From API’s Publications Team

Custody cases are rarely pleasant, but in about 10 percent of these cases, it truly becomes a battle between the estranged parents and the long-term effects on their children’s mental wellbeing can be devastating.

According to an article on TheHour.com, “Video Offers Advice to Divorcing Parents,” research at the Massachusetts General Hospital show that 65 percent of children involved in high conflict custody cases — or about 10 percent of all custody cases — experience clinical symptoms of anxiety, which manifested in a variety of ways such as physical aggression, sleep disorders, depression, bedwetting, becoming sexually active prematurely, and even dissociation.

What is Dissociation?

Dissociation is the psychiatric term to describe there is a splitting off of a group of mental processes from the main body of consciousness, as what happens with amnesia and some forms of hysteria.

Furthermore, 56 percent of the children of high conflict custody cases develop attachment disorders that leave them unable to form friendships with others in fear of being abandoned. 

“In a sense, there is a neglect,” said family court Judge Elaine Gordon in the video she co-created, Putting Children First: Minimizing Conflict in Custody Disputes. “Because parents who are fighting are not capable of emotionally caring for their children.”

To read the entire article, go to http://www.thehour.com/story/464345.