In Part Two of the APSAC report, I shared the part of the report that essentially blames parents, yet again, and implies that a child who “gets along with” people in their peripheral environment but NOT in their family environment is always the victim and never the victimizer. That sure runs counter to one of Tommy and Amy’s many therapists who described adding an attachment-challenged child to a healthy family as “injecting a pathogen into the family.”


The folks who wrote the APSAC report are clearly believers in the DSM-IV and the multitude of mental health disorders found within the pages of that book. Heck, it seems to me each new batch or cluster of symptoms gets its own new name… one of my favorites is still “Intermittent Explosive Disorder.” If it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny…


So I guess once a less-than-healthy child becomes a less-than-healthy adult, they can get a “legitimate” label, and if they wreak havoc on their family… be it family of origin, spouse, kids, or whatever… their family can point a finger at the diagnosis of “Borderline” or “Narcissistic” or in severe cases “Antisocial”, or maybe Psychotic, or Bipolar, or Schizophrenic, and the family can be seen as the victim or the “incidental fallout” of the ill person’s difficult or dangerous behavior. Somehow I doubt there are too many therapists or mental health professionals who could get away with blaming a husband for his wife’s personality disorder, or blaming a wife if her husband is a rapist or serial killer. (Maybe she just didn’t love him enough????)


So if adoptive parents end up with a child who has serious pathology, whether genetically based, chemically induced or environmentally created… how is it that the parents are always at fault? Does pathology not exist in kids under the age of 18? Is it “developmental” until the moment they have spent 6570 days on the planet, and then suddenly it is a true mental illness? Did all the adults on our planet who fail to form healthy relationships only inherit the responsibility for being a part of successful relationships on the day they turned 18? Did those same individuals participate in reciprocal, healthy relationships prior to their 18th birthday, and only crash and burn enough to get a "relationally-challenged" diagnosis after they hit the magic number? What am I missing here?

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