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Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Michael Mantell with another edition of Family Law Matters with Bonnie Rabinovitch-Mantel, founder and managing partner of the Primus Family Law Group, and we are joined once again with the wonderful Koryn Shepard, who’s a family law attorney and a member of the Primus Family Law Group. Bonnie, hi. Hi, you know Corinne’s not just a family law attorney, she’s a certified family law specialist.

She also often gets appointed by the court to be minor’s counsel in several cases because she’s just that good. Well, look at the halo. Can you see it? I see it.

Oh well, I wouldn’t go that far. The horns are holding it up. Speaking of inventing halos, I have an interesting question.

Many people have heard of something called Munchausen’s Disorder. It’s a psychiatric disorder where people invent certain diseases that they believe they have and other psychological difficulties, believing you have a halo over your head or something like that. But what happens in family law when one parent has a psychiatric disorder, such as Munchausen’s, and as a result that impacts the kids? They’re bringing them to doctors.

The other party has to pay medical bills for invented disorders. Koryn, what’s your experience with that? Well, a couple of things. The first thing is to just be very careful, obviously, not to play junior psychologist with another parent because you’d be surprised how many people, once they’re divorced, are abusive or are narcissistic or crazy.

It’s amazing how often people like to diagnose their spouses afterwards. But obviously, in some cases, this is a true thing. You have personality disorders and true psychological disorders.

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These affect people and children and families because it’s real, even if it’s rare. The difficulty sometimes is getting a diagnosis. That’s usually something that is tough because, of course, there’s a lot of protections for people and their medical well-being, their psychological well-being, and not sharing that information.

My recommendation would be this. If you really truly believe that the other person has a psychological problem, I would usually recommend that you request something called an evidence code 730 evaluation. What this is is the court appoints an expert, usually a PhD, to basically test everybody.

They test mom, they test dad, they do interviews. There’s psychological testing. Dr. Mantel, I’m sure you’re very familiar with all of the various psychological tests that people use to narrow in on a diagnosis.

It’s not there to diagnose somebody. Let me be very clear that they’re not going to give you a diagnosis. What they’re going to say is that somebody has some factors in their personality that would suggest certain things.

Sometimes this information can come in different ways. Sometimes you’ll have, especially with Munchhausen, Munchhausen is a really interesting one that has just come up for me a lot lately, personally. Usually, you’ll see this from other professionals.

The child’s pediatrician is like, wow, they’re in here all the time, but there’s just this roving diagnosis. If we tell you it’s not autism, then maybe it’s ADHD. If we tell you it’s not ADHD, maybe it’s some bipolar disorder.

If it’s not bipolar disorder, maybe it’s this other thing. It just seems the other parent is never satisfied with any diagnosis. This is why if you start getting the feeling that something like this is happening, an evidence code 730 evaluator can talk to the professionals, the doctors, the psychologists, and anyone else who might have information and do this testing, and then present information to the court as the court’s expert.

Bonnie, what’s your experience with this? This must be something that is exasperating for so many. It can be, Michael, because you’ve got one parent who is afflicted and then impacting the child, and you have another parent who has to sit back, often believes the child is just fine. Maybe it’s a preteen, maybe it’s a toddler, maybe it’s a terrible twos.

Kids developmentally go through crap. It doesn’t mean that they’ve got mental issues or that they’ve got other issues. Sometimes, though, the parent who’s afflicted can then point the finger at the other parent.

Because let’s say the child comes home with bruises and scratches, children play, children get hurt. It doesn’t mean they’re being abused, but with the afflicted parents need to find something wrong, then it becomes, and then you’ve got, right, Corinne, CWS, child welfare services involved. Because as a parent, you can call a welfare check.

There’s no limit to how many CWS reports one can make. If you’ve got this affliction and your child comes home every third day from the other parent, you can see how this can become, and then the courts get involved, and you’ve now created a situation that was here on the conflict scale, all the way up to here on the conflict scale, because a parent’s trying to prove a negative. I didn’t do it.

