The Essentials of Parental Alienation Syndrome: It’s Real, It’s Here and It Hurts

Robert A. Evans Ph.D., J. Michael Bone Ph.D. | English, 2011

We are seeing an increase in high conflict, adversarial divorce cases in mental health practices and in the courtrooms around the country. These cases present with a significant amount of parental conflict and, as a consequence, represent a threat to the children caught in the middle of these conflicts. Curiously, there is a great commonality among these cases in terms of the tactics alienators use to separate a parent from his or her children. It is almost as if they, the favored parent, were reading from a published playbook. Parental alienation syndrome (PAS) is acknowledged as being controversial within the mental health profession and equally controversial within the legal profession. It is important for professionals to get a sense of both sides of the PAS issue. Whether one uses PAS as a term, the problems brought by these cases are very real. Whether or not it is the appropriate diagnosis or description of behavior in a case must be determined by facts of that case and supported by evidence and data from multiple sources. An appropriate diagnosis and identification of PAS, along with a description of the severity, can make the difference between timely and effective interventions or allowing parents and children to be scarred for the rest of their lives.