Social psychopathy,social distress,family breakdown,and custody disputes in the 1990s: Implications for mental health professionals

The decade of the 1990s will probably contain more challenges to the role of the mental health practitioner in child custody cases than ever before in history. Because of increasing social stress and family disintegration, custody disputes are destined to become more frequent, bitter, and traumatic for all parties. Mental health professionals, in particular, need to develop a coherent structure regarding their own participation in this process. Issues of moral changes among our leadership and our citizenry are examined and guidelines for the behavior of the mental health practitioner in the courtroom are formulated and illustrated as they pertain to custody decisions. Particular attention is paid to custody decisions as an art rather than a science, the role of empirical research, the need to anticipate certain unintended circumstances, the need for the application of mental health principles on an individual case-by-case basis, the nature of the mental health professional's expertise, and the problems with the concepts of parental unfitness and the use of psychiatric diagnosis as a way of defining such alleged unfitness.