In America, even people whose lives were mangled by this fantasy epidemic stick with magical thinking. Around the time Patricia Burgus was paid a $10.6 million settlement because her psychiatrist had convinced her she was a mass-murdering satanist cannibal who’d raped her children, she took them and her husband to the Vatican. “We wanted to thank God for seeing us through this ordeal,” she explained, “and rededicate our lives to Him.”
