Sunday, 5 July 2009

personality disorders being diagnosed through family court assessments

I write this article with growing concern at the sheer
scale of personality disorders being diagnosed through
family court assessments. In recent years there has been
systematic abuse of parents by social services.These parents
have had their children removed not because of any harm they
have done to them but because of a likelihhod of harm that
may or may not happen in the future. The majority of cases
are
based on a liklihood of emotion harm which has no clear
definition in law and in fact I attended the failure to care
debate at channel 4 on the 12th May where i invited the
panel to define emotional harm and they couldnt.

The telegraph reported the following.

"The persistent failure of social workers to protect
children who are in very serious danger is made even more
outrageous by the profession's propensity to remove
children from parents who are manifestly no danger at all to
them. Of the 35,000 children who are taken into care every
year on the recommendation of social workers, a large
proportion are removed on grounds of "emotional
abuse" – a category so broad and ill-defined that it
can include both praising your children too much and not
praising them enough, or feeding them too many vegetables or
too little fresh fruit. It appears that social workers,
aware of their inability to intervene in cases where
children really are at
risk, compensate for that failure by intervening in
families where they are obviously safe."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/4214697/Telegraph-View-Child-abuse-wont-be-overcome-until-we-define-what-it-is.html

What then happens is that the parents after having their
children removed are bereft, angry, fearful etc they are
then made to undergo psychological and psychiatric
assessments where in most cases before the family courts
they are diagnosed with a personality disorder.This is then
used as an excuse for social services not to return the
children to their care. I believe that many of these parents do not actually have a personality disorder at all but that
the symptoms they experienced after having their children removed are often taken as symptoms of personality disorder when really what they are
experiencing goes hand in hand with the loss of a child.