Exporting Pseudoscience: Attachment Therapy Comes to Russia

Communications and interactions between the United States and Russia are marked by suspicions and sanctions these days. Some commodities that used to be readily available in Russia are no longer imported from the West.

Regrettably, sanctions have not prohibited the export to Russia from the United States of various pseudoscientific ideas about psychology and child development. In particular, we are seeing the spread in Russia of the theories and practices of “attachment therapists” and their helpers who subscribe to the use of “Nancy Thomas parenting” with vulnerable children.

Some readers will already know exactly what I am talking about, but for those who do not, I’ll supply some brief definitions. “Attachment therapy”, sometimes known as “holding therapy”, is an implausible, non-evidence-based treatment claimed by its proponents to be effective for certain childhood mental health problems. Advocates of “attachment therapy” (AT) also claim that their principles are derived from the work of John Bowlby, the originator of attachment theory, a framework for understanding the feelings and behavior of young children with respect to familiar and unfamiliar adults. As I have pointed out in other posts on this blog and in various print publications, the beliefs about attachment employed by AT proponents share almost nothing with Bowlby’s theory, but are instead essentially retrofitted to provide a rationale for AT practices such as restraining children physically, shouting at and intimidating them.

Two other points to define here: AT proponents describe adopted and foster children as suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder, a real though rare psychiatric syndrome described in DSM-5 and ICD. However, the alarming symptoms they list, including eventual serial killing, have nothing to do with the symptoms of RAD. They form instead a pattern that I have referred to as faux-RAD , resulting in a counterfeit disorder to be treated with a counterfeit therapy. Finally—and to my mind perhaps most importantly—AT advocates claim that their restraint treatments need to be accompanied by adjuvant methods sometimes referred to as “Nancy Thomas parenting”, created and taught by one Nancy Thomas, a self-identified instructor of foster parents, who recommends limiting the amount and variety of a child’s diet, withholding information as well as food from the child, requiring the child to ask permission for “privileges” like a drink of water or use if the toilet, and so on. These methods, joined with rocking the child like a baby and hand-feeding him caramels (yes, really, but I don’t want to take time to explain her reasoning right now) are said by Thomas and her followers to correct attachment problems that adopted and foster children may have experienced, and as a result to render the children docile, grateful, and affectionate. (The actual results of this kind of  treatment in one case may be seen at http://www.wbay.com/cotent/news/Wrightstown-couple-accused-of-starving-adopted-son-mentally-abusing-him-433665943.html --- and this case is not an outlier.)

AT and “Nancy Thomas parenting” (NTP) had their beginnings in the United States, and they have always seemed to me to have a peculiarly American, pioneer spirit, rough frontier justice, snake-oil salesman flavor to them—like something out of Mark Twain. Other countries have their own ways of abusing children (as witness the old German “black pedagogy”), but AT and NTP seem to be genuinely “made in America”. Our British cousins have picked AT up a bit, but on the whole their [former] EU membership made them somewhat wary about legal concerns related to maltreatment.

Now, however, we see Russia picking up AT and NTP with apparent great enthusiasm. For some years. American advocates of authoritarian child treatments have flirted with Russia, occasionally being invited to speak, and occasionally being prevented from speaking. In the last few years, an influx of AT proponents and AT ideas has penetrated Russia—in spite of the very clear fact that Russian adoptees who were harmed in the United States, leading to the ban on foreign adoptions, were in many cases harmed by AT and NTP practices! This connection appears to be invisible to groups of Russians who have hurried to encourage adoption of large groups of children from orphanages and have sustained the belief that they can “fix” these children by following AT and NTP precepts.

What exactly has happened in Russia? I have been receiving a series of descriptive comments from Mihail Able (see comments at childmyths.blogspot,com/2017/07/the-russian-adoption-ban-magnitsky-act.html; scroll down to the comments section, and please understand that Mihail is doing this with Google Translate). Mihail discusses specific families’ problems resulting from their acceptance of AT and NTP principles and practices.

In addition, my friend and esteemed colleague Yulia Massino has been following with distaste news of tours in which Nancy Thomas herself has come to instruct the Russians how they should deal with adopted and foster children. She has made her usual claims of “curing” 87% of children who have come to her as crazed future killers. (For some reason, the numbers 80%, 85%, 87%  have great power in AT circles, although of course there have never been systematic studies either of the children’s initial conditions or of the outcomes of NTP or similar treatments --  much less any randomized trials, and much less any detailed publications.) Interestingly, Thomas describes this trip as a “missionary” trip without mentioning the country visited (http://www.facebook.com/ntparenting/posts/1322659427848500).

Following Thomas, there has recently been an exporting trip by staff of the Attachment Institute of New England, an organization that has for many years pushed AT principles and practices. Yulia Massino wrote about this trip on her own blog, http://yuliamass.livejournal.com/232733.html   and http://yuliamass.livejournal.com/235689.html    (in Russian; use Google translate to read). She pointed out the activities of the two AT visitors, Ken Frohock and Megan “Peg” Kirby, who raised money from sympathizers for their trip and now describe it on the AINE Facebook page and announce lectures at their website http://www.attachmentnewengland.com.

A 2007 press release from AINE (www.attachmentnewengland.com/press.html ) referred to their therapy as utilizing parental eye contact and parental holding of children. The same press release mentioned a presentation by Nancy Thomas and referred to her training with Foster Cline, probably the best-known proponent of intrusive, authoritarian treatments targeting adopted and foster children. AINE has never recanted publicly from these positions; they have in the last few years picked up the most recent terms having to do with trauma, but have not stated any changes in their treatment methods. Although I do not know exactly what they said or did on their trip to Russia, if they were horses I would bet that their track record of AT and NTP involvement would be the best predictor of their performance there.

It seems that a fruitful new market has opened in Russia for the export of pseudoscience manufactured in the U.S. Interestingly, Yulia Massino has told me that the concept of emotional attachment, which “everybody knows” (not always correctly) in the U.S. and U.K., has not been discussed much in Russia. This may leave many Russians open to the impression that attachment, and therefore AT, is a brand new discovery of ingenious Western scientists. Fortunately a new article in circulation by Michael Ivanov may help counter this impression—but I am very much afraid that Russians are not learning from observation of the ill effects these beliefs have had for children in the U.S. You would think they might remember the harm done to Russian adoptees in the U.S. some years ago…

You can see Michael Ivanov's new article at https://www.researchgate.net/publications/318420576_Harmful_Treatments_in_Child_Psychotherapy.