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Rating: 
Summary: Damn Good Book
Review: Clear, clean,professional analysis of psychotic child abuse in
custody and child support litigation.
Rating: 
Summary: A reader in Anchorage, Alaska
Review: Gardner's self-published work is extremely deficient scientifically, exhibits extreme gender-bias toward women and assumes that all women are vindictive and all children are liars. This "syndrome" he purports is not based on systematic research, instead developed from personal observation and prejudices. Gardner has never tested his theory, and most of its foundational assumptions have been disproven. Virtually every symptom Gardner describes as evidence of PAS is open to opposing interpretations. Gardner's recommendations to send children to juvenile detention centers and mothers to jail for reporting abuse fly in the face of the goal of any therapy or treatment--establishing trust and "do no harm". This is nothing more than one man's opinion which is now being used across the country as a slick legal defense for abusive parents to gain custody of their victims and exact revenge upon the protective parent. It should not be relied upon by any reasonable person. Mental health professionals should be cautioned against using such an unscientific and harmful ideology in custody evaluations, as it could potentially result in ethics violations and malpractice claims by protective parents and their children who have been irreparably harmed by incompetent assessments.
Rating:
Summary: A reader in Anchorage, Alaska
Review: I am the father of two sons who were alienated from me according to the pattern described and analyzed by Dr. Gardner in this book. In the process of fighting in court for 6 years for at least minimal contact with my sons, I did a good deal of research on PAS and even wrote an unpublished book manuscript that dealt in part with PAS. I.e., I know what I am talking about, and not just from the perspective of my own case. I consider Dr. Gardner's book to be a major contribution to social psychology. This book was the first to define and articulate the dynamics of PAS. Dr. Gardner takes great pains to distinguish PAS from other phenomena and to provide one detail after another than can help an observer to diagnose a given case. He shows a keen appreciation for the pressures on the children and the differing behaviors of oldest and younger children. Many of his observations will strike a person going through a PAS case as uncannily predictive. His characterization of the pathological behavior of lawyers, psychologists, and judges in many of these cases is damning. It certainly fit the "professionals" who mishandled our case or used it for their personal gain. Dr. Gardner's prescriptions for reform of the psychological and legal handling of these cases are useful. Equally helpful is his unflappable common sense. He spent years dealing with family problems at US Army bases in Germany and has seen just about every crazy situation imaginable. So he is not fooled, as are many observers, by the endless allegations of the alienating parent against the allegedly hated parent. Nor does he hesitate to put the obsessive denigrators in their place, if need be. My research turned up two sources of statistical evidence that corroborated Dr. Gardner's finding that roughly 9 out of 10 of the alienating parents are the mothers. PAS is one of those phenomena that the media seem incapable of reporting accurately and analytically, or even reporting at all. Yet psychologists are coming to see that it is quite widespread. Indeed, PAS may account for a certain portion of the fathers who are said not to care for their kids. If you want to understand PAS, there is no better place to look than Dr. Gardner's book.
Rating:
Summary: Mirror Reverse
Review: My sister found this book a lifesaver.She does not have a clinical background, but she could finally give a name to what her husband was doing to the children. She was the alienated parent -- a mirror reverse from the traditional. She highly recommends this author. Also she recommends his followup book **Therapeutic Interventions for Children with Parental Alienation Syndrome** by Richard A. Gardner. If any part of these books will help my sister get out of her miserable situation, then they are worth their weight in gold. MjM
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