Dr Colin Ross: ‘A well-respected and dangerous fool’

Yesterday, in one of those strangely convoluted online wanders from link to link, we happened across a fascinating, if horrifying, Canadian-made video. It’s an episode of a CBC Television programme called Fifth Estate, and it tackles the thorny topics of “dissociative identity disorder (DID)”, false memories, and medical malpractice. At the heart of the programme is a character whose name rang a dull thud in the back of EC’s brain…Dr Colin A. Ross.

We’d heard Dr Ross mentioned in the past, but had never really paused to look into his role in promoting not only DID, but also the myth of Satanic ritual abuse, MK Ultra mind control programming, Manchurian candidate-style super-soldiers…you name it, Dr Ross seems to have had a finger in it. This video is well worth watching, despite some cringe-worthy scenes of grown adults seemingly reverting to thumb-sucking, clay-tossing babyhood:

On his own website, Dr Ross describes himself:

Dr. Ross is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of dissociation and trauma-related disorders. He is the founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma.

Dr. Ross obtained his M.D. from the University of Alberta in 1981 and completed his training in psychiatry at the University of Manitoba in 1985. He has been running a hospital-based Trauma Program in Dallas, Texas since 1991.

Dr. Ross’ book, The Trauma Model: A Solution To the Problem of Comorbidity in Psychiatry, was first published in 2000, with a second edition appearing in 2007. Other books of his include: Trauma Model Therapy. A Treatment Approach for Trauma, Dissociation and Complex Comorbidity (2009); The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists (2006); Moon Shadows: Stories of Trauma & Recovery (2007); Structural Dissociation. A Proposed Modification of the Theory (2013); and The Trump Card. A Psychiatrist Analyzes Reactions to Donald Trump (2017).

Hmm. Sounds legit. Lots of big psychiatric words. And yet….

It seems that many people have strong opinions about Dr Ross’ work. For example, a citation from the Dysgenics blog notes that Dr Ross “was fired from a Winnipeg hospital for practicing “fraudulent and dangerous medicine” and was sued for malpractice in Texas”.

And tucked away in the Google archive, one may find an intriguing document titled “Evidence Against Dr. Colin A. Ross, vol. 1“:

It was in 1985 that a Winnipeg psychiatrist Dr. Colin A. Ross first introduced a radical form of pop psychiatry into Manitoba health care. From 1985 to 1991 Ross divided his time between the St. Boniface General Hospital, the University of Manitoba and preaching his new found mental health ideas at seminars. Ross has been described as a young, charismatic and dynamic speaker.

Although Dr. Ross did not have the medical, scientific or police evidence to back up his ideas, he nevertheless maintained that almost all emotional disorders (anxiety, depression, dysfunctional relationships etc.) and many mental illnesses were caused by childhood incest or childhood assaults by Satanic cults. And if Ross’s patients could not recollect memories of the sexual assaults, Ross would tell them that they (the patients) had involuntarily blocked out or repressed the abuse memories and that the repressed memories resided in the patient ‘alters’ which were not accessible to the conscious memory (or host alter). By the use of brainwashing techniques (suggestive questioning, drug therapy, hypnosis, calling out alters, age regression, group validation etc.) Ross had no difficulty convincing his patients that their disorder was the result of childhood incest and/or Satanic cult abuse. Two of Dr. Ross’s favorite psychiatric medications were prescribing overdoses of Halcion (triazolam) and giving sodium amytal injections. Ross also performed experimental new drug testing for large Drug Corporations.

Patients would readily produce horrendous false memories of incest and/or having been abused by Satanic cults to account for their illness. Ross would diagnose these patients as having Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and his treatment plan was to uncover the memories and integrate the alter personalities into one. There was no scientific or medical basis for this diagnoses and plan of treatment.

So it appears that Dr Ross wasted no time at all, jumping straight from his psychiatric training at the University of Manitoba in 1985 into a “radical form of pop psychiatry” involving helping his patients “uncover repressed memories”.

During the course of her malpractice suit against him, one of Dr Ross’ former patients swore in an affidavit that “all of his DID patients became suicidal”:

A former patient of Dr. Colin A. Ross from 1986 to 1991 states that she was wrongfully diagnosed by Ross who used brainwashing techniques to implant false childhood memories. [She] states that she witnessed the wrongful deaths of Ross’s patients, and that Ross prescribed massive, noxious doses of psychiatric drugs to her at the St. Boniface General Hospital in Winnipeg for five years….

