Get better! (that's an order)

 

Breaking News from Nevada:

What happens when you cross a lamb with a canary? We’ll see. A recent case, born of strange litiga­tion, has made me some hybrid of canary in the coal mine and sacrificial lamb. Treating a young teenager, I was unable to be the person, or to find a therapy approach, that would lead him to acknowledge his affection for his mother. I failed. He does not like his mother and doesn’t want to see her, even for two minutes of tele-visi­tation biweekly. This was not what the adver­sarial side wanted, and I was set to be­ replaced by a PhD psychologist “specialist.”

Instinct makes me concerned about presenting confidential information. As it goes, I’m sure there’s no need to worry. That’s because Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy – what the evidence, I am told, points to – is obviously so common that I could be writing about any anonymous Joe. Just kid­ding. This is an uncommon, absurd case that has resulted in one side working to keep the child safe and happy, the other side bent on forcing him into serial therapies for the purpose of changing his mind (or maybe they would say: “seeing the light”).

I produced a little argument to the social worker: “G---’s father informs me that the court, or lawyers, or whoever holds the purse strings, wishes to foist a doctoral-level therapist on the young man. This sounds to me like ‘bad cop’ in the guise of ‘better cop.’ G should not be put through this: It is incompetent. We all know that any person – adult or child – put under this type of duress will, if he has even the slightest self-esteem and self-respect, not cooperate with therapeutic coercion. You should be careful about the possibility of child abuse. Not to mention, be wary of ‘experts.’” I linked a The Pessimist Shrink blog post to the text-message as evidence of my powerful loose cannon credentials.

As of the moment, I don’t know how this will go. I’d never seen a case where a parent was pres­sured not only to send the child to therapy, but to accept the antagonist’s choice of therapist and to switch therapists several times (the prospective PhD would be the fourth) in order to get a desired confessional or emotional result.

Maybe my reaction is a bit strong, but as I see it, if there were ever a good time for the San Andreas Fault to budge, causing California to fall into the ocean, this would be it.