The Bizarre Case of Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, Harvard psychiatrist

A flash back to the bizarre case of Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, Harvard psychiatrist, taken from a report in the NY Times on September 18th, 1992.

Psychiatrist in Sex Abuse Case Offers Her License

Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been accused of sexually abusing one of her patients and contributing to his suicide, offered to resign her medical license today.

The offer was made four days before the state Board of Registration in Medicine was scheduled to present evidence against Dr. Bean-Bayog that could have led to the loss of her license.

After meeting tonight, members of the medical board announced that they would forward the letter and accompanying documents to the administrative judge in charge of the case for a decision on whether to go forward with the hearing on Monday, as scheduled.

But Jack Fabiano, the lawyer hired by the board to present the evidence against Dr. Bean-Bayog, called the resignation attempt "invalid" and said, "I view this as a highly improper attempt to circumvent normal trial procedures."

A member of the medical board, Paul Gitlin, said there were complications with Dr. Bean-Bayog's letter proposing her resignation, which would be permanent and would prevent her from practicing medicine anywhere in the nation. In most states, however, the loss of her medical license would not prevent Dr. Bean-Bayong from practicing as a therapist.

Continues to Declare Innocence

In her letter, Dr. Bean-Bayog continued to declare her innocence and denounced the board and the way it has treated her. Dr. Bean-Bayog said the hearing would be a "media circus" staged for "purely political purposes."

Dr. Bean-Bayog, who is 48 years old, said she wished to resign rather than endure "any further pandering to the public appetite for preposterous, salacious scandal." She specifically denounced both the state Secretary of Consumer Affairs, Gloria Larson, who has jurisdiction over the medical board, and Mr. Fabiano.

"I am not resigning because I fear the potential outcome of this hearing process," she wrote. "It is the process itself, which has already taken a heavy toll on me and my family, and not any potential verdict, that I find daunting."

Confession Unacceptable

In the last few weeks Dr. Bean-Bayog had been negotiating with the board for a settlement, but in her letter she said the board's offer to suspend her license was unacceptable because, she wrote, "It required me to confess to conduct I did not commit."

The medical board had prepared a strong case against her, people familiar with the case said, and it would have introduced evidence questioning her therapy methods and suggesting that she had become sexually involved with her patient, Paul Lozano, a Harvard Medical School student. Mr. Lozano, who began therapy with Dr. Bean-Bayog in 1986, killed himself with a large overdose of cocaine in April 1991 after she had stopped treating him.

Mr. Lozano's family has filed a lawsuit against Dr. Bean-Bayog charging her with malpractice and wrongful death. Andrew Meyer, the Lozano family's lawyer, said that Dr. Bean-Bayog's resignation would tend to help the family's case. Allegations Attract Notoriety

The case has attracted enormous national attention because of the sexual allegations and because of 3,000 pages of medical records introduced by Mr. Meyer that include sexual fantasies written by Dr. Bean-Bayog. At least two books and two television movies are in the works, and some of the hearing was to have been televised on Court TV. Officials of the state Division of Administrative Law Appeals, an independent state agency that is conducting the hearing, said they had received so many requests for press credentials that they had decided to move the proceeding to the State House auditorium, with a seating capacity of 600.

Dr. Bean-Bayog and some of her friends in the psychiatric community have said she is being unfairly singled out because she is a woman. They have argued that neither the press nor the medical board would have pursued the case so vigorously if she were a man.

Another psychiatrist, Dr. William Barry Gault, who also treated Mr. Lozano, first reported possible abuse by Dr. Bean-Bayog in late 1990. But it was not until last March, after Mr. Meyer filed 3,000 pages of evidence with the court and after the press subsequently began reporting about the case, that the medical board began its inquiry.

Sexual Fantasies Documented

Mr. Meyer's evidence included sadomasochistic sexual fantasies handwritten by Dr. Bean-Bayog, allegedly about Mr. Lozano, and flashcards she gave him.

One of the cards said: "Run over these cards every day until you know them all by heart and are starting to believe them." Another said, "I'm your mom and I love you and you love me very, very much. Say that 10 times." Still another said, "I'm going to miss so many things about you, the closeness and the need and the phenomenal sex."

Dr. Bean-Bayog has argued that these are examples of an accepted therapeutic technique called transference, in which the patient is asked to imagine the therapist as his mother.

Therapists often take patients back to their childhood to discover the source of troubling emotions. But Dr. Howard Zonana, a professor of psychiatry at Yale Medical School, said: "It is one thing if you do this in a role-playing session. It's another thing if someone's reality is getting confused. Most doctors would not actually say they are the mom."

The most serious allegations against Dr. Bean-Bayog, and those that would provide the board with its clearest cause to strip her of her license, are very hard to prove: that she sexually abused Mr. Lozano and that she contributed to his death. Dr. Bean-Bayog has denied any sexual involvement with Mr. Lozano.

Nevertheless, the board appeared ready to try to prove these accusations. Its expanded list of charges, filed in June, includes one that she "improperly conducted and utilized psychotherapy sessions." According to people familiar with the case, the board will use this to introduce testimony from several other psychiatrists who treated Mr. Lozano that he had told them she slept with him and masturbated in front of him during therapy sessions.

'Somewhat Unconventional'

On the issue of suicide, the board's charges contend that "Dr. Bean-Bayog's failure to conform to the standards of accepted medical practice caused harm to Paul Lozano." The board is expected to call expert witness on that subject.

A second difficulty is that while the medical board has charged Dr. Bean-Bayog with failing "to conform to the standards of accepted medical practice," there is widespread disagreement among therapists about the boundaries of proper psychotherapy. In one of her few public statements, Dr. Bean-Bayog acknowledged that her treatment was "somewhat unconventional," but she asserted that this was necessary because Mr. Lozano was an especially troubled patient.