How to Ensure that Clients with Psychological Disabilities Receive the Best Possible Attention

 Raymond Havlicek, PhD

High conflict families, distressed to begin with, and interacting with our adversarial legal system, may temporarily experience escalating distress, which may result in a diminished capacity to fully understand and appropriately respond to all their reasonable options at any stage of a judicial process, which in effect reduces their ability to appreciate their due process rights. Improving the delivery of services to persons undergoing such stressors may improve high conflict parents’ ability to more appropriately respond to their options considering the best interests of their children. Additionally, our adversarial manner of dealing with divorce and custody in itself may preclude effective attention to more reasonable options.

Parents involved in child custody and parenting disputes are well known to experience escalating stress, which in many circumstances leads to increased anger and “position hardening,” along with attending rationalizations to justify the increasing rigidity of allegations and defenses. Since both parties are roughly experiencing the same syndrome of escalating aggressiveness and increasing rigidity, the inevitable outcome is distress, anger and anxiety, further burdening the coping capacity of the parents. Parties, in particular, the less moneyed and/or less mentally healthy and/or less advantaged in the litigation contest, undergoing such stressors may become disadvantaged during their consultations with legal professionals, judges and mental health professionals conducting court ordered assessments. Ensuring that less emotionally integrated litigating spouses will not experience discrimination based solely on their condition would lead to empowerment and hence less distress.

Separating parents functioning under circumstances of extreme aggression, oppositionalism and rigidity, can only lead to less effective thinking and decision making. Yet, considering the amount of money, energy and human capital expended during such conflicts the outcome may very well be less adequate and possibly less just, than what would have been the case had the parties participated in a process of alternative dispute resolution, mediation, parenting coordination or other interventions.

Research has demonstrated that a relatively high proportion of the U.S. population at any point in time experience mental illness. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), “Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 22.1 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about 1 in 5 adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 1998 U.S. Census residential population estimate, this figure translates to 44.3 million people. In addition, 4 of the 10 leading causes of disability in the U.S. and other developed countries are mental disorders—major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time.” A more recent study by NIMH has reported that approximately half of all Americans at some point will develop mental illness (Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, the primary sponsor of the study). Since emotional factors may be more prevalent in high conflict families, to begin with, it is likely that the rates of mental illness among divorcing, high conflict families may be even higher. These realities argue strongly in favor for a reconsideration of the manner in which the delivery of legal, mental health and forensic services takes place. Two issues are of concern. First, ensuring that every effort is undertaken to reduce stress and improve decision making by assisting the warring parties by having them develop mediated strategies for approaching the children’s needs and their own. The use of alternative dispute resolution methods would be of particular importance for such families in addition to parent education regarding the needs of children undergoing divorce. Second, the rights and needs of parents having an emotional disability must be fully attended to, and not used against them to deprive them of appropriate involvement in a parenting plan. In a word, the current system un-empowers parents who are frequently suffering from an emotional condition, which only worsens the emotional impact upon children.

Improving the delivery of services to those having psychological disabilities as well as the issue of ensuring that those with emotional disabilities are not discriminated against when it comes to the issue of developing and implementing parenting plans should be addressed for several reasons. Parents with physical and medical limitations are not automatically discriminated against with respect to parenting plans; neither should parents with emotional disabilities, as long as a safe, secure and appropriate parenting plan can be crafted. Keeping in mind that high conflict litigants may experience loss of control, high stress and impaired decision making, settlements may be entered into which do not fully provide for the children’s best interests. Children deprived of appropriate interactions with both parents may be emotionally harmed.  Estrangement and alienation, the disruption of parent-child relationships, is well known to have adverse effects on children’s development and adjustment. (Lamb, 1999, Lamb, Hwang, Detterlinus & Fracasso, 1999). Children who are deprived of meaningful relationships with one parent are at a greater risk of developing emotional impairments even when they maintain a relationship with the other parent. Children are more likely to attain their maximum psychological potential when they are able to develop and maintain meaningful relationships with both their parents whether or not they live together. (Kelly & Lamb, 2000). Children’s self-esteem is undermined and fragmented by believing they have one “good” parent and one “bad” parent. The development of the good parent-bad parent view may cause the child to experience themselves as either “perfectly good” like one parent or “completely bad,” like the other parent. These identity conflicts lead to impaired self esteem and poor self confidence.

Children precluded from contact with a parent because of the psychological disability of that parent may regard the emotionally impaired parent may as “bad,” and/or “angry” with the child, rather than disabled, leading the child to both extreme polarization regarding the parent in question, in addition to guilt. Planning for an optimized parenting plan, which takes into consideration the disability of the parent may have the advantage of redirecting the child’s understanding of the parent towards a more reality based view, free of the mistaken belief that the parent is “bad,” and that the child was some how responsible for the parent’s behavior. The incorporation of such approaches early on in the process might serve the purpose of reducing the “winner take all” expectancies which frequently prevail and make matters so much more acrimonious. If litigants entering into a custody contest knew in advance that instead of a “winner take all approach,” an attempt will be made to arrange for an optimized, inclusive, empowering plan, much less re-litigation might ensue with less risk to the children, better parent cooperation and ultimately a better appreciation of the due process rights by the litigants.