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Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice

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Margaret Hagen is an experimental psychologist who studies human activities. She is very much aware how little we know or can predict about human behavior, and that we know virtually nothing about how the brain works in everyday life. Clinical psychologists, the people who decide about mental illness, treatment, prison confinement, and guilt and innocence in court do not draw on this meager knowledge. Rather, clinical psychology depends on speculations about human behavior going back to Sigmund Freud, and on the intuition of the psychotherapist. In other words, clinical psychology is neither science, nor does it rely on firm knowledge. She refers to therapy and assessment as ineffective, a waste of time. We, the public, the courts, various welfare and other institutions, desperately need to assess and to know what to do with persons, including children, who are emotionally damaged, who commit criminal acts, or are just generally behaving weirdly. Society has empowered the clinical psychologist to make these determinations, to say who is sick, who is guilty, who needs treatment, and how to dispose of the case. The clinical psychologist has no, absolutely no, no kind, of science to base his or her judgement on. We simply do not know how people will behave in future, nor do we understand the working of the brain. "I have said it before, and I will say it again, there are no reliable valid, mental or `behavioral' tests for suspected child abuse worth a damn In this mythology, the individual is an impotent pawn of his environment and upbringing, and the family is more likely pathological, dysfunctional, and damaging. In contrast, "the ideas of free will and moral choice have vanished from the landscape." (p. 306) Clinical psychologists confidently assert that memories of trauma may be repressed, and will cheerfully help a client or witness in a criminal case excavate these repressed memories. This, despite that fact there is no evidence of repression anywhere in the large experimental literature on the subject. People can forget, they can avoid thinking of the unpleasant past, they may scramble memory, but they will not repress it. In clinical psychology children are fragile and have to be protected from the court, from their parents, and from unhappy experiences lest they be damaged forever. Yet, what we know about the brain, is that children heal more, better, and faster than adults, are more resilient, and can cope with adversity better than adults. This is a very interesting book, and, I think, essentially true as well.

SEND A COPY TO EVERY JUDGE IN YOUR COMMUNITY!! Ms. Hagen has done an OUTSTANDING job of exposing the fallacies of the Psych communities involvement in the legal system. If you are attempting to refute bad "science" this book will help you to understand how to go about it. It will not give you step by step instructions but the understanding of how and WHERE the flaws are will help to create questions and arguments against "SNAKE OIL SALESMEN" (might make a good follow up title?). I am buying a box and sending one to ALL of our judges. They ALL need to know what they are dealing with!

Based on testimony of one of those "psychoexperts," I have not seen nor spoken to my own children for more than 10 years, so I was enthusiastic about reading Prof. Hagen's book. But I was sorely disappointed: from the opening apologia for her "personal outrage," the book is a mishmash of promotional material for experimental psychology & condemnations of anything "clinical." It is poorly outlined, poorly written, badly edited (Restak & Restick in the same paragraph!), and, like so many of her colleagues, she repeatedly misreads Freud's "legacy." Freud, among others in the latter 19th century, sold the public on the idea that human beings could be objects of scientific inquiry, just like plants & animals; Prof. Hagen obviously believes this, and this places her squarely in the company of those she condemns. This is a surprisingly and sadly incoherent book, & Prof. Hagen can never quite explain why our courtrooms are overrun with psychoexperts: not because the experts are liars & the judges are fools but because they & Prof. Hagen sincerely believe that the scientist can explain the mysteries of human conduct by, to paraphrase Sartre, reducing the cultural order to the natural order.

Quiz Questions:

1. In what field did the author earn the letters she proudly displays behind her name?
2. What does she do for a living?
3. How much does she earn and who pays it?

If you wish, you're allowed to read this review, and even the book, before answering.

Hagen maintains the belligerent tone of the title and subtitle throughout her book, hissing and sizzling and inflating the text with epithets. That is a pity, because the unprofessional presentation of her quite valid arguments detracts from them.

What Hagen tells us is that the fields of psychology and psychiatry are scams. The so-called research done in these fields does not meet scientific criteria such as being repeatable, challengeable and refutable. It isn't possible to do scientific research in these fields because the factors affecting human behavior are too infinitely many and unknowable, let alone controllable. The Diagnostic Manual is baseless. Degrees people earn in these fields are not awarded to them for demonstrating skills or knowledge of facts, but rather for their having successfully memorized the beliefs held by others in the field. Often these beliefs are based on a single anecdotal case, with the supposed conclusions subsequently generalized to millions of people. We do not even know how normal people's minds work, let alone the minds of people who display deviant behavior. Definitions in this field are so fluid as to be useless. The information gathered is uncorroborated and the tests employed are based entirely on self-reporting. "Graduate and professional training programs ... fail because the task they have set for themselves is impossible." Psychological treatments have never been proven effective. No valid body of knowledge exists on which practitioners or "expert witnesses" can base their claims, nor can they be held accountable when they utter spectacular nonsense. When it comes to predicting future behavior, lay people consistently score higher than professionals. Psychologists and psychiatrists are employed by courts to help ease the judges' burden of making difficult judgments; and by government benefit programs as gatekeepers because somebody has to do the gate-keeping and we like to believe that these professionals are equipped to do it even though they are not. Millions of the taxpayers' dollars are wasted on these scam professionals.

