Attachment Therapy on Trial: The Torture and Death of Candace Newmaker

by Jean Mercer

Candace Newmaker was an adopted girl whose mother felt the child suffered from an emotional disorder that prevented loving attachment. The mother sought attachment therapy―a fringe form of psychotherapy―for the child and was present at her death by suffocation during that therapy. This text examines the beliefs of the girl's mother and the unlicensed therapists, showing that the death, though unintentional, was a logical outcome of this form of treatment.

The authors explain legal factors that make it difficult to ban attachment therapy, despite its significant dangers. Much of the text's material is drawn from court testimony from the therapists' trial, and from 11 hours of videotape made while Candace was forcibly held beneath a blanket by several adults during the therapy. This book also presents history connecting attachment therapy to century-old fringe treatments, explaining why they may appeal to an unsophisticated public. This book will appeal to general readers, such as parents and adoption educators, as well as to scholars and students in clinical psychology, child psychiatry, and social work.

Genres: Psychology

272 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2003

Reviews

[Marideth Bridges · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t like this book very much. I felt the authors were using this girl’s death to support an agenda, plus it just felt very dry and technical, like a textbook. Seems like this Candace Newmaker girl was very troubled and had several diagnoses, not just RAD, but ADHD, ODD, PTSD, and bipolar disorder, which is very controversial to diagnose before the age of 14. I feel like a lot of children (not ALL) from foster care end up having multiple mental illnesses and the parents feel like they can’t really treat them with conventional therapies, so that’s why they often resort to less established forms of treatment such as boot camps in the first place.

Anyways, I'm giving it 2 stars because while I didn't hate it, I didn't think it wasn't very good, either. The reason why I think it has an agenda is because I feel like the authors attack all parents who seek treatments that are unvalidated for behavioral issues in children as 'abusive' and 'narcissistic', as if they've never been in their shoes. I understand that they are passionate about 'evidence-based' treatments that are backed by science, but they don't seem to offer much solutions, so I would not recommend this book for anyone looking to adopt or foster a child who might have RAD and/or PTSD. But I don't think that this book was written for parents, anyways. It might have been written for college students as an assigned text for a class since one of the authors was a psychology professor.

In addition, I also think that it's entirely possible that Candace may very well have had FASD https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fasd/facts... to begin with and the state of North Carolina did not disclose it to her foster mother in the first place. This seems to be very common in failed adoptions; that the child has FASD and either the state or the adoption agency won't disclose it to the foster/adoptive parents. Children with FASD can be violent and disruptive and often receive the same diagnoses that Candace had. In addition, heart defects, which the defense argued that Candace had, can also occur in FASD.