Parental Alienation: A Mental Diagnosis?

Parental Alienation: A Mental Diagnosis?
Some experts say the extreme hatred some kids feel toward a parent in a divorce is a mental illness
By Lindsay Lyon
Posted October 29, 2009

From an early age, Anne was taught by her mother to fear her father. Behind his back, her mom warned that he was an unpredictable and dangerous; any time he'd invite her to do anything—a walk in the woods, a trip to the art store—she would craft an excuse not to go. "I was under the impression that he was crazy, that at any moment he could just pop and do something violent to hurt me," says Anne, who prefers that only her middle name be used to guard her family's privacy. Typical of a phenomenon some mental-health experts now label "parental alienation," her view of him became so negative, she says, that her mother persuaded her to lie during a custody hearing when the couple divorced. Then 14, she told the judge that her dad was physically abusive. Was he? "No," she says. "But I was convinced that he would [be]." After her mother won custody, Anne all but severed contact with her father for years.

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Comments:

Children are torn apart by parents who suffer from pathological envy, narcissism, disavowal, perverse modes of thought, and a perverse attitude toward reality. The focus should remain on parental behavior. Why drag the kids into this? Not one comment in this growing column makes any sense to me. My little girl is not sick; her father is sick. I don’t care to see her slapped with some stupid UN-scientific diagnosis then sucked in to swallowing a bunch of poisonous psychotropic drugs to help her deal with it. And the last thing we need are more swindling shrinks in the courtroom mouthing off about some junk science called PAS, distracting the judge from his job of protecting children from hateful parents who simply can’t cope unless they’re smacking their ex with back-to-back barratrous legal action. The only person making any sense to me right now is Dr. Michael Donner; every family court judge in this country should read, and memorize, his article “Tearing the Child Apart…” Find an extract at http://mommygobyebye-virginia.blogspot.com/2009/08/michael-donner-phd-pathological-envy.html.

CCHR Comment... Parent Alienation - Another bogus mental disorder: Child is “mentally ill” if one parent has “alienated” him from the other
The phenomenon has been described for many decades, but it became a cause célèbre in 1985, when Richard Gardner, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, coined the term “parental alienation syndrome.” The American Psychological Association has issued a statement that “there is no evidence within the psychological literature of a diagnosable parental alienation syndrome.” http://www.cchrint.org/ http://www.cchrint.org/2009/10/29/parent-alienation-bogus-disorder/