Current Title: "Independent Health, Wellness, and Fitness Professional" in Washington, DC (per her LinkedIn profile).
Education: PhD in Psychology, Northwestern University, 1977
Notable Titles and Acts:
- Co-Founder of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (1983); winner of ISSTD “Distinguished Achievement Award” (1992); ISSTD Fellow
- Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital (Chicago), 1985-1998.
- Co-Founder and variously Head Psychologist, Educational Director, Senior Clinical Consultant, and Director of Training, Dissociative Disorders Program and Unit, Rush North Shore Medical Center (Skokie), 1987-1998
- Author of Processing memories retrieved by trauma victims and survivors: A primer for therapists, as well as 15+ research articles and book chapters.
Career:
- Co-founded, with Bennett Braun, the first inpatient dissociative disorders unit in the country at Rush North Shore Medical Center in 1987. The unit would be shuttered in 1998 after the hospital, Braun, and a colleague lost a $10.6 million lawsuit over the treatment of Patricia Burgus and her family.
- Cited with gross negligence and unprofessional conduct in a probe stemming from the Burgus case, but avoided punishment by testifying against Braun.
- Sued, along with Bennett Braun, D. Corydon Hammond, and Rush, by former patient Elizabeth Gale, who had been convinced of her role as a ‘breeder’ in Satanic cult and had a tubal ligation as a result. Sachs lost $3.1 million in the 2004 settlement, with Rush and the others losing an additional $4.1 million.
- Published a bizarre paper in 1990 detailing the roles of sex and reproduction in the transgenerational Satanic cults that she had come to belive in.
- In 1990-1993, played a central role in the treatment of Mary Shanley and her son, who would become convinced of their involvement in a Satanic cult, including bearing and sacrificing a child and other murders. Shanley would eventually recant and sue Sachs and others, but not before losing her husband, home, and long teaching career.
- Subject of a 1998 disciplinary order by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which found her responsible for manipulating a family into inappropriately committing all of their children into a psychiatric hospital, convincing the children they were abused by “transgenerational satanic cults,” and inappropriately prescribing psychotropic medications, among other ethical violations. She was found guilty of numerous charges, including:
- Gross Negligence;
- Unethical, Unauthorized, and Unprofessional Conduct;
- A Pattern of Practice or Other Behavior Which Demonstrates That Respondent Practiced Beyond Her Competency.
- Named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1998 criminal trial USA v. Peterson, having treated the central patient Mary Shanley at Rush, and having provided her formal diagnosis of MPD stemming from cult abuse in the first five minutes of her intake interview.
- In 2002, subject of disciplinary action against her Illinois license. The allegations were failure to keep appropriate records of treatment and failure to question the problematic medication protocols of the psychiatrist prescribing to her patient. As a result, she was fined and her license reprimanded.
- Sued in 2004 by Marsha Koppien and her two daughters for having led them to believe that they were subjects of a transgenerational Satanic cult.
In Her Own Words:
- Pregnancy, while also a means of perpetuating the gene pool of cult members, is also viewed as a method for offering new souls to Satan. In "normal" social groups, every effort is made to preserve the life of one's offspring. However, in Satanic cults.a specific selection process determines which babies will live or die. For example, some cult members are designated as "breeders" and their task is to produce children who will be offered as sacrifices in Satanic rituals or for black market trade. Breeders are sadistically abused while pregnant and often it is considered a challenge to see how much torture they can endure without aborting their unborn child. Breeders suffer this abuse because it is a way for them to advance in the cult hierarchy of power. The young children of cult members are forced to play a prominent role in various sadistic sexual and sacrificial rituals at an early age. Afterwards, they are forced to cannibalize the dead sacrifice as part of their initiation into the cult. Until recently, many psychologists and psychiatrists were likely to incorrectly interpret the reports of former cult members as sadistic fantasies. (from the abstract to The Role of Sex and Pregnancy in Satanic Cults." Pre- and Peri-natal Psychology Journal Volume 5, Issue 2 December, 1990 pp 105-114)
- Patients that I have dealt with who remained in the cult and became active perpetrators and became leaders of the cult, when they began to discover what they have done at an adult level there is really very little desire to live. They lose all reason for going on. It's a very difficult treatment issue to work with because it’s a reality. Whether they’ve been programmed or brainwashed or whatever, the truth is they have participated in blatant murder. ("Ritual Child Abuse: A Professional Overview" (Cavalcade Productions 1989))
- “... in the Catholic ritual of Holy Communion, a priest symbolically turns bread into the body of Christ which is then ingested by the congregation as a way of commingling with the spirit of God. However, in Satanic groups, human bodies are actually eaten by cult members as a way of delivering their souls to Satan.” (1990)
- “In highly dissociative or multiple personality disorder clients, the internal parts or alters that the therapist may not have met are watching and listening to determine whether a safe environment exists for their later therapeutic work.” (1994)
- “Then a client is dissociative or multiple, an instant age regression may occur when the alter that emerges remembers the past trauma being processed. However, child alters are not considered age regressed but developmentally frozen back in time due to traumatic events.” (1994)
- “When the client has some perception of parts, those parts are often quite willing to “try out” initial blending activities by coming closer together.” (1994)
