Review Session, Annual Convention of the Canadian Psychological Association, St Johns NL. Exact time TBA.

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” - George Santayana. In the late 1980s and early 1990s concern swept North America that thousands of children and young adults had been ritually abused by satanic cults, and that this explained the common psychological symptoms that they were experiencing. This panic was sparked, in part, by the publication of Michelle Remembers, asubsequently-debunked book by a British Columbian practitioner. Mental health clinicians across the continent - including psychologists - succumbed to what turned out to be a mass delusion, damaging the lives of clients and their families in the process. After a time the hysteria subsided and the field moved on, without substantial reckoning with how the disaster had unfolded or how future degradations of practice could be prevented. Although the “satanic panic” is a particularly startling example of professional gullibility, it may serve as a model for prior and subsequent fads within the field. This presentation discusses the origins and nature of the panic, the failures of the mental health system and professions to intervene, and the vulnerabilities revealed in the process - vulnerabilities which, it is argued, remain today. Examples of more recent failures of critical thought are discussed, with the aim of promoting caution and humility in the face of tempting enthusiasms within the field.