around Ritual Abuse - Israel
- From Ritual Sacrifice To Labour Abuse: How Rajkot Police Unravelled A 2018 Mystery - India
- Bail win for alleged leader of global satanic child abuse ring - Clare Sibthorpe and Perry Duffin - Australia
- This is what it’s really like to live with multiple personality disorder — and 24 alter egos By Eric Spitznagel                Cameron West “First Person Plural”
- How Childhood Trauma Shapes Dissociative Identity Disorder  Repeated early abuse and neglect can fragment     a developing self.  Fabiana Franco Ph.D. Trauma, Resilience, and Recovery

 

Articles:

Shining a light on Organised Ritual Abuse – In this guest post, Dr Elly Hanson and Jon Brown shine a light on organised ritual abuse, why disbelief about this form of harm persists, and why that must change. Elly draws on recent research to set the scene, and Jon translates this into practice, policy, and strategy implications for professionals across all agencies. 27 May 2026 Guest posts
describes graphic abuse

The reality of organised ritual abuse Elly Hanson
In 1986, three months after entering care, a three year old boy in Broxtowe, Nottingham-shire, started disclosing to his foster carers sexual abuse and degradation at the hands of his family members. This was the first in a set of extensive allegations made by him, his siblings and his cousins about a family organised around sadistic abuse led by their grandfather. They described being starved, injured and humiliated, and sexual abuse that involved multiple perpetrators subjecting them to ritualistic and extreme acts. They talked about being made to eat faeces, animals being ‘sacrificed’, and adults dressed as witches, the devil, clowns and monsters. The subsequent court case led to the conviction of ten adults for abuses relating to twelve children.

Some years later, journalist Beatrix Campbell interviewed one of the convicted mothers coming up to the end of her prison sentence. She described a similar childhood to that of her children, including parties where adults dressed up and ‘Dad was the devil’ – ‘when I was a child my parents talked about the devil all the time. They said I was “born for the devil”’. When she grew up and had her own children, ‘my Mum and Dad said, “they’re not children to be loved… they’re an ornament to be messed with”’. This intergenerational element was picked up by local MP Graham Allen when he commented at the time of the convictions that ‘child sex abuse can run on in families from generation to generation. We must now break this link of depravity that runs through generations for good.’

Sadly four decades on, we haven’t moved much closer to achieving this ambition, although I believe we are now at a time where there is a building momentum of awareness raising and change.
The Broxtowe case is one of at least 14 in the UK in which people have been convicted of child sexual abuse, and their use of ritualistic practices within it has been widely acknowledged by criminal and/or family courts. The most recent of these was the conviction of seven individuals in Glasgow in 2024. Yet survivor reports to helplines, therapists, researchers and other trusted individuals reveal that convictions are the very small tip of a large iceberg. Across twenty years or so of working in the field of sexual abuse and trauma, I have supported a number of ritual abuse survivors alongside many colleagues who have done the same. We are not alone; a survey of over 100 Clinical Psychologists in 2013 found that 38% had ‘dealt with one or more cases of satanic/ritual abuse’ and the majority judged most reports of this abuse credible.

Survivors’ disclosures reveal that this abuse often starts young, involves family members, and occurs against a backdrop of other child maltreatment (for example, neglect and physical abuse). It also often intersects with the production of child sexual abuse images and the sale of children to be raped (child sex trafficking). The ritual abuse tends to take place on specific occasions in which multiple perpetrators subject their victims to abuses enacted within ‘ceremonies’ and the like, and according to supernatural narratives (for example, abuse is denoted as a sacrifice, worship, ritual punishment etc). Such elements work to empower those abusing, whilst further silencing, shaming and terrorising the victims. Moral injury, a form of abuse in which victims are forced to act against their moral core (for example, through being made to choose between abuses to others) leaves many with a profound sense of complicity and guilt.

As is evident, such childhoods involve multiple experiences of extreme abuse, of which a single incident would be enough to floor a person. Survival depends in part upon various forms of dissociation (ways of psychologically distancing or shutting off from the abuse). Most survivors report living with Dissociative Identity Disorder, an adaptation to chronic childhood maltreatment in which the psyche develops different parts or ‘selves’ to cope with the contradictory demands of the abuse and its otherwise overwhelming nature. DID often means that adult parts of a person may be unaware for long periods that they are survivors of this abuse. And when they do become aware and reach out for help, many are faced with widespread disbelief – people turn away from what they saying, seeing it as too outlandish or extreme to be true.

The discourse of disbelief
A UK survey of 58 survivors of ritual abuse and 10 supporters found that most had experienced or witnessed poor practice from police, health and/or social services in response to disclosures of this abuse, with disbelief being cited as the most major problem. These service responses form part of a wider societal stance of disbelief – this developed and reached its peak in the 1980s and 90s but has exerted a long shadow ever since. Reports of ritual abuse are often met with a default scepticism and discounted as the product of moral panic, false memories and suggestive questioning. This narrative operates to rewrite history according to its wishful thinking, and Broxtowe is a clear case in point. In my report I detail how the case came to wrongly be retold as a cautionary tale of ‘satanic panic’ to the point that its entry on Wikipedia now concludes ‘that there was no evidence of the satanic ritual abuse claims.’

This default disbelief then works to perpetuate itself, working in lock-step with silencing. There is evidence of victims not mentioning ritual aspects of their abuse to avoid disbelief, police demanding more evidence before they investigate it, and prosecutors dropping these elements from cases when they get to court.

