"NEW YORK -- Rebuffing an intensive lobbying campaign, a task force of the American Psychiatric Association has decided not to list the disputed concept of parental alienation in the updated edition of its catalog of mental disorders.
The term conveys how a child's relationship with one estranged parent can be poisoned by the other parent, and there's broad agreement that it sometimes occurs in the context of divorces and child-custody disputes.
However, an acrimonious debate has raged for years over whether the phenomenon should be formally classified as a mental health disorder by the psychiatric association as it updates its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the first time since 1994.
The new manual, known as DSM-5, won't be completed until next year, but the decision against classifying parental alienation as a disorder or syndrome has been made."
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PA may not meet the scientific criteria for classification of a mental disorder per the DSM standards. But it is VERY REAL.
ReplyDeleteLike everything else, I am sure there are less than scrupulous persons who will misuse it to their advantage. BUT in no way shape or form does that discredit it entirely.
Men are falsely arrested every day by false claims made under VAWA. Does that invalidate VAWA?
Not everything is a mental health illness. Sometimes what you have is simple bad behavior. I'd go with that. Also, the solution PAS proponents have as the consequence of PAS, which is to exclude the other parent from access to the children and immediately switch custody makes it appear as if PAS is simply a scheme to attach protective mothers and put their children in the hands of abusers.
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