Attachment Therapy on Trial: The Torture and Death of Candace Newmaker (Child Psychology and Mental Health) (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Larry Sarner (Author), Linda Rosa (Author) "What made the practitioners continue their actions until the child was dead?..." (more)
Key Phrases: therapeutic foster parenting, unvalidated treatments, therapeutic foster mother, Jeane Newmaker, Candace Newmaker, North Carolina (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

A fine balance of scholarship and passion. This will hopefully be read by those struggling with parenting and weighing options. -- Scientific Review of Mental Health Practices, Spring/Summer 2004 Vol 3 Number 1

Review

“Highly recommended. All collections.”–Choice

“Masterfully chronicles the chilling story of how a 10-year old girl, Candace, endured painful physical stimulation, was dangerously restrained, and eventually suffocated to death. In the name of 'curing her' with Attachment Therapy, Candace's therapists ignored her begging, screaming, and gasping; eventually they were convicted in criminal court. The extent to which some therapists embrace such unvalidated fringe treatments is one of the greatest scandals in today's mental health system. This damning indictment should stir a badly needed national debate about these practices, and aid in the fight against them.”–Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine

“Here is a profoundly good book--humane, constructive, and scrupulously objective--about a case that could have been treated with sensationalism and melodrama. Attachment Therapy, the authors show, is only the most dangerous embodiment of a more general aberration: the founding of treatments on premises that have already been confuted by sound research. Every therapist and every legislator ought to take this important work to heart.”–Frederick Crews Principal author, The Memory Wars

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Praeger Publishers (May 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0275976750
• ISBN-13: 978-0275976750
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,678,781 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unhelpful generalisation, June 17, 2007

By	M. Lansdell (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The difficulty with this book, from its title onwards, is the fact that it uses one example of bad practise to brand a whole style of therapy, a massive section of child development theory, research and practise dangerous and bad.

Attachment theory is highly evidence based, established over decades, and extremely useful in understanding the nature of human relationships. The fact that children who experience abuse and neglect from their carers in early life generally find making new attachments more difficult is proven beyond doubt. And therefore a number of therapies have developed, some very stronly based on evidence and implemented by highly skilled and professionally trained and licensed clinicians, and others that were less effective or evidence based and more controversial.

So, yes, bad examples of practise exist (as they do in every corner of the world in every field) and it is extremely sad that they have led to deaths, and I'm totally in favour of greater regulation of therapy professions if we can prevent or reduce malpractise. However, the implication of this book is to not only tar these examples, but to tarnish all therapists who work on attachment issues or even believe that they exist! It is the equivalent of finding one brand of anti-depressant medication that in rare cases can cause death, investigating one death, and then saying that proves not only that all anti-depressants are bad, but that it is proof that depression doesn't exist.

I'm generally quite against the medical/American idea that every presentation needs a diagnosis that places the problem within the individual (in this case, placing the attachment disorder within the child, when attachment is a relationship and only shows between TWO people). However, it is really unhelpful to make such sweeping generalisations and not to present any of the evidence about how there is also much good therapy dealing with attachment issues and how to help a new parent compensate for the abuse/neglect of a prior carer.

I'm a clinical psychologist, with a doctorate and eight years training and ten years of clinical practise with children including those removed from their family of origin. I can tell you both from my reading and my experience that there are some wonderful, sensitive, child-centred ways of working with parents and carers with attachment issues, that make significant positive changes for people. We need to be building on these, evaluating them with systematic research, and increasing their availability, because they change people's lives and allow children who have been damaged by their past to begin to feel loved and lovable.

Just because there is a bad example, we shouldn't ignore the hundreds of good examples. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening, March 6, 2007

By	Kyle Jimenez (Fort Worth Texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book pulls together information from many different places allowing the reader to view a concise overview of the problem that is "attachment therapy".

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Treatment to Avoid, September 18, 2007

By	BeatleBangs1964 (United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Exploitation is the theme of this book. Parents are exploited by such fringe groups of unlicensed "therapists" into going along with quackery and other questionable methods. Most people are determined to keep their child(ren) from being labelled, but that does not appear to be the case in this book.

This book brings to light the horrors and emotional atrocity of Attachment Therapy (AT) aka holding therapy. Anybody who has a child who has been diagnosed with RAD will want to read this book. AT is a form of abuse and quacks like the Tinbergens who were ornithologists and NOT experts on autism as well as Martha Welch tout this method. No scientific evidence is presented to support their claims; only unproven anecdotes are offered. If AT/holding therapy really worked, then everybody would be doing it and nobody would have autism or attachment disorders.

On the other hand, Candace, the child featured in this book has an account that has been proven. Court testimony and video tapes have shown this to be a dangerous practice in some cases. Had this child been treated by reputable professionals who were at the very least licensed, she might be alive today. The authors of this book did a good job of exposing this form of fringe treatment for the crock and emotional fraud that it is and uncovered a sad truth about how it claimed a casualty.