The damage that this discourse has caused is hard to overstate. Not only has it been a gift to those who perpetrate the abuse, providing cover for continued abuse, it is also a profound invalidation of survivors, working to amplify and entrench the invalidation at the heart of the abuse….
https://www.csacentre.org.uk/blog/shining-a-light-on-organised-ritual-abuse/ 

Breaking the Silence Around Ritual Abuse describes graphic abuse
People say they are psychotic, that they are delusional, that things like this cannot possibly happen in reality – and certainly not in Israel. But now, four therapists – three psychiatrists and a social worker – who repeatedly heard about this phenomenon from patients and also saw the physical proof on their bodies, are courageously declaring: Yes, ritual abuse exists in Israel – and it’s not an isolated phenomenon. Yes, there are women and men, most of them children, undergoing sadistic, violent rituals that usually include sexual abuse, with cult-like elements and serious psychological manipulation. Yes, abusers include rabbis and doctors and there are even allegations against a judge. And yes, we must first of all believe the victims and then do everything we can to end it – right now

Haim Rivlin May 15, 2026

Suddenly, the stories began trickling in. One after another, their patients – male and female alike – started to tell them about depths of human evil that are hard to fathom. And they – who thought that they had heard it all, who dealt with every kind of life-altering trauma – realized that something entirely different was happening here. That in Israel, too, a phenomenon known as ritual abuse exists – and that almost no one is talking about it.

Now, they say, they have collated testimonies from more than 50 victims and are ready to end the conspiracy of silence surrounding ritual abuse in Israel. Three female psychiatrists – Dr. Inbal Brenner, Dr. Sharon Levy and Dr. Daphna Armon – along with social worker Tanya Oren-Chipman, all four of whom hold very senior positions and who have many years of experience, have come together to issue a wake-up call: This is happening right here, it is far more widespread than you think – and it is taking a devastating toll….

What began as a trickle, however, soon became a steady stream of testimonies: men and women from all walks of life, without any previous connection between them, who came from different places and at different times – all of whom offered strikingly similar accounts of what they experienced. “We heard stories that included multiple attackers, stories about extreme cruelty and sadism, about the use of deliberate starvation to control and punish,” says Levy, who has personally met with dozens of patients, each of whom separately described to her the same horrific situation. “I said to myself, ‘Hang on, there’s something odd here.’ I searched through the literature and came across something known as ‘ritual abuse’ and I knew I had found the answer.”

None of them were previously familiar with the phenomenon of ritual abuse. They had not encountered it during their medical studies or their specialized training in treating complex trauma. Hearing such harrowing accounts in the therapy room pushed each of them, on her own, to look for answers – whether in the professional literature or by consulting colleagues abroad.

In December, Israel held its first-ever professional conference on ritual trauma, organized by the Israeli Society for Sexual Trauma Treatment and Prevention (ISST), which operates under the auspices of the Israeli Medical Association. All four of the interviewees for this article are members of ISST and it was Levy who presented the conference with the professional definition of ritual abuse: “Organized and repetitive abuse involving physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual violence, often carried out within the framework of structured rituals, at times utilizing religious and cultic symbols. Its purpose is total control over the victims and the deep indoctrination of patterns of submission within the victim.”
According to Oren-Chipman, one of the messages to emerge from the conference was that “we recognize that this issue exists and that we have to start addressing it on a professional level. It makes no sense that every professional therapist who encounters it will have to make their own way through the darkness, with all of these horrors. We have to say: This is unacceptable, it is inconceivable – but it exists and we have to recognize the phenomenon in order to start dealing with it.”….

This was also the stage that the subjects of this article, who belong to the very core of the Israeli medical and therapeutic establishment, realized that they could no longer remain in the sterile space of the clinic. They decided to exert the full professional gravitas by joining forces and saying something that Israeli society simply refused to hear: We have seen the wounds with our own two eyes. It’s not imagined; it’s real.

“The impact of this kind of narative on our patients is devastating,” says Inbal Brenner, chairperson of ISST and director of the Sexual Trauma Clinic at Lev Hasharon Mental Health Center. “We felt that we had to say something, because we saw our patients falling apart and becoming suicidal. The discourse was extremely blunt and very violent and we felt, as female professionals, that we had to say: We have seen with our own two eyes and we have heard these stories for years from men and women. We had to speak out and say: The phenomenon does exist. You can’t just say ‘You’re all crazy,’ because that essentially means abandoning our patients.”….

This blanket denial does not usually come from a place of malice or evil, they say. “Sometimes there’s ignorance, there’s a lack of understanding and there’s a very human inability to believe that such evil exists,” Brenner explains. “It’s hard to believe that there are sexual assaults that happen in such an organized way, that adults can hurt children in this way – and it’s easier for us to say that it’s nothing more than a fantasy, a troubled psychological state – and to say ‘She’s crazy’ or ‘She’s imagining it’.”

“After all, who wants to live in a society like that, in which there are such evil people and evil is institutionalized?” Armon adds. “It’s a lot easier to believe that evil only comes from beyond our borders, that it is different, foreign, that it has a different color or accent. Who wants to think that people with power in our country behave in this way? That entire communities do this? Who wants to believe that? You can’t sleep at night.”

In response to this wave of denial, doctors and therapists from a variety of fields – all of them members of ISST – last month published a position paper. “Ritual abuse and organized sexual abuse networks are an existing and recognized phenomenon worldwide, including in Israel, requiring urgent and profound institutional, therapeutic and legal attention,” it read….

