Trauma survey delves into delayed recall.

A spate of lawsuits surrounding recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse has bolstered the suspicion that these jolting blasts from the past occur mainly in white, middle-class women exposed to dubious memory-recovery techniques in psychotherapy.

But a national survey now finds that a substantial minority of both men and women who have survived a range of severe traumas report having had periods of partial or complete memory loss of their experiences. Moreover, many cases of delayed recall involve blacks and Hispanics who have never sought psychotherapy.

"The phenomenon of delayed recall of personal trauma occurs most often for violent and really distressing events encountered by both sexes," asserts survey director Diana M. Elliott of the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine. "It's not primarily about white women in psychotherapy remembering sexual abuse."

Elliott presented her data in New York City this month at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.

Researchers who express skepticism about recovered memories, including D. Stephen Lindsay of the University of Victoria, Canada, argued at the meeting that sexually abused children rarely forget the violations they endure.

In the new survey, a majority of people who encountered severe trauma--childhood sexual abuse, military combat, or witnessing the murder or suicide of a loved one--indeed cited continuous recall of the events. But about 20 percent of severe trauma survivors noted a period of temporary amnesia for the entire experience, and another 20 percent said that at some time they had forgotten important details of the trauma.

Memory-disrupting traumas tended to occur repeatedly, to afflict children or adolescents, to include violent acts, and to cause high levels of self-reported distress, Elliott says.

Her sample consisted of 280 women and 225 men age 18 to 75 who responded to a mailed questionnaire. The participants, who came from various races, ethnic groups, and income levels, reported experiencing traumatic events at a rate that corresponds roughly to previous population estimates.

For instance, 27 percent survived an automobile accident; 23 percent lived through a natural disaster of some sort; 26 percent had been physically assaulted as an adult; and 20 percent cited childhood physical abuse. Among women, 11 percent said they had been raped as an adult, and 30 percent reported childhood sexual abuse. About 14 percent of men reported childhood sexual abuse.

Trauma survivors who consulted a psychotherapist at some time displayed the same rate of delayed recall as those who did not, Elliott says. Blacks and Hispanics cited more instances of delayed recall of trauma than whites, she adds. This reflects the greater proportion of poverty in the black and Hispanic populations, which increases their likelihood of encountering such trauma, in the UCLA researcher's view.

Of participants who reported forgetting all or part of a trauma temporarily, most noted that an event triggered the recovery of their memory. More than half said that something they saw or read in the media prompted recall. Nearly one-third of victims of childhood sexual abuse recovered memories in connection with an instance of consensual adult sex. Other memory prods included experiencing an event similar to the original trauma, a conversation with a family member or friend, a dream or nightmare, and a physically violent encounter.

Psychotherapy was the least commonly noted cue for the return of traumatic memories, cited by 14 percent of the delayed-recall group.

Prior studies suggest that a small portion of those surveyed provided false reports of childhood sexual abuse or other traumas (SN: 9/18/93, p.184). A roughly equal number probably failed to report traumas they had actually experienced, Elliott says.

"These data are an important step forward and confirm what many clinicians have seen," holds Christine A. Courtois of the Psychiatric Institute of Washington (D.C.). "There are many cues to retrieving traumatic memories in our environments, and psychotherapy is not the strongest one."