Getting Real About Abuse and Alienation: A Critique of Drozd and Olesen's Decision Tree

Parental Alienation Disorder: Why Label Children with a Mental Diagnosis?

“…Mental health clinicians and legal professionals often misinterpret how much data are needed before paying attention to the details of the abuse to which the child is exposed (Meier, 2010). This is problematic as the underlying PAS diagnosis comes from the parents' behavior and not the impact it has on the child's perception of safety and security.…”

“…Most mothers would have difficulty in labeling their child with a mental disorder that originated due to their own difficulties in getting along with the child's father. Domestic violence advocates suggest that placement of PAD in the DSM-V would have a chilling impact on women reporting spouse abuse for fear their children would be assigned the label of PAD (Meier, 2010, this issue). Caplan and Cosgrove (2004) warn of the danger of using the PAS diagnosis in their review of biases in psychiatric diagnosis.…”

Protecting Psychotherapy Clients From the Shadow of the Law: A Call for the Revision of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC) Guidelines for Court-Involved Therapy

“…The AFCC was aware of this conflict even before the Wingspread Conference held over 10 years ago, but it was in those proceedings where the domestic violence providers provided empirical research. Yet, in its publication of the findings from that conference in the AFCC journal, the differences were indeed minimized and ignored so that the results continue to be misquoted in the courts (see discussions by Geffner, 2014;Meier, 2010Meier, , 2014Walker, 2014).…”

The Chameleon Child: Children as Actors in the High Conflict Divorce Drama

“…Some authors have suggested that the child's experience of parental violence is one factor to be considered relevant to estrangement and part of a larger hybrid model (Drozd & Olesen, 2004;Fidler & Bala, 2010;Friedlander & Walters, 2010). 1 Others have argued, instead, that a determination of domestic violence is sufficient to explain a child's rejection of Parent B and thereby to preclude consideration of alienation Meier (2010). 2…”

“…Drozd and The Chameleon Child 31 Olesen (2004) and Meier (2010) have, among others, recommended decision trees shaped by their respective views of the frequency, significance, and interaction of alienation, estrangement, enmeshment, and domestic violence. The evaluator who seeks to understand the chameleon child's words and actions as evidence of alienation in the belief that Parent A has scripted the child's words, as estrangement in the belief that the child's resistance to Parent B is justified and perhaps a response to experiences of violence in the home, or as enmeshment in the belief that the fault lies in the breakdown of healthy parent-child boundaries risks throwing gasoline on the family fire.…”