TASK FORCE NOVEMBER 26, 2013 PART I: GERIATRIC PSYCHOLOGY!

There was a new member added to the task force on this day, Dr. Robert Horwitz, a well known member of the AFCC. 

 

Of course, citizens are again asking why the AFCC has stacked the task force with their own people.  Is it perhaps because they want to maintain total control over the content of the task force hearings and the final report. 

 

Next, Dr. Keith Roeder was present at the task force to respond to questions.  Dr. Roeder stated that he has worked as a clinical psychologist since 1977. 

 

What is interesting about this is that Dr. Roeder's generation was trained in a paradigm deeply based in psychoanalytical thinking where the presumption is that people will be in long term, intensive therapy for years and years to come.  Naturally, this course of treatment is very costly and leads to very dubious, if any measurable results, and has largely been discredited in our day and age. 

 

More specifically, Dr. Roeder is entrenched in Freudian theory which nobody pays any attention to any longer, particularly because of its deep prejudice towards women and because it simply does not work.  It has no basis in scientific practice. 

 

This is what I find so extraordinary and what I have commented on considerably during the time that I have written this blog.  The majority of mental health professionals doing evaluations in the court system today are old folks in their late 60s and 70s who were trained in an approach that is old fashioned, counter-productive, extremely bigoted towards women, and based upon the presumption that nobody ever gets better. 

 

These professionals were a part of an old, now dismantled system that maintained people in psychiatric hospitals for decades. 

 

What I am assuming is that once the big cash flows to the large psychiatric hospitals got cut off, these mental health professionals then turned to the family court system for a replacement to make up for their financial losses. 

 

The bottom line is, Dr. Keith Roeder's testimony is not useful to the task force because it is based on professional views in regard to mental health that are completely out of date and simply are not based upon our current scientific knowledge. 

 

You would think that anyone listening to Dr. Roeder's testimony would have picked that up pretty quickly! 

 

Be that as it may, Dr. Keith Roeder talked about his experience as a youthful clinician when he was in training.  At that time, apparently, divorce was very rare.  From 1949 to 1960 the focus was on the psychopathology of family system and the focus was dysfunctional family systems. 

 

In 1982, Dr. Roeder volunteered to do a major research study on conflict and the families of divorce.  He found it hard to obtain any data using those research terms.  But when he put in conflict and family functioning he found plenty.  He learned that mental hospitals had large groups of adolescents who wanted to kill themselves or others.  Why?  Because of family conflict. 

 

Dr. Roeder is being disingenuous in regard to the basis for these young people being in the hospitals.  Again, he is harking back to his very distant clinical training when we still had the major psychiatric facilities where psychiatric patients were warehoused for decades. 

 

They weren't in there because they were a danger to themselves and others.  They were there because it was profitable for the psychiatric facilities to have them there and they made tons of money off of them. 

 

When it wasn't money at the bottom of the motivation to put these young people in psychiatric hospitals, it was the motivation to establish some social control over these young people at a time when there was tremendous social change with the civil rights movement, hippie movement, and the protests against the war in Vietnam. 

 

Again, providing an old fashioned perspective on the origin of mental illness and providing self serving explanations for the travesty of locking people up in psychiatric facilities for years at a time is simply disingenuous and I don't think anyone listening to Dr. Roeder was fooled. 

 

As he continued speaking, Dr. Keith Roeder emphasized that it is "family conflict, not divorce, that created troubled youth."  In the late 70s and 80s the Dad was ordinarily isolated in the family, while Mom was at home.  Families were intact.  Children matured through the process of identification--the daughter identified with the mother and the son identified with the father. 

 

What occurs when mother downgrades father?  What happens when the father downgrades the mother?  In conditions of high parental conflict, the children lacked a relationship with one or the other parent. 

 

Ultimately, the process of belittling disrupts the process of identification of the children and results in low self-esteem which results in mental illness.  Why is conflict so bad between parents?  Because of the stress symptomology which results such as hopelessness, internalized or externalized, which lowers self esteem, creates distance, and leads to a lack of contact with a parent. 

 

He stated that co-parenting offsets these problems, and that he believes that divorced families can function as well as intact families if they work together to lower conflict. And, of course, my take on Dr. Roeder's comments is that even when the marriage stayed intact, Dad could be isolated in the family and basically not have any better experience of parenting than a person who is divorced. 

 

According to Dr. Roeder, the doctor's primary concern, the main mission of a psychologist is to protect the child and any conditions, post divorce, which hurt the child are bad.  Dr. Roeder stated, "I have strong sympathy for those who do not see their children.  Still, the kids should come first." 

 

Our complaint, as parents who were involved in establishing this task force, is that family court cuts off parents' access to their children for frivolous and unjustifiable reasons on a repeated basis, or else allows one parent or the other to cut off that communication independent of any legal basis.  When I refer to frivolous and unjustifiable reasons, I'm referring to the mental health professionals associated with the court who have colluded in trumping up fabricated mental health diagnoses as a basis for cutting off communication between parent and child.

 

Also, let's get back to the point that Dr. Roeder just stated that an absent parent would disrupt the process of identification in children?  Based on that if parents are unable to see their children, doesn't that automatically cause harm to those children? 

 

According to Dr. Roeder, when marriages were intact, you would have family therapy where all the members of the family would be in the same room, but now they are separate.  Of course, what I sense here and have experienced is judgment against  parents who have chosen to divorce and a condemnation of such parents and an unexpressed, nostalgic wish to carry on as if the parents had not gotten a divorce. 

 

What this has led to, in my view, is an expectation among these elderly mental health professionals that divorced couples continue to act as though they are married after the divorce.  That is their standard for post divorce stability--a situation where the couple continues to act in every way as if they are still married, but they don't have sex and they live in different homes, sometimes with a different partner whom such professionals and the courts regard as and treat like a third wheel. 

 

This is grossly unrealistic in many ways, but it is typical of the kinds of expectations that geriatric mental health professionals associated with family court are currently imposing upon divorcing couples.  Divorced couples got a divorce because they don't get along.  To expect them to act like they didn't get a divorce and pass judgment upon them because they don't get along is simply foolish. This is 2013, not 1960.

Perhaps if mental health professionals in the court system were more realistic about their expectations and weren't so entrenched in the past, they might be more insightful into what they are actually doing, i.e. trying to turn back the clock, and there wouldn't be so many problems with divorced couples post dissolution as a result of their misguided involvement.

Some of this, in my view, results from the fact that old fashioned mental health professionals such as Dr. Keith Roeder, who are trained in sexist Freudian theory, continue to expect women to remain in a subordinate, male dominated role in relation to their ex husbands well beyond the divorce, and convey that expectation to the court.

 

(to be continued...)