The individual testimonies received by all four therapists are of course confidential, but Levy can describe in general terms what ritual abuse of this kind looks like. The abuse is always carried out by a group of adults, “with each of them having a specific role,” she says. “For example, there is someone running the ceremony, someone recording it and so on.” The children must be naked and the ceremony itself includes severe sexual abuse and life-endangering torture such as strangulation. “I have heard descriptions of drowning in the mikveh or at sea, or situations where a child was placed in a grave-like hole and covered in dirt or trapped inside a circle of fire.”

Another characteristic that keeps reappearing is that the perpetrators often use restraints or cages as part of the ritual abuse. In some cases, victims have told the therapists that they were taken to a room or pit with spiders or the carcasses of dead animals, “or a child was led to believe that this is what was happening,” Levy says. She adds that, according to her patients, their abusers lacked any emotion and were indifferent to the pain they were causing and their victims’ screams.

In many cases, ritual abuse took place within the family itself. “And then,” Levy says, “there are several family members involved, whether that be abusing the victim and participating in the ritual or by preparing the child for abuse or treating their wounds afterwards. In many cases, the children are handed over to other adults who will abuse them.”
In most cases, the rituals have cultic or religious overtones. In cases where there is no cultic-religious element, Levy says, the framing “can be that of a game, where the child is staged in various situations of abuse and photographed.”

According to the four therapists, even rituals which have cultic or mystic characteristics are not actually like that. Rather, they are a calculated mechanism designed to destroy the victim’s identity. “There was one victim who was very capable of describing exactly how they led her into the abusive situation,” says Oren-Chipman. “It was a description that I later heard from other places and other people – whereby the victim was ‘sacrificed’ by one of her relatives. It’s something that happens again and again. And the abuse itself, which is incredibly sadistic, is extremely harsh. Among the most violent I have ever heard of. Waiting nervously for the abuse, which could mean several children waiting together for their turn. And, of course, muttering verses, incantations and all kinds of religious conceptualizations.”….

However, the modern-day version of ritual abuse often includes, according to victims’ testimony, a video camera documenting everything that happens. The therapists believe that the reason for this is financial: the videos are sold on the darknet. “There are buyers for these things,” says Brenner. “And a lot of our patients live in fear because there is videotaped evidence of them being abused circulating God knows where online.”
The camera, therefore, is not just a tool to make money on the darknet; it is also the ultimate weapon for extortion and to ensure the victims’ silence for the rest of their lives. “There are all kinds of ways to extort someone,” says Armon. “They want to get married or start dating someone [and the abusers threaten] to expose them or ruin their reputation.”

“The ritual is their way of controlling. Using brainwashing, intimidation, profound psychological strategies,” Armon adds. “The abusers are intelligent, powerful people of means; it’s not some marginal phenomenon that happens by mistake or something private that happens behind closed doors.”….
According to Levy, some of her patients who suffered from organized abuse still carry the silent scars of what they endured in the medical files: “We see broken bones and we see a lot of urinary tract infections. When it comes to deliberate malnourishment, you see a lot of children who need infusions of iron. Why should a child need iron infusions without any medical reason?”

“On occasions, the abuse also included the denial of medical treatment,” says Brenner. “There are patients who told us that they were not allowed to see a doctor for years or that they only got medical treatment after they left the cult or the abusive environment.”
This “abusive environment,” as already mentioned, can often be the immediate family. The gateway to the world of organized abuse is often through a relative who traffics/pimps out the child victim. “It doesn’t have to be a parent. It can be an uncle or grandfather whom the parents trust who commits these abuses and who takes the child to a network of abusers,” Brenner adds.

Proximity and easy access to children explain why the victims are so young: “Usually around the age of three, four or five. And it continues for quite a long time,” Brenner says. “There are also cases of abuse of children of primary school age. Beyond that, it is apparently less common.”….

Suddenly, the stories began trickling in. One after another, their patients – male and female alike – started to tell them about depths of human evil that are hard to fathom. And they – who thought that they had heard it all, who dealt with every kind of life-altering trauma – realized that something entirely different was happening here. That in Israel, too, a phenomenon known as ritual abuse exists – and that almost no one is talking about it.
Now, they say, they have collated testimonies from more than 50 victims and are ready to end the conspiracy of silence surrounding ritual abuse in Israel. Three female psychiatrists – Dr. Inbal Brenner, Dr. Sharon Levy and Dr. Daphna Armon – along with social worker Tanya Oren-Chipman, all four of whom hold very senior positions and who have many years of experience, have come together to issue a wake-up call: This is happening right here, it is far more widespread than you think – and it is taking a devastating toll.

At first, they also found it hard to believe what they were hearing from their patients. “They told us stories that simply didn’t sound reasonable; they sometimes even sounded absurd,” says Oren-Chipman, who served for many years as director of the Ministry of Welfare’s Tamar Center for Sexual Trauma in Jerusalem. “They told us things that I found hard to deal with,” adds Dr. Levy, the deputy head of the Meuhedet HMO’s mental health services in the Jerusalem district.

What began as a trickle, however, soon became a steady stream of testimonies: men and women from all walks of life, without any previous connection between them, who came from different places and at different times – all of whom offered strikingly similar accounts of what they experienced. “We heard stories that included multiple attackers, stories about extreme cruelty and sadism, about the use of deliberate starvation to control and punish,” says Levy, who has personally met with dozens of patients, each of whom separately described to her the same horrific situation. “I said to myself, ‘Hang on, there’s something odd here.’ I searched through the literature and came across something known as ‘ritual abuse’ and I knew I had found the answer.”

