In Therapy Gone Mad, journalist Carol Lynn Mithers offers a riveting story of betrayal by psychology and psychotherapy on a massive scale.

The Center for Feeling Therapy was founded in Los Angeles in 1971 by a group of dissidents from Arthur Janov's Primal Institute. Its charismatic leaders, Joe Hart and Richard "Riggs" Corriere, soon reached the mainstream, writing several books and appearing on "The Tonight Show" to hawk their radical approach to therapy.

But soon after the Center's closing, on the eve of Ronald Reagan's election victory, patients began to file charges of physical and sexual abuse with the California authorities; the Center had become a cult community where patients' lives were no longer their own. Mithers methodically builds her story of the evolution of a cult from its seemingly innocent, hopeful beginning to its horrifying, explosive end

1. What drew these patients there? Who were they, what happened to them, where are they now? Through their own eyes, Mithers recreates the Center's astonishing rise and fall through the 1970s - that "lost" decade when psychotherapy became an essential tool to "finding yourself." What she has achieved here is a stunning look at the search for inner fulfillment that wreaked havoc on many of the young people of the Sixties as they tried to grow up.

Therapy Gone Mad is a gripping portrait of a generation looking for itself - and of our obsession, as a society, with the cult of psychotherapy.