| Michael Shermer » Death by Theory |
Attachment therapy is based on a pseudoscientific theory that, when put into ... We should ban its practice before it tortures and kills children again. ...
According to AT, Candace’s reaction was a sign of her emotional resistance, calling for more confrontation to achieve emotional healing. ACE (now operating as the Institute for Attachment and Child Development) claims that “confrontation is sometimes necessary to break through a child’s defenses and reach the hurting child within.” Putting theory into practice, Ponder admonished, “You’re gonna die.” The girl begged: “Please, please, I can’t breathe.” She then vomited and cried, “I gotta poop.” Ponder instructed the others to “press more on top,” on the premise that such children exaggerate their distress. Her mother entreated, “I know it’s hard, but I’m waiting for you.”
After 40 minutes of struggling, Candace went silent. Ponder rebuked her: “Quitter, quitter!” Someone joked about performing a C-section, while Ponder patted a dog that meandered by. After 30 minutes of silence, Watkins remarked, “Let’s look at this twerp and see what’s going on. Is there a kid in there somewhere? There you are lying in your own vomit. Aren’t you tired?”
Candace wasn’t tired; she was dead. The death certificate listed the proximate cause as asphyxiation, and her therapists received the minimum sentence of 16 years for “reckless child abuse resulting in death.” The ultimate cause was pseudoscientific quackery masquerading as psychological science. “However bizarre or idiosyncratic these treatments appear — and however ineffective or harmful they may be to children — they emerge from a complex internal logic based, unfortunately, on faulty premises,” write Jean Mercer, a psychologist at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and Larry Sarner and Linda Rosa of the National Council against Health Fraud in their 2003 analysis, Attachment Therapy on Trial: The Torture and Death of Candace Newmaker.
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