None of them were previously familiar with the phenomenon of ritual abuse. They had not encountered it during their medical studies or their specialized training in treating complex trauma. Hearing such harrowing accounts in the therapy room pushed each of them, on her own, to look for answers – whether in the professional literature or by consulting colleagues abroad.

In December, Israel held its first-ever professional conference on ritual trauma, organized by the Israeli Society for Sexual Trauma Treatment and Prevention (ISST), which operates under the auspices of the Israeli Medical Association. All four of the interviewees for this article are members of ISST and it was Levy who presented the conference with the professional definition of ritual abuse: “Organized and repetitive abuse involving physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual violence, often carried out within the framework of structured rituals, at times utilizing religious and cultic symbols. Its purpose is total control over the victims and the deep indoctrination of patterns of submission within the victim.”

According to Oren-Chipman, one of the messages to emerge from the conference was that “we recognize that this issue exists and that we have to start addressing it on a professional level. It makes no sense that every professional therapist who encounters it will have to make their own way through the darkness, with all of these horrors. We have to say: This is unacceptable, it is inconceivable – but it exists and we have to recognize the phenomenon in order to start dealing with it.”
“It’s easier for to frame it as fantasy or a mental condition and say, ‘She’s crazy,’ or ‘She’s imagining things.’”

In March 2025, when the late Shoshana Strook – daughter of Minister of Settlements Orit Strook – published videos in which she claimed that she suffered ritual abuse – the public response fell between outright denial that the phenomenon even exists, factional division and political sniping. It is important to note that none of the four therapists interviewed in this article has any information that confirms or contradicts the allegations made by Shoshana Strook. In April 2025, a court rejected a request to lift the gag order placed on the case, ruling that “at this stage, reasonable doubt is extremely meager, if not less than that.” What set the alarm bells ringing for the four therapists, however, were the responses. “I am not familiar with Shoshana’s story, may she rest in peace,” says Oren-Chipman, “but when I saw the first video that she uploaded, I immediately turned to my husband and said, ‘Shit. Now they’ll say that it’s all political.’ I was really annoyed by that, because I knew that it would split everyone right back into the same old camps and entrenched positions we’re all familiar with, where it’s impossible to think outside the box. Long before [Shoshana Strook] posted that video, I had heard stories – not one, or two or even three – and it certainly was not political.”

Following Shoshana Strook’s tragic death on March 14 of this year, social media was awash with dismissive and violent rhetoric which, among other things, rejected victims’ testimony about the phenomenon as “delusional” and called the women who claimed to be victims of ritual abuse “crazy.” This was also the stage that the subjects of this article, who belong to the very core of the Israeli medical and therapeutic establishment, realized that they could no longer remain in the sterile space of the clinic. They decided to exert the full professional gravitas by joining forces and saying something that Israeli society simply refused to hear: We have seen the wounds with our own two eyes. It’s not imagined; it’s real.

“The impact of this kind of narrative on our patients is devastating,” says Inbal Brenner, chairperson of ISST and director of the Sexual Trauma Clinic at Lev Hasharon Mental Health Center. “We felt that we had to say something, because we saw our patients falling apart and becoming suicidal. The discourse was extremely blunt and very violent and we felt, as female professionals, that we had to say: We have seen with our own two eyes and we have heard these stories for years from men and women. We had to speak out and say: The phenomenon does exist. You can’t just say ‘You’re all crazy,’ because that essentially means abandoning our patients.”

Oren-Chipman adds: “The greatest fear of anyone who has been sexually abused is that they are crazy, that they imagined it, that they made it up or that they are exaggerating. When that encounters external denial, it becomes even more paralyzing, even more shocking and it raises feelings of guilt, loneliness and self-loathing. Every imaginable form of evil.”

This blanket denial does not usually come from a place of malice or evil, they say. “Sometimes there’s ignorance, there’s a lack of understanding and there’s a very human inability to believe that such evil exists,” Brenner explains. “It’s hard to believe that there are sexual assaults that happen in such an organized way, that adults can hurt children in this way – and it’s easier for us to say that it’s nothing more than a fantasy, a troubled psychological state – and to say ‘She’s crazy’ or ‘She’s imagining it’.”

“After all, who wants to live in a society like that, in which there are such evil people and evil is institutionalized?” Armon adds. “It’s a lot easier to believe that evil only comes from beyond our borders, that it is different, foreign, that it has a different color or accent. Who wants to think that people with power in our country behave in this way? That entire communities do this? Who wants to believe that? You can’t sleep at night.”

In response to this wave of denial, doctors and therapists from a variety of fields – all of them members of ISST – last month published a position paper. “Ritual abuse and organized sexual abuse networks are an existing and recognized phenomenon worldwide, including in Israel, requiring urgent and profound institutional, therapeutic and legal attention,” it read.
Armon, director of the Complex PTSD Department at the Be’er Yaakov Mental Health Center, explains why they decided to break their silence: “The hardest part is that the victims themselves don’t believe their own memories. The question of whether it happened or not is always relevant – but it’s even more so when it comes to ritual abuse of this kind.”
And then the doubt that the environment expresses merely exacerbates it?