All of this is true and cannot be said too often. But none of it is new, having been said decades earlier, mainly by Thomas Szasz, whom she does not mention anywhere in the book. She also does not mention compulsory civil commitment and compulsory treatment by these same sham professionals, and the incredible harm they do to the health of their victims, in addition to the injustice of depriving them of their liberty while they have been convicted of no crime.

Along the way Hagen slips in some of her political views. She is not opposed to government charity such as welfare and disability benefits, but feels the gatekeepers should be ordinary people, like a lay jury. This indeed would probably be a lot cheaper and no less fair, but no more fair either. The reality is that there just is no fair way to gatekeep government benefits.

Hagen furthermore apparently resents the success and power of white males, prompting her to make silly statements like, "... the workplace ... run by powerful white males ..." Obviously the workplace is run by somebody powerful, but how would she know the sex and color of the person who runs my workplace, and on what does she base her suggestion that someone of a different sex/color would do it differently?

Now, do you remember the Quiz Questions? Here they are again, with the answers:

1. In what field did the author earn the letters she proudly displays behind her name? According to the back flap of the dust cover, in developmental psychology, whatever that is.
2. What does she do for a living? Again according to the back flap, she teaches, presumably in the field of her Ph.D.
3. How much does she earn and who pays it? On this the back flap reveals nothing, but it would not surprise me that she makes a comfortable living, financed by the taxpayer.

Hagen justifies her own degree and employment as being like astronomy is to astrology. This is not a valid comparison, astrologers are not presumed to have studied the work of astronomers. A more valid comparison would be as medical researchers are to physicians. The former do the research, the latter study that research and apply it, in theory anyway. Szasz uses his credentials and career for blowing the whistle, Hagen doesn't. This is her only publication of this kind.

This book was, in her own words, "... inspired by that most banal and most questionable of motives -- personal outrage." She is angry that her older brother was sued in a civil case alleging psychological injury. He won, but his defense set him back $90,000. Her motive to settle the score with the psychologist who testified on behalf of the plaintiff is reflected not only in the tone of her language, but also in the frequent quotations from her brother's trial throughout the book.

I hope Hagen someday returns to this subject and writes a better book, making her excellent points in a more appropriate way.

An online PDF version of the book minus the introduction is available for free at the whoresofthecourt website.

Copyright © MeTZelf

There are two doctors that are whores for hire and will commit the innocent to institutions and have them forcefully medicated if they get the right price. Dr. Francisco Velarde and Dr. Kaushal Sharma are chilling charlatans and this book's author should investigate any cases involving these two vile whores.

Whores of the court. The court psychologists are liars working for the anti-family, anti-Christian, pro-Femily court. The judges are lawyers and everything that goes with what lawyers are infamous for. Some of the judges are psychopaths who take pleasure in hurting people. The court psychologists are the judge's prostitutes who keep doing tricks for the judges, covering the judge's back ends with fraud as they constantly hurt children and fathers. Femily court judges maintain power by knee-jerk severe judgments, by refusing to admit their failures when evidence shows them wrong and by using court psychologists to cover the judges' back ends. Court psychologists keep doing the tricks for judges as long as the judges force more people to go to the court psychologists and pay court psychologists $200 an hour like an entry level lawyer, when most of the other psychologists are billing around $80 per hour and taking insurance. It's a like a prostitution ring to generate Billions of dollars a year for friends and keep expanding the anti-family, anti-Christian anti-father society of the United States. Many psychologists speak scathingly about the corrupt court psychologists and their judge friends. Statistics show that children's lives are severely harmed by child trafficking into sole custody.

This was a great book. However, the writing style made it difficult to read sometimes. There were some sentences with more than 80 or so words in them. This book does point out just how limited and how wrong psychologists and psychiatrists can be in providing 'expert' opinion. Dr Hagen is to be congratualted for writing this book.