How do you prove that? One of the things that it reminds me of is, I don’t know if you guys know the proverb about the blindfolded or blind men that are touching various parts of an elephant and trying to describe what an elephant is. They touch the trunk, it feels like a hose. You touch the ear, it feels like a leaf.

You touch the hide, it feels like leather. You touch the tail, it feels like a branch. Depending on who you speak to, the elephant is a different thing.

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Nobody has the full picture. This is one of the issues with this, is because if you take the Radies, they’re not necessarily talking to CWS. If you’re taking them to the pediatrician, they don’t necessarily know that you took them on an emergency basis to Radies or what CWS has found.

Various parts of the agencies that are involved or the professionals involved don’t interrelate. They don’t share information. I can tell you right now, CWS often doesn’t even review its own prior findings, which is unfortunate.

I think they’re supposed to, but I don’t think they are required to. This can lead to our elephant situation where everybody has a piece of the puzzle, but no one is seeing the broader picture. A lot of these things can go under the radar, undetectable or difficult to prove for a very long period of time.

Especially because, as you mentioned, Dr. Mantel, something like Munchausen’s or Munchausen’s by proxy is a very rare kind of thing. Also to this, people also should remember that most of these diagnoses are a range kind of thing. There’s a spectrum.

You could have aspects of a personality or aspects of a disorder without having the full disorder. A lot of times there’s a need to be needed, a need to be wanted, a need for attention, the need to feel the child is special. Personally, I’d rather you want to see your child be special for all their positive traits, because I’m sure your child, no matter what, has many, many positive traits, rather than focusing on negative things like disorders, trying to diagnose them, wanting them to have something wrong with them.

I do tend to find that in these cases, sometimes it’s about wanting something negative to be wrong so that you can have conflict with the other person. You can blame them for something else. It is truly something that needs to be dealt with therapeutically.

Unfortunately, legally speaking, we don’t have a great solution about treatment, but you can certainly seek orders that would maybe put the child legally more in your care, i.e. I want sole legal custody. I want primary physical custody, perhaps even supervised visits. You can get orders for people to be in conjoined therapy.

I think the thing that you have to really be cognizant about is, what are you telling your child when you’re constantly taking it to the doctor, constantly taking it to a psychologist, constantly telling this child in some ways that there’s something wrong with this child, that child’s going to internalize that. Eventually, what will happen is your child will manifest that there’s something wrong with it. In many ways, it gets even worse when one parent, as soon as they take the child from the ex-spouse, the other parent, they immediately say, you know, something’s wrong.

Whenever you go to your dad’s house, whenever you go to your mom’s house, you always come back with a headache or with this or that. Not only do they just instill in a child a sense that there’s something wrong with you, but it’s the other parent’s fault. You know what courts are often left with the remedy of doing is that they will pluck that child from the primary.

Let’s say it’s the primary parent, who is this afflicted parent. They will flip custody. They will sit there and say, look, there is nothing that I can do anymore to make this go away because you’re in this situation, whatever part of the spectrum you’re on, you’re not addressing it.

I have to take care of this kid. And so I will move this kid if you don’t stop to the other side and give them sole legal custody, certainly over medical decisions. So you can’t be running the kid to the doctor when you do see him.

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And you can see folks why the Primus Family Law Group has been described as sophisticated, relentless, formidable, but most of all caring. Bonnie, if people want to be in touch with Primus Family Law Group for more information, how can they reach you? You can always reach us at 619-574-8000. And we will definitely schedule you for our free 30-minute phone consultation to see how we can help you.

Or you can reach out to us online, www.primusfamilylaw.com. You can see all of Team Primus on our website. Koryn Shepard, Bonnie Rabinovitch-Mantel, thanks for another terrific Family Law Matters. See you next time, folks.

Bye. Bye, Michael.