“That’s why we published our statement. We don’t know what did or did not happen in the specific case of Shoshana Strook, but we cannot stand idly by when people are dismissing the phenomenon. This denial of the phenomenon harms every victim – and we 100 percent believe that people have been harmed in this way.”
The abused children are accused of being ‘impure’

The individual testimonies received by all four therapists are of course confidential, but Levy can describe in general terms what ritual abuse of this kind looks like. The abuse is always carried out by a group of adults, “with each of them having a specific role,” she says. “For example, there is someone running the ceremony, someone recording it and so on.” The children must be naked and the ceremony itself includes severe sexual abuse and life-endangering torture such as strangulation. “I have heard descriptions of drowning in the mikveh or at sea, or situations where a child was placed in a grave-like hole and covered in dirt or trapped inside a circle of fire.”

Another characteristic that keeps reappearing is that the perpetrators often use restraints or cages as part of the ritual abuse. In some cases, victims have told the therapists that they were taken to a room or pit with spiders or the carcasses of dead animals, “or a child was led to believe that this is what was happening,” Levy says. She adds that, according to her patients, their abusers lacked any emotion and were indifferent to the pain they were causing and their victims’ screams.

In many cases, ritual abuse took place within the family itself. “And then,” Levy says, “there are several family members involved, whether that be abusing the victim and participating in the ritual or by preparing the child for abuse or treating their wounds afterwards. In many cases, the children are handed over to other adults who will abuse them.”

In most cases, the rituals have cultic or religious overtones. In cases where there is no cultic-religious element, Levy says, the framing “can be that of a game, where the child is staged in various situations of abuse and photographed.”
According to the four therapists, even rituals which have cultic or mystic characteristics are not actually like that. Rather, they are a calculated mechanism designed to destroy the victim’s identity. “There was one victim who was very capable of describing exactly how they led her into the abusive situation,” says Oren-Chipman. “It was a description that I later heard from other places and other people – whereby the victim was ‘sacrificed’ by one of her relatives. It’s something that happens again and again. And the abuse itself, which is incredibly sadistic, is extremely harsh. Among the most violent I have ever heard of. Waiting nervously for the abuse, which could mean several children waiting together for their turn. And, of course, muttering verses, incantations and all kinds of religious conceptualizations.” Brenner adds that, according to testimony she has heard, the abusers also made use of religious artefacts: “It could be a shofar or a staff said to have powers. The abused children are accused of being ‘impure,’ so the ‘purpose’ of this specific ritual is to bring them to a higher level of spirituality, to some kind of purity and holiness.”

The use of religious or cultic symbols is designed to create an impossible conflict for the child. “It’s a cheap manipulation, but it’s a very powerful tool for creating psychological control over the victims,” Oren-Chipman explains. “They deliberately made them sin – stealing, violating the Shabbat, eating leaven during Passover, all kinds of things that sound petty to someone who is not religious, but ‘You sinned’ and ‘You should atone for your sins’ and now part of what you are going through is atonement and you are redeeming your soul and bringing about redemption through this thing. If they were abused in the name of God, and if God Himself wanted these things to happen to them, then it’s a lot harder to free themselves.”

Behind the cultic disguise and the pseudo-religious mumbling is a twisted internal logic that is as dangerous as it is ancient. Researcher Dr. Udi Frohman, who has studied the historic roots of the phenomenon, identifies the source of this warped ideology in movements like Sabbateanism and Frankism – movements which espouse the principle of “a commandment that comes by means of a transgression,” out of a belief that the abolition of old values requires the deliberate trampling of the most severe sexual prohibitions and a descent into impurity. The reports that Frohman cites from today’s victims sound as if they were taken from those same dark periods of history: “A circle surrounded by burning candles… The rabbi recites the blessing ‘Blessed is He who permits the forbidden’… They would repetitively recite Psalms… And they told me ‘You are special, you are chosen’.”
However, the modern-day version of ritual abuse often includes, according to victims’ testimony, a video camera documenting everything that happens. The therapists believe that the reason for this is financial: the videos are sold on the darknet. “There are buyers for these things,” says Brenner. “And a lot of our patients live in fear because there is videotaped evidence of them being abused circulating God knows where online.”

The camera, therefore, is not just a tool to make money on the darknet; it is also the ultimate weapon for extortion and to ensure the victims’ silence for the rest of their lives. “There are all kinds of ways to extort someone,” says Armon. “They want to get married or start dating someone [and the abusers threaten] to expose them or ruin their reputation.”
“The ritual is their way of controlling. Using brainwashing, intimidation, profound psychological strategies,” Armon adds. “The abusers are intelligent, powerful people of means; it’s not some marginal phenomenon that happens by mistake or something private that happens behind closed doors.” 

We see broken bones and we see a lot of urinary tract infections. Indeed, it is only natural for us to want to view the abusers as monsters, members of the society’s fringes or criminals who emerge from darkened alleys. But the reality, as depicted by victims’ testimonies, is rather different: “In quite a few of the cases we’ve come across,” Brenner reveals, “the perpetrators were high-status community members. They either held respected religious or spiritual authority, like a rabbi or a rebbetzin, or occupied other influential, prominent positions, such as a judge. It’s mind-boggling – the gap between the public persona and these stories. No one would believe such far-fetched stories about a judge, yes, a judge, or a teacher, or a school principal.”

“As a physician,” says Armon, “it’s important for me to point out that I have heard of doctors who have taken part in such things; who have deliberately harmed people. I have heard about births that took place in secret, all kinds of things that the medical team was involved in. I feel a responsibility to point this out. People are trying to turn ritual abuse into something political – which it is not. It exists everywhere that there is power and influence.”
According to Levy, some of her patients who suffered from organized abuse still carry the silent scars of what they endured in the medical files: “We see broken bones and we see a lot of urinary tract infections. When it comes to deliberate malnourishment, you see a lot of children who need infusions of iron. Why should a child need iron infusions without any medical reason?”

