In response to requests for more information on PAS for professionals who want to be better prepared in the courtroom, I recommend resources listed at the Leadership Council's website:
http://leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/faq.htm#PAS
The American Psychiatric Association, in updating its much-anticipated next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for clinicians, has decisively rejected a doctrine that has long been standard operating procedure in Rhode Island Family Court: a junk science called “parental alienation syndrome” (PAS).
http://leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/faq.htm#PAS
The American Psychiatric Association, in updating its much-anticipated next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for clinicians, has decisively rejected a doctrine that has long been standard operating procedure in Rhode Island Family Court: a junk science called “parental alienation syndrome” (PAS).
For more than two decades Rhode Island family court
litigants and their children have been subjected to court-ordered “therapy”
under psychologists Brian Hayden, John
Parsons, Lori Meyerson, Bernice Kelly, Judith Lubiner, Peter
Kosseff, licensed clinical social worker Haven Myles, and others who adhered to PAS and used the disgraced doctrine in
their clinical reports. Children sent to them were often forbidden to see their
own trusted counselors in the midst of the most frightening trauma of their
lives.
For the most part, Family Court judges do not want to hear
about the anguish of children who pull out their hair in clumps, pluck out
their eyelashes, suffer gastrointestinal distress, and wake up screaming with
night terrors. Why?
“I don’t have
any psychological training,” one judge told me. Lawyers say judges use
court-ordered “psych evaluations” in order to hang their “hats” on “hat-racks,”
as if to justify their judicial decisions with “expert” opinions. Perhaps these judges sleep better at
night than those of us who deal directly with children traumatized by judicial orders
that deprive them of the very parent and therapist they trust and need the
most.
Instead, judges rely on “therapists” carefully
recruited by attorneys with a vested interest, as Lise Iwon did in the case I have written about at http://littlehostages.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-did-lise-iwon-do-it.html
Though Iwon was supposed to be a neutral guardian ad litem, she described herself as a
member of the “team” and sat with the father's lawyers in the courtroom. Iwon’s
bill shows her urgent search for a therapist amenable to the father's defense strategy
of “parental alienation.” Then-DCYF Director Patricia
Martinez told me she had given Iwon permission to contract for up to
$30,000 for a psychiatric evaluation. The resulting document showed that Iwon instructed the clinician in PAS.
The defense strategy of “parental alienation” blames one
parent for a child’s aversion to the other parent without examining the
evidence that the despised parent is in fact abusive and sometimes
criminally so. It’s a cunning strategy that has brought buckets of gold to attorneys and psychologists. It has worked better on judges than previous strategies that urged clinicians to diagnose a battered mother as having borderline personality disorder or Munchausen's syndrome by proxy without ever asking whether her accuser might be a charming psychopath. Whenever lawyers drag a clinician's couch into the courtroom, their plan depends on disseminating a carefully contrived, and often completely fraudulent, narrative. Lawyers train litigants and “experts” in the narratives that work best on judges.
In the Iwon case cited above, I appealed to Child
Advocate Jametta Alston, who had already been told that this mother was “coaching” her children against
their father—a common term in parental alienation narratives. An Associate Justice, who declined to
take the case, was told another common narrative--that this case began as a simple
divorce case and the mother later claimed that her child had been sexually
abused. Court documents showed the exact opposite: DCYF had indicated the father for sexual abuse in January 2004, and
the mother reluctantly filed for divorce in April 2004. The defense team was already skewing the
truth to get this case so mired in Family Court that it would never get to where
it belonged—before a jury in Superior Court.
An entire section in the 2004 training manual, Guardian ad Litem Practice in Rhode Island, developed by a committee headed by then Associate Justice Haiganush Bedrosian and staffed by former
Chief Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah’s
top assistant, David Tassoni, made “parental alienation” seem like an acceptable argument in the courtroom. In a tumultuous custody case that same year involving a
Family Court deputy sheriff with a long history of domestic violence against
his wife and girlfriend, Tassoni told me that he was searching for a
psychologist who “understood parental alienation.” He found Lori Meyerson in a cramped office and
brought her in to write a chilling report recommending sole custody to the
deputy sheriff. Meyerson became a court favorite and set up her psychology
practice at the Regency Plaza. Tassoni left the court under a cloud in 2011
when the newly appointed Chief Judge Bedrosian and state police found that he
had neither the college nor law school credentials he claimed.
As recently as this Spring, Attorney Barbara A. Barrows concluded her article, “Parental Alienation
Syndrome in Divorce,” in the Rhode Island
Bar Journal (March/April 2012 , pp. 31-32) with the disingenuous statement:
“If a parent chooses to play the alienation game, it is the children who
ultimately pay.” In fact, it is defense lawyers themselves who devised this
game because it pays so handsomely.
The American Psychiatric Association holds that “parental
alienation” is neither a “syndrome” nor a mental disorder, and it does not
belong in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders. Nor does it belong in Rhode Island’s Family Court. It is finally time for those in charge to make this clear.
For more on the APA decision, see:
As always, Anne Grant welcomes comments and corrections to this article. You may also send your experiences, both positive and negative, with Family Court, DCYF, and court-ordered clinicians to her confidentially at ParentingProject@verizon.net
