LANSING – A Houghton County medical malpractice case involving a therapist’s alleged false accusations of sexual abuse is headed to the Michigan Supreme Court.

According to appeals court documents, the Supreme Court will rule on a motion to dismiss the case on the basis the mental health counselor, Kathryn Salmi of Hancock, had no “duty of care to avoid harming third parties” – the patient’s parents – through her treatment.

If the Supreme Court finds she does have that duty, the case will return to the Houghton County Circuit Court, where Lale and Joan Roberts of Bruce Crossing allege Salmi used highly controversial recovered memory therapy to create false memories of sexual abuse in their child, who is now an adult and not a party to the case.

In Dec. 2014, an appeals court in a 2-1 ruling overturned a Houghton Circuit Court decision that Salmi did have a duty to the Roberts’.

None of the parties nor their lawyers chose to comment for this article, but the appeals court’s decision stated in its fact finding that Salmi reported allegations of sexual abuse by the teen patient to the Department of Human Services about two months after beginning therapy in 2009.

According to the document, both the DHH investigator and Michigan State Police officers investigated the allegations and questioned other family members, but neither found reason to press charges or take other action against Lale or Jane Roberts.

In 2012, the Roberts sued, alleging Salmi had used “recovered memory therapy,” a treatment that uncovered hundreds of alleged sexual abuse cases in the 1980s but has since fallen far out of favor. According to online sources, the practice is highly divisive among psychiatrists and sometimes involves hypnosis, drugs such as sodium amytal and content suggestive of abuse.

In 1994 the American Medical Association issued a warning against repressed or recovered memory therapy. States have widely disallowed evidence discovered using the therapy, and there have been several successful lawsuits against therapists by patients, and sometimes their families, claiming they were harmed by falsely suggestive therapy.

In a court affidavit, however, Salmi said she “does not offer or practice ‘Repressed or Recovered Memory Therapy'” and “at no time used any suggestive techniques with clients.”

The affidavit said she did not “believe in exploring for such events or traumas when not presented to me as an issue by the client.”

Lawsuits for repressed memory therapy malpractice aren’t uncommon, but the Roberts’ third-party suit without their daughter as a plaintiff puts them, and the Michigan courts, in relatively uncharted territory.

In his dissent against the ruling to allow the suit, Court of Appeals Judge David Sawyer wrote that allowing a third-party suit would “create a duty between a therapist and a patient’s parents” not currently recognized by Michigan law, and that this “represents a policy decision best left to the legislature.”

The most widely-cited repressed memory case online, though, involves accused-abuser father Gary Ramona, who was awarded $500,000 in damages against a therapist, a doctor and the Western Medical Center in Anaheim by a California court in 1994, without a retraction by his accuser.

The Michigan Supreme Court granted Salmi’s leave to appeal on Sept. 16. A court date hasn’t yet been scheduled.