[She] says Ross would encourage his drug induced patients to commit suicide. By way of sworn statements, and other evidence, this Dossier alleges that Ross was dismissed from his position at the St. Boniface General Hospital in 1991 for causing the wrongful deaths of five patients. Ross’s dismissal was concealed and covered up, allowing him to become certified by the Texas State Board of Medical examiners. After assessing the drug prescription resume of [name redacted] as a patient of Dr. Ross, it is the writer’s view that Ross attempted to cause [her] death by way prescribing massive overdoses of drugs and suggesting to her that she commit suicide.

In July 1998 Dr. Colin A. Ross was charged with fraud, gross negligence, fraudulent concealment, and conspiracy to commit fraud in the State of Texas. He was charged in Texas for practicing the same fraudulent medicine that he practiced at the St. Boniface General Hospital from 1985 to 1991. Charges were also filed against Ross in the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench in l994 and 1997. To date no one has been successful in getting Ross into Court.

It seems that Dr Ross has not limited himself to the psychiatric quackery of DID, however.

As suggested in the video above, some of his writings have branched out into full-blown conspiranoid “research” and speculation about the CIA’s MK Ultra mind-control programme:

As far as Ross “proving” the existence of a satanic conspiracy and CIA mind-control, of course he’s done nothing of the sort. What Ross has done is collected and published a number of documents – available to anybody by way of Freedom Of Information Act request – relating to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments that began in the 1950s, continuing till at least the late ’60s, in response to Cold War fears that the Soviets had perfected the same.

In the course of the project’s mind-control research, MK-ULTRA experimented with a variety of drugs – sometimes on unwitting citizens – in an effort to find the perfect truth-serum. While some drugs made most subjects more chatty, none reliably provoked the unrestrained revelation of guarded secrets that experimenters had hoped for. In fact, the potential for the subject to divulge unreliable, false, fabricated information was found to be so high that the drugs employed as truth serums were eventually disregarded as useless. [3]

Similarly, hypnosis was concluded to be worthless insofar as military applications are concerned. Ross nonetheless suggests – flaunting the existence of documents that demonstrate experiments in hypnotic mind-control were attempted – that the United States is currently engaged in the production of hypnotically brain-washed agents, “Manchurian Candidates”, to carry out Top-Secret operations and assassinations.

The irony of Ross’s self-styled expertise regarding MK-ULTRA is that knowledge of the actual results of the MK-ULTRA experiments should have served to correct him – in advance – of errors made in his clinical practice: As a therapist working with Multiple Personalities, Ross has used many of the same techniques proven unreliable during MK-ULTRA to extract information from his client’s “alters” (alternate personalities), including hypnosis and “truth serum” (sodium amytal).

On his own website, Dr Ross makes this bizarre claim:

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) (www.randi.org) offers a One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. The Foundation will award a prize of $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal ability or phenomenon. Dr. Ross’s Challenge was accepted by the JREF and Dr. Ross is waiting for a response to his proposed protocol.

Dr. Ross claims that he can make a tone sound out of a speaker using an energy beam he sends out through his eyes. James Randi accepted this as a claim of the paranormal.

Well. All righty then.

And just for larfs, here are a few quotes from Dr Ross himself:

...One of her alters had a clear memory of aliens coming into her apartment, impregnating her, coming back later to remove the fetus, than returning years later to show her the half-human, half-alien child they were raising among the stars. This alter was mortified when I raised the possibility that the aliens were possibly not literally real:-

Margaret made this claim before I had heard about the current epidemic of UFO abductions. I did not realize, when I heard Margaret’s story, that thousands of people in North America have similar memories. If the abductions are real, it would appear that the human race is being used as breeders, with amnesia for the human participation implanted hypnotically by the aliens. Margaret taught me that there is a connection of some kind between UFO abductions and the use of women as breeders for Satanic cults.

Colin Ross, M.D.
The Osiris Complex, P. 149

I have met many demons, devils, evil characters, representatives of Satan, and Satan himself in my MPD work.

C. Ross, M.D.
The Osiris Complex; 1994

How can one determine if an entity is an alter or a demon? This question would be dismissed as irrelevant by the vast majority of psychiatrists and psychologists, and regarded as unscientific. The Evil One taught me otherwise.

C. Ross, M.D.
The Osiris Complex; 1994

 

In an article on The Process blog, author Doug Mesner states,

Dr. Colin Ross’s delusions are hardly concealed.  He is a known conspiracy theorist who helped construct the Satanic cult hysteria of the eighties to mid-nineties.  He has written and lectured regarding nefarious mind-control projects within the CIA, and even – in an interesting case of possible projection – speculation regarding the “iatrogenic [clinically produced] creation of Multiple Personality Disorder” by CIA psychiatrists….

Ross can not be dismissed as a marginal fool.  He is a well-respected and dangerous fool.

We really don’t think we could have said it better.