Mental Health Notes

Mental Health Repercussions For FLDS Religious Sect Children

by Alicia Sparks, NAMI Affiliation Leader on April 21st, 2008

For the most part, I try to stay out of other people’s religious business. Sure, if your car breaks down on the way to Mass, I’ll give you a lift. Along the way, I may even ask you a question or two about the history of the Rosary or whether or not you’ve met the Pope.

I’m helpful and curious, what can I say.

However, it’s neither helpfulness nor curiosity that’s caused me to keep up with what’s going on out in Texas regarding the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) at the Yearning For Zion Ranch (YFZ) - specifically, what’s going on regarding the children being taken from their families and placed in state custody, DNA testing to determine who’s related to whom, and the still anonymous teenage girl who’s telephone call alleging sexual abuse by her 50-year-old husband that started it all.

Frankly, it’s worry.

Their worlds have been turned upside down, they’ve been taken out of familiar surroundings and away from their parents, and they’re being given the impression that the lives they’ve lived until this point have been “bad.”

Mental health professionals and behavioral experts were brought in to “try to ensure a sense of normalcy” for the children shortly after the raid on the YFZ Ranch. Too, spokesperson for Child Protective Services, Darrell Azar, claims CPS will make the “transitions as easy as possible” and “keep them together as much as possible so they don’t feel they’re completely isolated from their culture or the people they know,” but the children’s mental grip on everything they’ve known has already suffered a serious blow.

At the same time, another CPS spokesperson, Marissa Gonzales, points out that separation is necessary because keeping the parents and children involved in abuse allegations together isn’t normal practice, and that the decision to separate them was made after “after consulting mental health experts and attorneys who thought it would be best to separate the mothers from their children.”

I can see the need to separate children from their parents when investigating abuse. It doesn’t make the situation any more pleasant or bearable, but I can see the need for it.

During my search to find more about what mental health professionals are saying about the situation, I kept running into testimonies from Dr. Bruce Perry. According to Scholastic, Perry is an “internationally-recognized authority on children in crisis.” And, according to Perry, we’re seriously stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Well, he didn’t say that exactly, but he may as well have.

Perry, who has studied “children in cults,” claims the FLDS belief system and culture is “abusive” and “very authoritarian,” and he feels the children would be at risk returning to YFZ. However, Perry also testified that “the traditional foster care system could be destructive.”

Therein lay our rock and hard place: “Don’t send them home because it could be abusive, but the alternative - traditional foster care - is potentially dangerous, too.” (My quote.)

What to do, what to do…

Religious beliefs aside, if the court does deem these children are being abused in some way, then…traditional foster care is the only answer, isn’t it? If it’s determined that these children cannot return to their family environments, facing the destruction Perry claims the traditional foster care system could cause seems inevitable, right?

It seems we’re merely at the tip of the iceberg, and my heart goes out to these children.

Image source and credit.

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POSTED IN: Childhood Disorders, Current Affairs & News, Doctors & Scientists, Sites of Interest