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There are a lot of websites, experts, and emotion invested in this debate. But there aren’t two empirical sides. There is science, and then there is passionate non-science. As Paul Fink, a professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine and a past president of the American Psychiatric Association in Arlington, Va., once said of Gardner, “He invented a concept and talked as if it were proven science. It’s not.”
Even without a scientific basis, parental alienation, like climate denialism, has its own language, passions, and saliency. Right or wrong, recognized or not, most family courts now take PAS extremely seriously. Experts testify, court-appointed advocates offer diagnoses, and family-court judges regularly adopt alienation explanations as a way of rejecting abuse allegations. As Meier wrote in a 2009 article: “Despite the palpably extreme and unbalanced quality of both the PAS theory and the thinking of its author, as well as the lack of scientific basis, the theory has for over a decade become virtually ubiquitous in family courts.”
Parental Alienation in Child Custody Disputes (Tennessee Bar Journal, May 2011).
Parental alienation sydrome: It’s not a real disease, but some people want it to be (Slate Magazine, May 17, 2011).
Information provided by K.O. Herston, Tennessee Divorce Lawyer
Parental Alienation and Child Custody in Tennessee
http://herstontennesseefamilylaw.com/2011/05/26/parental-alienation-and-child-custody-in-tennessee/There are a lot of websites, experts, and emotion invested in this debate. But there aren’t two empirical sides. There is science, and then there is passionate non-science. As Paul Fink, a professor of psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine and a past president of the American Psychiatric Association in Arlington, Va., once said of Gardner, “He invented a concept and talked as if it were proven science. It’s not.”
Even without a scientific basis, parental alienation, like climate denialism, has its own language, passions, and saliency. Right or wrong, recognized or not, most family courts now take PAS extremely seriously. Experts testify, court-appointed advocates offer diagnoses, and family-court judges regularly adopt alienation explanations as a way of rejecting abuse allegations. As Meier wrote in a 2009 article: “Despite the palpably extreme and unbalanced quality of both the PAS theory and the thinking of its author, as well as the lack of scientific basis, the theory has for over a decade become virtually ubiquitous in family courts.”
Parental Alienation in Child Custody Disputes (Tennessee Bar Journal, May 2011).
Parental alienation sydrome: It’s not a real disease, but some people want it to be (Slate Magazine, May 17, 2011).
Information provided by K.O. Herston, Tennessee Divorce Lawyer
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