Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The Profession
I've read some of the comments over the last few days, and frankly, I'm a little disappointed about some thing that you be surprised that I'd be disappointed about.
I've thought about not even posting my thoughts on this, because, in a sense, I'm "biting the hand that feeds me" (again).
There have been posts by a few people who claim to be shrinks, both here, and in the San Francisco Chronicle comments section. They express empathy to the victims of ayres, and they mention that ayres "Disgraced us all."
To be sure, I would STILL like to hear others in the profession comment on this, but what I REALLY want to know is: Where the hell were the comments like this BEFORE there was precious little chance of any conviction, and when speaking up might have made you a little out of place with your colleagues?
I can think of only a very small handful of people who were ASSOCIATED with ayres in the past who spoke up BEFORE or during the criminal trial, and one of those few was a judge, so doesn't really count. There is a laundry list of shrinks who sent out requests for support of ayres legal woes. ( some of them are pictured above) and one has supported ayres in public ( Etta Bryant).
But few have spoken up to clarify that:
A) It is a sham that ayres was claiming to do physicals. ( These were NOT physicals.)
B) Psychiatrists don't do physicals.
Where are all of you, why aren't you being vocal? You're complaining about your profession being disgraced: if you really care, then why didn't you speak up when it counted? If 50 shrinks in the bay area had stated in the press that this claim was bullshit, there would have been public outcry at the outcome of the first trial. If you had hounded the DA and the press about this "Disgrace" BEFORE the first trial, you all could have saved some of the disgrace brought to you profession.
You didn't.
When I spent years in therapy as an adult, wanting desperately to talk about the problem, and while displaying classic symptoms of an adult who had suffered child molestation, I was never asked once about where those symptoms might have come from. I was dying to be asked, and no shrink ever did.
I don't know that there's much disgrace left for your profession to suffer.
Well, so much for gratitude, right? I guess as this drags on and on, I have very little grace left in me. But at least I'm growing a pair of balls.
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Blame must also go to the San Mateo District Attorney's office, for failing to investigate Ayres' key claim that he was trained to do physical exams- including the genitalia- on boys in therapy at Judge Baker in Boston. The prosecution knew that, because one of Ayres' own partners told her so after Ayres was arrested.
ReplyDeleteOn this blog in January, 2010, the prosecutor claimed she contacted several doctors who trained with Ayres in Boston, but ---- she claims they couldn't confirm that they weren't trained to do physicals.
Fast forward to last week's competency trial. Deepsounding described the following that occurred during testimony:
"The “training” line of discussion allowed McKowan to discuss the fact that while ayres insists that he was trained to do “physicals,” while McDougall was preparing for the re-trial, he was unable to find a doctor willing to testify to that fact."
Riddle me this: how is that it was Ayres' OWN lawyer who was the one ended up being the one to refute Ayres' claim about his being trained to do physicals in Boston training in Boston?
Shouldn't this have been the job of the prosecutor?
If Ayres' own lawyer could not find a single doctor to back up Ayres' statement about his training, why wasn't the prosecutor able to determine this herself? Did she even try to get to the bottom of Ayres' training?
Why did the Judge Baker administration ask a reporter in 2009 why NO ONE from the San Mateo District Attorney's thought to fact check Ayres' claim?
Why was a reporter able to find more than 40 doctors who had trained at Judge Baker when Ayres was there who said he was lying when Ayres claimed he was trained to do physicals? How is it that the prosecutor was not able to find a single doctor from Boston who would confirm to her that Ayres wasn't trained to do this?
Did the prosecutor make false statements on this blog and to the public about her efforts to contact these doctors? Why is there such a discrepancy in her stories? Why does she attribute information to them that they said did not come from them?
Why did she say that one of the doctors she spoke to was "physically unable to travel" when the doctor claims the San Mateo prosecutor never contacted her at all?
Why WOULDN'T the DA's office want to get to the bottom of Ayres' training? Was there an unconscious wish on the part of the office to sabotage the trial?
I am angry and sorry that at first some in the medical profession out in California stuck by Ayres.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I talked to many, many child psychiatrists who trained at Judge Baker in Boston when Ayres was there, and NONE of them defended him. They were horrified and appalled to hear that he was touching boys in ANY shape or form in therapy, as that was NOT part of their training. These doctors were disgusted with Ayres and expressed sympathy for the boys.
Doctors who trained at Yale when Ayres was there were also disgusted with him.
The Judge Baker doctors I spoke with hadn't seen or heard from Ayres since the 1960s. I am guessing he cut off ties because he didn't want any of these doctors to cross paths with the shrinks in California he had snowed about having been trained at Judge Baker to do physicals.
What the doctors from Yale, Judge Bake,r and Boston Children's Hospital expressed to me was an amazement that ANYONE in California would believe Ayres' bogus stories about his East Coast training.
@deepsounding why did you wait so many years to speak up?
ReplyDeleteLook what happened when 15 year old Greg H. told his therapist, Jeff Lugerner in 1987 that Ayres had molested him. When the police confronted Ayres, Ayres said he "was trained to do physicals" back East in Boston. The police never bothered to check this lie out.
ReplyDeleteDamned if you do speak up, and damned if you don't.
Anonymous at June 22, 2011, 11:37AM:
ReplyDeleteThanks for asking. Perhaps you should do some reading here or other places on the internet that cover such issues. They've been covered in depth.
Or perhaps you have some point that you were pussyfooting around?
Just in:
ReplyDeletePedophile pediatrician Dr. Earl Bradley, indicted on 470 counts of raping and molesting children in Delaware was convicted yesterday:
Bradley indicted: February, 2010
Bradley Convicted: June, 2011.
Dr. William Ayres: arrested April 2007
June 2011: Still no conviction.
For shame, San Mateo County DA's office, for doing such a piss poor, half-assed job. Stacked up to other cases of pedophile doctors around the country,where doctors were convicted in a speedy manner, the San Mateo's incompetence and foot dragging is not just pathetic, but also highly suspect.
I have seen the fact of Psychiatrists being trained as MD's being used to justify his perversion of ayres.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for training psychiatrists in Medicine is so that they can recognize mental illness caused by physical illness not so that they can be both MD and Psychiatrist. It is hardly likely that a boy or girl in for a juvenile behavior problem evaluation has a mental illness caused by their genitals. I don’t think any mental illness is caused by genitals.
To Anonymous, For asking why wait so long to tell. Even if you're pussyfooting here is my take for those honestly interested in the anomaly.
The reasons given vary and seem to me to be mostly subjective and in the form of self-explanation. The fact of delayed reporting is that most male victims of sexual abuse in childhood, who are not helped at the time or very soon after, do not start to talk openly about it until past the age of forty.
I do not know why but if you spend any time on websites for male victims and survivors they are mostly middle-aged men who have as many explanations for the late onset of being able/willing to talk as there are men.
But the single most common statistic if you will, is that abused boys (sexual and otherwise) are mostly middle aged when they begin to talk about it.
In general Social Conditioning in America is much more deeply ingrained and powerful than people know or are willing to admit. That conditioning says to every boy that they can never admit to having been humiliated or that humiliation will be a permanent daily torment. We are a very Spartan people and any sort of male weakness, such as being a vulnerable boy, is seen as legitimate to exploit for the thrill of inflicting more humiliation if not to make money from it.
C