“On occasions, the abuse also included the denial of medical treatment,” says Brenner. “There are patients who told us that they were not allowed to see a doctor for years or that they only got medical treatment after they left the cult or the abusive environment.”
This “abusive environment,” as already mentioned, can often be the immediate family. The gateway to the world of organized abuse is often through a relative who traffics/pimps out the child victim. “It doesn’t have to be a parent. It can be an uncle or grandfather whom the parents trust who commits these abuses and who takes the child to a network of abusers,” Brenner adds.

Proximity and easy access to children explain why the victims are so young: “Usually around the age of three, four or five. And it continues for quite a long time,” Brenner says. “There are also cases of abuse of children of primary school age. Beyond that, it is apparently less common.”
Armon also wants to dispel the stigma around the victims’ families: “The victims can come from families that are considered upstanding; we’re not talking about children who have been picked up from the street because they come from the fringes of society.” The understanding that evil resides in the hearts of perfectly normative communities is perhaps the hardest to fathom. “The average citizen does not want to know that such things exist,” Armon admits. “The problem is that evil is good and good is evil – and that is also why it is impossible to believe them.”

They use drugs, electric shocks, hypnosis and lots of lies
Apart from sadistic abuse, part of the reason for ritual abuse is to force the victim into silence about what they have been subjected to. “The goal of the perpetrators of ritual abuse is simple,” Levy explains. “They want to keep on doing what they are doing, without their secret being exposed, and that’s where they invest all their efforts.” To this end, they do not stop at ordinary intimidation; they employ a practice known in professional circles as mind control. “The abusers deliberately create a state of dissociation,” Oren-Chipman explains. “They do not just rely on the fact that it is traumatic, causing the mind to forget, but also employ a variety of sadistic methods, such as using various types of drugs and mind-altering substances.”

“Many patients describe having all kinds of substances injected into them between their toes,” Levy confirms. “They use drugs, electric shocks, hypnosis and lots of lies, threats and brainwashing, repeating the messages again and again – all as part of the effort to induce a state of dissociation in the child.”

Armon says that the tactic is sadistic in a particular cold and calculating manner. “There are all kinds of techniques used, like flashing lights, mirrors or sleep deprivation. Certain words are used that become code words that trigger something. There are patients who will dissociate if I say a sentence a certain way, but if I express the meaning differently, they will stay with me in the conversation. There are those who know that these sentences are dangerous for them – sentences that leave them with no memory of what happened, no idea what they are doing or what is going on around them, and no ability to fight back.”

The therapists refer to this as psychological programming. “The word ‘programming’ might sound like it comes from some science-fiction movie or from the days of the Cold War,” Brenner says, “but since the victims are children of a very, very young age, there is something with repetition, with repeating a certain ritual, or an activity or spoken word that is repeated in a certain way. When it happens again and again, it’s a way of controlling the child.”

According to Brenner, these manipulations are accompanied by humiliating phrases repeated over the years, until they become ingrained in the victim’s inner consciousness, leading them to believe that they wanted what happened to them and that they are to blame. “On many occasions, the victims will tell themselves that they cooperated with their abusers because part of this programming forces her to lie in a certain position, for instance, while it happens over and over again,” Brenner adds. “When we look at this from the outside, it’s obvious that there is no and there can be no cooperation or consent here, but these manipulations make them feel as if they did these things of their own free will.” The result of this prolonged torture is total emotional collapse….

Oren-Chipman admits. “When I first encountered it, I also looked for psychological interpretations that would allow me to say ‘No, it can’t be true. The world surely isn’t so disturbed’.”
The clinical picture, however, presents a completely different reality from that of a mental health struggle. Levy explains the medical diagnoses: “With psychosis, we see fixed delusions that are completely unrelated to whether they talk about what happened or the bond between the patient and therapist, and there are no physical symptoms.” For victims of ritual abuse, in contrast, the body itself carries physical evidence of the horror: “Victims of ritual abuse have many physical symptoms, which sometimes manifest as if a part of them is silencing them. Every time they start to share something, they suddenly get nauseous and you can actually see them freeze. They also experience various pains linked to the abuse itself, which is something you just do not see with psychosis.”….

Armon adds: “You cannot fake what happens to the body, the physical response. The feelings and things that come up make no sense and cannot be put into words. But the disgust, the pain, the terror, the things you see inside the person’s body and eyes – you cannot fake that. And you feel it yourself too, as if it is passing into you. I have never felt anything like that with a psychotic patient.”….

In fact, the fragmented way in which these memories come to the surface is perhaps the best proof that they are genuine. “A traumatic memory is always fragmented, always partial,” Brenner explains. “Usually, a traumatic memory resurfaces in the form of physical feelings, flashbacks or panic attacks. In fact, if someone comes in and suddenly tells a story from beginning to end, detailing exactly what happened, that actually raises questions for us.”

However, this “physical truth,” which screams from within the therapy room and leaves the therapists with no room for doubt, collapses entirely in police investigation rooms. The inherent gap between how traumatic memories work – fragmented, partial and silent – and the strict demands of the law enforcement system explains how it is possible that not a single indictment has ever been filed in Israel for ritual abuse.

According to Armon, the famous case of Ka-Tzetnik’s (the author Yehiel De-Nur) dissociative collapse on the witness stand during the Eichmann trial illustrates this difficulty. “He was unable to answer the judges’ questions in the way that they demanded. So, our first demand is to establish a specialist unit for these cases. You also need investigators, prosecutors and judges who have expertise. And you need a court that specializes in ritual abuse.” ….

