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Psychological evaluations are the worse. The minute one finds oneself in a contested divorce situation that involves underage children, brace yourself for the accusations and allegations that invariably lead the court to order a psychological evaluation. This can be a very bad reality.
For most litigants who have found themselves on the wrong side of a court ordered psychological evaluation, it is fair to say that they would opine that the legal community and the psychiatric community make very bad bedfellows. And I can fully understand their point of view. For, can a psychiatrist or psychologist really determine that one parent is more loving, fit and appropriate than the other after a ten hour evaluation session stretched over two years that involves all manners of "objective tests" such as Rorshach, Thematic Apperception, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory?
So two people have decided that they no longer want to be married. They have grown apart and they want to break the contract that binds them. Religiously, that might be deplorable to some people. After all, many of us have been socialized to think that marriage should be for "better or for worse." But the reality is, over 50% of people will decide that worse is unmanageable and they will ask for a divorce. Does that make them bad parents? Does that make them crazy? Does that give the court the right to order expensive and often times damaging psychological evaluations which can and often do involve indepth evaluations of the children and pitting the children against one or the other parent?
The funny thing about COI's that include psychological evaluations is that they will invariably end up concluding that either one or both parents are crazy, incompetent, unfit and undeserving of having either legal or physical custody of the children.
In almost no case I have seen thus far, psychiatrists will not come back with a finding that "these parents are fine and this family should be left alone." By definition they are paid to find a problem and find one they do. The very litigious nature of the average contested divorce makes this a ripe environment for the kind of fact finding that leaves one parent in the dog house as far as custody. That is to say, one parent will come out looking like a stark raving lunatic at worse, or horrendously unfit to parent at best, if for no other reason, that he or she will be deemed "narcisstic" or "neglectful" or "borderline" or some other catch phrase that these experts tend to use.
If you ask me personally, I don't think the psychiatric community should be involved in custody disputes. They tend to do more damage than the good they do. The create problems for these families, they divide, they even destroy sometimes and none of this is in the best interest of the children who they supposedly are trying to assist.
The test for who gets custody should be who is the primary custodian of the children. IF both parents share equally, custody should be split. It's really that simple.
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