Candace Newmaker

Re “Seeking Child’s Love, a Child’s Life Is Lost,” Feb. 4: As a board-certified child/adolescent and adult psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst graduate of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, my heart goes out to the other (mostly adoptive) children and mothers and the impossibly difficult situations in which they often find themselves. Desperation often induces choices with dire consequences.

Multiply traumatized children who are adopted later in their childhood pose daunting problems for which there are few answers.

All too often, notions of “rebirthing,” “reliving infancy,” “regressive therapy” and a host of other similar half-baked therapies promising radical repair come to popular attention via the Internet and word of mouth. No simple notions of experientially putting children through earlier times in their troubled lives can truly undo their past. Only long, slow, hard work in therapy can delicately help families overcome their pain. The public is too easily seduced by authoritative-sounding therapists with firm belief systems that they have the truth; harm, even deadly harm, can result. When will we learn the necessary humility in dealing with the preciousness of the psyche, especially in children?

JEFFREY K. SEITELMAN MD

Seal Beach

* Jeane Newmaker and Connell Watkins and her three unlicensed therapist helpers should be charged with murder. The child was pleading for her life as the therapists pushed harder and yelled “go ahead, die.” Let’s not forget that the bottom line is this child lost her life by being smothered to death by these people. It’s time to send the therapists and adoptive mother to prison. Give them prison therapy with bad food, a small cell and a daily supply of fear.

CLIF FINCHER

Santa Ana

* My daughter, an adoptee with a history of physical abuse and neglect, was an in-patient at the Attachment Center at Evergreen in the early ‘90s. While in the long run the practices employed by Watkins and ACE did not do my daughter much good, neither did they do much harm.

My family’s odyssey is, I imagine, little different from that of other families who are drawn to Evergreen. After seven years of conventional treatment for our child, my husband and I had seen it all: behavior modification, play therapy, drug therapy, rewards, punishment, in-patient, out-patient and more. Despite intensive ongoing treatment, our child was no better off and in fact continued to deteriorate, and my life became a waking nightmare. Every therapist had a different diagnosis and had a different approach for “curing” our daughter. Every therapist assured us that those who had preceded him or her were “wrong,” and he or she was “right.”

Parents turn to people like Watkins and places like ACE out of desperation and anguish. Despite the assurances of self-confident therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, their treatments simply do not have the desired effect for children with attachment disorders. The sad fact is that these disorders are so profound and reach to such an elemental level that they may not be amenable to treatment at all. The tragedy for Candace and her mother is not that therapists cannot do the impossible, but that they will not admit it.

SHARON WATKINS

(no relation to Connell Watkins)

Manhattan Beach