“I would say that, over the years, I have encountered at least 20 such cases – mainly women and a few men.”
Overseas, in contrast, more and more data has been collated over recent years. A report published in July 2025 in the United Kingdom by the two official organizations responsible for monitoring and treating sexual abuse – the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC) – found that 2.5 percent of all calls to a dedicated helpline between 2006 and 2024 mentioned ritual abuse. The report found that, in the four years leading up to 2025, British welfare services and police received 211 reports of organized sexual abuse. At least 14 of these cases led to convictions.

A study surveying workers at a sexual assault support center in Melbourne, Australia found that 28 percent of them had supported one or more survivors of ritual abuse and, in the decade preceding the study, 153 such cases were documented in the city. In a survey conducted among 2,709 psychologists in the U.S., 13 percent reported that they had worked with one or more survivors of ritual sexual abuse. The British report emphasized that these figures are likely just the tip of the iceberg, due to immense barriers preventing victims from reporting, and that actual convictions do not represent the full scale of the phenomenon…. https://www.shomrim.news/eng/breaking-the-silence-around-ritual-abuse 

From Ritual Sacrifice To Labour Abuse: How Rajkot Police Unravelled A 2018 Mystery
The breakthrough began to take shape during a massive anti-child labour crackdown conducted by the Rajkot police, which resulted in the rescue of numerous children from West Bengal. Reported by: Saurabh Vaktania India News Jun 05, 2026 describes graphic abuse
Rajkot: The Rajkot police have solved a horrific and deeply puzzling eight-year-old cold case involving the brutal murder of a child labourer. In 2018, the severed head of a young boy was discovered on the banks of the Aji River, sending shockwaves through the entire region. Initial police investigations leaned heavily toward the suspicion of a ritualistic human sacrifice, a theory that inadvertently led the case into a long, agonising dead end. However, recent breakthrough investigations have unmasked a far more terrifying reality, revealing that a young migrant child from West Bengal was savagely murdered by his employer, who then dismembered the body to erase evidence.

The breakthrough began to take shape during a massive anti-child labour crackdown conducted by the Rajkot police, which resulted in the rescue of numerous children from West Bengal.
While processing the repatriations, one desperate family pointed out that their son was not among the nineteen rescued children. They informed officials that a contractor had taken their young boy to Rajkot for work nearly eight years ago, and he had never been heard from since. Acting swiftly on this crucial missing-person link, investigators traced the contractor, Ajit Maula, alias Azmat Maula, who was already serving time in a Kolkata prison for an unrelated offence.
Under sustained interrogation, the contractor finally cracked and confessed to the heinous crime.

The investigation revealed that the contractor routinely subjected the young boy to extreme physical abuse simply because he could not keep up with the gruelling pace of the work. The relentless torture culminated in the child’s murder, after which the accused severed the body into multiple pieces, dumping the head by the Aji River to mask his tracks….
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/from-ritual-sacrifice-to-labour-abuse-how-rajkot-police-unravelled-a-2018-mystery-11593039 

Bail win for alleged leader of global satanic child abuse ring – Clare Sibthorpe and Perry Duffin April 28, 2026
The accused leader of a global “satanic paedophile ring” that allegedly includes a swimming coach and former police officer has been released back into the community following months in custody on remand.

Landon Ashton Versace Germanotta-Mills, who describes himself online as an “investigative and forensic journalist” who railed against child abusers, was granted Supreme Court bail on Tuesday despite prosecutors expressing concerns about his release.
The 27-year-old is alleged to have played a leading role in an international satanic child sexual abuse ring that police described as “the most extreme we’ve seen”, with its details so “depraved” it has shocked court authorities.

Germanotta-Mills was arrested several months ago alongside ex-police officer David Turner and former Victorian swim coach Mark Andrew Sendecky, both 42.
Detective Superintendent Jayne Doherty, the head of the NSW Sex Crimes squad, said at the time that the material consisted of victims aged from babies to 12, was “among the most extreme we have seen” and that its “use of satanic iconography demonstrates the level of depravity”.

She said police were working with international law enforcement and had gathered evidence identifying 145 alleged overseas offenders.
Germanotta-Mills was charged a string of offences, including accessing, transmitting and possessing child abuse material and some relating to bestiality material…. Several more men were arrested in connection to the alleged child abuse ring and remain before the courts, including Turner, Sendecky, Benjamin Raymond Drysdale and Colin Milne.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/bail-win-for-alleged-leader-of-global-satanic-child-abuse-ring-amid-admissions-20260428-p5zrmg.html 

This is what it’s really like to live with multiple personality disorder — and 24 alter egos By Eric Spitznagel Published May 30, 2026 describes dissociative episodes
Cameron West, who lives with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), revealed childhood sexual abuse by his grandmother.

Rikki, West’s wife, helped manage his breakdown and supported their family through his 24 alters. West’s 1999 book, “First Person Plural,” a bestseller, is reissued with a new e pilogue. Cameron West’s eyes go somewhere else for a moment.
He’s sitting beside his wife of 45 years, Rikki, in the middle of a conversation about a morning more than 30 years ago. She opened a closet door in their young son’s bedroom and found her husband crouched on the floor with a sketchpad and a red marker.

