The following is information, letters I received regarding Parental
Alienation Syndrome:
Dr Richard A. Gardner
A Child psychiatrist who developed the theory of Parental Alienation
Syndrome
31 May 2003
Richard Alan Gardner, psychiatrist: born New York 28 April 1931; MD 1956;
twice married (one son, two daughters); died Tenafly, New Jersey 25 May
2003.
In a contentious child custody dispute in the suburbs of Pittsburgh a few
years ago, three teenage boys begged a family court judge not to force them
to continue visits to their father because, they said, he was physically
abusive towards them. Rather than believe the boys, the judge relied on the
testimony of an expert witness retained by the father, a Columbia University
professor of clinical psychiatry, Richard A. Gardner.
Gardner insisted the boys were lying as a result of brainwashing by their
mother and recommended something he called "threat therapy".
Essentially,
the Grieco boys were told they should be respectful and obedient on visits
to their father and, if they were not, their mother would go to jail.
Shortly afterwards, 16-year-old Nathan Grieco, the eldest of the brothers,
hanged himself in his bedroom, leaving behind a diary in which he wrote that
life had become an "endless torment". Both Gardner and the court were
unrepentant even after the suicide, and it was only after an exposÈ in the
local newspaper that custody arrangements for the two surviving boys were
changed.
This "threat therapy" was part of a much broader theory of
Gardner's known
in family courts across the United States as "Parental Alienation
Syndrome".
The theory - one of the most insidious pieces of junk science to be given
credence by US courts in recent years - holds that any mother who accuses
her spouse of abusing the children is lying more or less by definition. She
tells these lies to "alienate" the children from their father, a
shocking
abrogation of parental responsibility for which she deserves to lose all
custody rights in favour of the alleged abuser.
This is not only tawdry logic, guaranteed from the outset to protect the
interests of divorcing fathers, by far Gardner's most enthusiastic
constituency, but it has also destroyed the lives of hundreds, maybe
thousands, of American families over the past 15 years. In state after
state, courts deferred to Gardner's academic credentials and put children in
the custody of their alleged abuser, even in cases where police records,
medical records and testimony by teachers and social workers supported the
mother's accusations.
By now, the concept of "parental alienation" has entered case
law and
swayed thousands of disputes in which Gardner himself played no part. Yet it
has no scientific basis whatsoever. It is not recognised by the American
Psychiatric Association or any other professional body. The stream of books
that Gardner produced on the subject from the late 1980s were all
self-published, without the usual peer review process. His method for
determining the reliability of sex abuse allegations was denounced by one
noted domestic violence expert, Jon Conte of the University of Washington,
as "probably the most unscientific piece of garbage I've seen in the field
in all my time".
Nobody with experience of high-conflict divorce cases would deny that
mothers, in some cases, make false allegations against their spouses. But
Gardner went much further. He believed that 90 per cent of mothers were
liars who "programmed" their children to repeat their lies, and never
mind
the corroborating evidence. He theorised that mothers alleging abuse were
expressing, in disguised form, their own sexual inclinations towards their
children.
And he suggested there was nothing much wrong with paedophilia,
incestuous
or not. "One of the steps that society must take to deal with the present
hysteria is to 'come off it' and take a more realistic attitude toward
paedophilic behaviour," he wrote in Sex Abuse Hysteria - Salem Witch Trials
Revisited (1991). Paedophilia, he added, "is a widespread and accepted
practice among literally billions of people". Asked once by an interviewer
what a mother was supposed to do if her child complained of sexual abuse by
the father, Gardner replied: "What would she say? Don't you say that about
your father. If you do, I'll beat you."
It beggars belief that such a figure would be taken seriously by family
court judges but, in an adversarial system where fathers often have more
money to spend on divorce cases, Gardner's theories have proved remarkably
persuasive. The journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry wrote in 1996 that a book of Gardner's, Protocols for the
Sex-Abuse Evaluation, was "a recipe for finding allegations of sexual abuse
false, under the guise of clinical and scientific objectivity. One suspects
it will be a bestseller among defence attorneys." And so it has proved.
Gardner's work has created a generation of mothers and children scarred
psychologically and, in many cases, physically by the court rulings he has
influenced. In one of his earliest cases, a Maryland physicist he labelled a
"parental alienator", unfit to retain custody of her children, was
subsequently shot dead by her ex-husband. Still Gardner did not change his
view that the wife was the true villain; her lies, he insisted, had made the
husband temporarily psychotic.
Richard Gardner's background was surprisingly conventional. Born in the
Bronx, New York, in 1931, he studied medicine and psychiatry at various
prestigious New York universities, and served a stint as a US army
psychiatrist in Germany. Appointed to the Division of Child Psychiatry at
Columbia in 1963, where he became Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in 1983,
he was respected for many years as an expert on childhood experience of
divorce.
After he developed his Parental Alienation Syndrome in the 1980s,
however,
he and Columbia slowly distanced themselves from each other and he spent
most of his time in private practice in New Jersey. Along the way, he also
turned into an authentic American monster.
From another list: The connection to the list is the denial of trauma
and the supporting child abuse and discrimination against women.
Shabtai Noy
Subject: DR. RICHARD GARDNER'S SUICIDE
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2003 08:33:44 EDT
From: Richard Ducote, Attorney at Law, New Orleans, LA
Parental Alienation Syndrome is a bogus, pro-pedophillic fraud
concocted by Richard Gardner. I was the last attorney to cross
examine Gardner. In Paterson, NJ, He admitted that he has not spoken
to the Dean of Columbia's med school for over 15 years, and has not
had hospital admitting privileges for over 25 years. He has not
been court appointed to do anything for decades. The only two
appellate courts in the country who have considered the question of
whether PAS meets the Frye test, i.e., whether it is generally
accepted in the scientific community, said it does not. As Dr. Paul
Fink, former president of the American Psychiatric Association has
stated, Dr. Gardner and PAS should be only a "pathetic
footnote" in
psychiatric history.
Gardner and his bogus theory have done untold damage to sexually and
physically abused children and their protective parents. PAS has
been rejected by every reputable organization considering it. In a
Florida case in which I was recently involved, when the judge
insisted on a Frye hearing, Gardner simply did not show up.
Perhaps because he finally realized that the entire nation was on to
his scam, he committed suicide on May 25. Let's pray that his
ridiculous, dangerous PAS foolishness died with him.
Richard Ducote, attorney at law, New Orleans, LA
And link to an obituary from UK's Independent:
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=411000