Oh, where to begin in critiquing this purportedly "clarion wake-up call" about the "fraud of psychiatric testimony" and the "rape of American Justice." To begin with, Ms. Hagen is quite clearly a staunch conservative with an agenda to discredit "liberal" social policy and the field of clinical psychology as a whole because she sees it as one and the same. She makes it clear that she does not believe in mental illness but personal responsibility, and that all offenders should be locked up (and that addicts, or as she calls them, "drunks" and "druggies" are just as bad as violent felons, and addiction is not a treatable disease). She makes only slightly veiled racist attacks on psychology and society as well, particularly in her claims that "for reasons I won't discuss," graduate classes on race and oppression are "always taught by African-Americans." According to Ms. Hagen, psychology is all a liberal agenda, to create a government to "take care of" everyone, which psychologists profit from by being the caretakers. In this same vein, she asserts that all psychologists (especially feminists) see everyone as "victims" in need of saving, but purely for their own economic agenda - to make money off of these "victims" by "treating" them. Which of course, in her expert opinion, is a scam for money because there is no treatment - she claims that psychotherapy absolutely does not work. Period. (And apparently all liberals - er, psychologists - view the American family as inherently dysfunctional, and blame the parents - and society - for everything.) Perhaps the most offensive is her subtle way of hinting that rape and child abuse and other trauma are not really traumatizing.

Ms. Hagen is out of touch with contemporary training and practice, even 13 years ago. To say all clinical psychologists are Freudian, that psychodynamic = Freudian, and that eclectic means Freudian plus something else is such an ignorant statement that anyone at all familiar with the field - or who had actually done some research - would have known better. And to claim that all graduate training in therapy technique is kept a "secret" is an outrageous lie - any book used in any such class is readily available for order on Amazon. Returning to her sweeping statements that all therapy is ineffective, she gives no mention of the success of CBT or other evidence based treatments, and even in the late 90's there was psychotherapy research literature out there. Ms. Hagen believes that psychology, like Skinner and the other strict behaviorists, should only be the study of behaviors in the lab, or of perception and cognitive processes (which is what she studies, naturally).

Whether intentional or simply ignorant (and I really can't decide which one is more likely), she also blurs and confuses psychologists with all other types of "therapists," not only including LCSWs and MFTs, but all other "healers" found in the New Age newspapers doing hypnotic past life regressions and bodywork therapies. She presents fringe therapies and therapists as mainstream and accepted by the profession of psychology, which could not be further from the truth. She also confuses psychiatry and psychology a lot, particularly around the DSM and "medicalization" of psychology.

Although this book is supposedly about expert witnesses in the court, she is all over the map in her attacks on psychology. She is extremely out of touch with contemporary forensic practices (again, even 13 years ago). Regarding prediction of violence, there was not a single mention of instruments - at that time the Hare Psychopathy Checklist was out, and had she done any research, she would have found that the initial HCR-20 (a structured clinical judgment instrument) was also out. Ms. Hagen doesn't even know what she's talking about with forensic practice. She thinks the psychologists "decide" competency and insanity (not true; it is the judge/jury), and she does not get that being incompetent to stand trial does not equal "get out of criminal proceedings." She also doesn't seem to understand that diagnosis does not equal insanity or incompetency. And the claim that psychological factors used as mitigating/exculpatory in 50% of criminal cases? Where on earth does she get this number? (No evidence to back it up...she completely makes it up). Above all, she completely confuses expert witnesses/testimony with lay/fact witnesses, treating therapists.

The worst, and the most ironic, flaw of this book is that she is completely biased in her sources, which she doesn't even cite or include half of the time - in fact, no "research" or "science" in making her claims. No basis. This is her core argument against psychology/psychiatry - that there is no evidence, no real science or research behind it - and yet she is more guilty of this charge than the profession she tries so hard to discredit. All of the "research" she cites, besides being completely self-serving, is completely outdated. She does not address or look at all the literature refuting or contradicting her claims.

Above all, this attack is all personal - she is angry, with a serious chip on her shoulder because of her brother. All throughout the book she relies on the transcript of his trial to somehow "prove" her argument.

In this long-winded emotional rant, she confuses clinical and forensic psychologists, assessment with treatment, and blurs all disciplines of mental health providers. Her point is continuously lost and derailed as she just spits venom, not really making a clear, coherent or logical case for anything.

This book is an excellent example of how not to make a case against psychology - or anything, for that matter.

The topic is an important one, but unfortunately this book doesn't do it justice. It is relatively incoherent and sprinkled with anachronisms about modern clinical psychology. There are no well-thought through arguments explaining why psychology should not be used in its current form in the courtroom, because the information presented about such psychology is so simplistic and biased that it is a straw man's argument to refute. Find other literature on this important issue.

Dr. Hagen cuts straight to the chase in this well researched novel. As a Psychology student, Whores of the Court provided exactly the kind of contemporary information I needed for several papers and presentations. One cannot read this novel and and not feel a deep sense of alarm and healthy skepticism towards our courts and those we put on the witness stand under the guise of "Expert Witness." Student, Professor and curious bypassers alike will definately benefit from this enlightening title