Parental alienation syndrome: invention or reality?

Since Richard Gardner first described the term parental alienation in 1985, there have been many controversies and criticisms derived from this construct. Detractors of the concept have used different types of arguments to invalidate its existence in recent decades, which Authors such as Suárez and Nodal (2017) have analyzed in a recent review in order to shed some light on this complex freak.

So that... Does the concept of Parental Alienation Syndrome have foundation? Let's see it.

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Parental Alienation Syndrome

Gardner's original definition of PAS referred to the “disturbance that usually appears in the context of a divorce, in which the child despises and criticizes one of her parents, when such a negative assessment is unjustified or exaggerated (in Vilalta Suárez, 2011) ”.

The SAP implies that a parent perniciously influences the child to reject the other parent in those cases in which there is no evidence of any type of abuse by the alienated parent towards the child. Specifically, the following are included as defining signs of PAS (Vilalta Suárez, 2011):

• existence of a smear campaign.
• Frivolous or absurd rationalizations for rejecting the parent.
• Lack of affective ambivalence towards parental figures.
• Appearance of the «independent thinker phenomenon», it is argued that the decision to reject is exclusive to the child.
• Automatic support for the "beloved" father in any position.
• Absence of guilt in the child for the expression of rejection.
• Appearance in the son's story of borrowed scenarios that the child has not experienced or cannot remember.
• The extent of the rejection to the family or environment of the rejected parent.

According to the aforementioned authors, in the Practical Guide to Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence, prepared by a group of experts on the subject and by the General Council of the Judiciary in 2016, the impossibility of validating the existence of the SAP.

This categorization is based on the fact that such a psychological entity It is not included in the classification systems of reference mental disorders such as the DSM-V. This is especially relevant since said document becomes a fundamental guide in the field of forensic psychology and may in turn condition the conception that professionals in the area of ​​clinical psychology have about the construct of SAP.

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Critical analysis on SAP validation

In the work carried out by Suárez and Nodal (2017) different arguments are presented that call into question the justifications offered by the detractors of the SAP and the authors of the aforementioned Guide when invalidating its existence.

First of all, it seems that the very nomenclature of PAS defining it as a syndrome has generated much debate, in the sense of whether its conceptualization should be legitimized as a pathological phenomenon, a mental disorder or a disease.

1. Pathologization of a relational phenomenon

According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), a syndrome is defined by a set of signs and/or symptoms that, based on their frequent occurrence, may suggest a pathogenesis (DSM-IV-TR, 2014). While it is true that the "syndrome" element may be insufficiently justified scientifically in the SAP, This does not mean that the existence of the situational phenomenon can be denied. that parental alienation describes. This can be considered independent of whether there is a sufficient consensus to grant it the nosology of a syndrome.

Related to the above, the SAP has not been included as such in any of the DSM versions either, despite the fact that The debate on including it or not among the group of experts responsible for the official preparation of the manual was very present. current.

2. the circular argument

In this sense, the authors of the work allege that the fact that the SAP has not finally been included in the classification system, does not necessarily imply that its existence should be denied. See examples used such as "battered woman syndrome" or homosexuality, which was defined as a mental disorder until 1973. Both justify the fact that, although there is no specific diagnostic label available for a problem psychological during a certain period, this can be equally relevant and of priority attention in practice clinical professional.

Thus, if finally the SAP or AP (parental alienation) is contemplated in a future revision of the DSM, Would this imply that only from that moment on could it be defined as a mental pathology and not with anteriority?

3. Supposed lack of interest from Psychology

Another of the arguments that Suárez and Nodal (2017) question refers to the belief that PAS has not been (and is not) the object of interest of the psychological scientific community. The text lists numerous works that show precisely the opposite, although it is true that they also include meta-analysis studies that describe the difficulty of empirically validating SAP. Therefore, it cannot be said that there is no interest from the scientific community in the clinical and forensic area in investigating and delimiting PAS (or AP) more objectively.

In addition to the above, it seems that in the field of jurisdiction, no sentence can be found either Supreme Court or the Strasbourg Human Rights Court that intrinsically questions the existence of the SAP.

SAP and DSM-V

As previously mentioned, PAS is not recognized as a disease entity in the DSM-V. However, in the section corresponding to "Problems that may be the object of clinical attention" it seems to contemplate an entity called "Relationship problems between parents and children".

Considering its diagnostic criteria, this can be adjusted to what is defined in the SAP: Psychologically based problem, related to family education and that causes functional deterioration at the behavioral, emotional and cognitive level. Therefore, despite the fact that it is conceived as a relationship problem and not as a mental disorder, it seems that PAS or AP can be described in such a way that enables its detection by means of specific defining indicators in real cases, the assessment of the need to require an intervention at the level psychological and/or forensic and, finally, that allows in the future the continuation of investigations that determine with greater accuracy what implications the SAP.

Bibliographic references:

• American Psychiatric Association., Kupfer, D. J., Regier, D. A., Arango López, C., Ayuso-Mateos, J. L., Vieta Pascual, E., & Bagney Lifante, A. (2014). DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Madrid [etc.]: Editorial Médica Panamericana.
• Escudero, Antonio, Aguilar, Lola, & Cruz, Julia de la. (2008). The logic of Gardner's Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS): "threat therapy". Journal of the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry, 28(2), 285-307. Retrieved on January 26, 2018, from http://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.php? script=sci_arttext&pid=S0211-57352008000200004&lng=en&tlng=en.
• Suarez, R. J. V., & Nodal, M. W. (2017). On the Myth of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) and the DSM-5. Psychologist Papers, 38(3), 224-231.
• Vilalta Suárez, R. J. (2011). Description of Parental Alienation Syndrome in a forensic sample. Psychothema, 23(4).