He wasn’t entirely Cameron West at that moment. He was Davy, a sweet, sad 4-year-old drawing pictures of what had been done to him as a child. The images were crude and explicit and terrible. West had no idea who Davy was, yet, or what the drawings meant.
“My mind was protecting me, from things I would not have been able to psychologically survive as a child,” West told The Post in an exclusive interview. “It turned out to involve my grandmother sexually abusing me.”

Little Davy was the first of West’s 24 alter personalities to emerge. He documented his experiences with his alters — the clinical term for each of the separate personalities living inside a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously called multiple personality disorder — with the 1999 book “First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.”
A New York Times bestseller and one of the first first-person chronicles of DID, it sold over 1 million copies, earned West an “Oprah” show appearance and was optioned for a Disney/Robin Williams movie that was never made.

Now, the memoir has been reissued with a new epilogue bringing the story of West, now a grandfather in his 70s, and his family up to date….
Central to how the family managed was a concept West’s therapists helped him develop called co-consciousness, an internal awareness that allowed him to observe his alters when they were out rather than simply losing time entirely.
“He can see what they’re doing,” Rikki explained. “They’re aware of him. They have an inner communication.”

In 2001, the Wests went to Los Angeles to see a neurologist who recorded West’s brain wave patterns in real time as his alters switched.
“Each of your alters have different brainwave patterns from you and from each other,” West recalled the doctors telling him. “And child alters have the brainwave patterns of children that an adult no longer has.” When switching occurred between alters, the EEG looked like a seizure. Each personality produced a distinct and measurable signature.
Twenty-five years on, most of West’s alters have quieted or integrated, the result of years of intensive therapy, including inpatient treatment at a Dallas trauma center, and the slow internal work of building communication within the system…. https://nypost.com/2026/05/30/health/what-its-really-like-to-live-with-multiple-personality-disorder/ 

How Childhood Trauma Shapes Dissociative Identity Disorder Repeated early abuse and neglect can fragment a developing self. March 12, 2026 | Fabiana Franco Ph.D. Trauma, Resilience, and Recovery – Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Chronic childhood trauma can disrupt identity development through dissociation.
Repeated abuse and attachment wounds are central risk factors for dissociative identity disorder (DID).
The child’s mind may divide experience into separate self-states to survive.
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a trauma-related condition marked by the presence of two or more distinct identity states and significant gaps in memory that cannot be explained by ordinary forgetfulness (Şar et al., 2017; Loewenstein & Brand, 2023; Kissa et al., 2025).

These identity states, often called “parts,” may have different patterns of emotion, perception, memory, and behavior. For many individuals, these identity states developed in response to overwhelming, often hidden, early life trauma.

Why Chronic Childhood Trauma Matters
Research consistently shows very high rates of severe, repeated childhood abuse and neglect among individuals diagnosed with DID (Raison & Andrea, 2022; Tang, 2023; Şar et al., 2017). Compared with other psychiatric diagnoses, adults with DID report higher levels of emotional neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, often beginning early in life.

Chronic Trauma Is Not Single-Event Trauma
Chronic trauma differs from a single frightening event. It can include prolonged exposure to:
Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse.
Emotional or physical neglect.
Chaotic or threatening caregiving environments.
Disorganized or frightening attachment relationships.

When young children, whose brains and sense of identity are in the early stages of formation, experience chronic trauma, the effects can be more pronounced than in adults or older children. Some studies suggest that trauma occurring before ages 6 to 9 may be particularly associated with later dissociative disorders (Raison & Andrea, 2022; Tanwar et al., 2025).

Dissociation as a Survival Strategy
When a child cannot physically escape danger, the mind may seek to create psychological distance. Dissociation allows a child to detach from overwhelming pain, fear, or betrayal. This response can be protective in the short term, but severely damaging in the long term. What is calming to the young child can emerge later in life as DID.

Over time, repeated dissociation may become structured. Different self-states may emerge to manage different functions:
One part handles school or daily life.
Another contains traumatic memories.
Another carries intense emotion, such as rage or shame.

Clinical and theoretical models describe this as the mind’s effort to compartmentalize unbearable experiences (Cudzik et al., 2019; Şar, 2017). This division can allow the child to function and even appear outwardly “fine.”
The long-term cost is fragmentation. Because these states do not fully integrate, the adult may experience discontinuity in memory, identity, and self-experience (Loewenstein & Brand, 2023)….

While childhood exposure to chronic trauma is not a guarantee that DID will develop later in life, it is a very strong predictor. The earlier the exposure, and the more intense the exposure to chronic interpersonal trauma, the greater the likelihood of developing DID. Abuse involving attachment figures appears to distinguish DID from other trauma-related conditions (Şar et al., 2017; Raison & Andrea, 2022). DID is best understood as a developmental adaptation to prolonged relational trauma during the years when identity is still consolidating….

Treatment and the Possibility of Healing
DID is often an extreme adaptation that enables survival despite chronic early trauma. Treatment helps transform that survival system into a life that feels more continuous, grounded, and whole.
DID often responds to treatment with phase-oriented trauma therapy. Treatment typically proceeds in stages:
Safety and stabilization.
Careful processing of traumatic memories.
Greater integration and cooperation among self-states.

Systematic reviews suggest that structured, trauma-informed treatment can reduce dissociation, self-harm, and instability while improving functioning (Griffiths et al., 2025).
For many individuals, therapy does not erase parts of the self. Instead, it strengthens communication, reduces internal conflict, and fosters a more cohesive and flexible sense of identity.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/trauma-resilience-and-recovery/202603/how-childhood-trauma-shapes-dissociative-identity