Psychotherapy is meant to help. But what about when it harms? | Aeon Essays
Therapy for a patient recovering from drug addiction at the Shiliping rehabilitation centre in Zhejiang Province, China in June 2014. Photo by William Hong/Reuters
Therapy for a patient recovering from drug addiction at the Shiliping rehabilitation centre in Zhejiang Province, China in June 2014. Photo by William Hong/Reuters
is programme director of psychology and director of the Psychological Clinic, both at the University of Kansas, Edwards Campus.
In 2000, Jeane Newmaker took her adopted 10-year-old daughter Candace to an ‘attachment therapy’ retreat designed to increase their emotional bond. While there, Candace underwent an intervention that’s supposed to replicate the birthing process. Therapists wrapped her in a flannel sheet and covered her with pillows to simulate a womb or birth canal. Then they instructed her to fight her way out while four adults (weighing nearly 700 lbs in total) tried to stop her. Candace complained and screamed for help and air, unable to escape from the sheet. After 70 minutes of struggling, pleading that she was dying, and vomiting and excreting inside the sheet, Candace died of suffocation. This tragic case highlights an important but often overlooked aspect of psychological interventions designed to help people – sometimes they can be harmful, or even fatal.
Candace Newmaker’s death is a shocking and obviously recognisable example of an alleged treatment causing immense harm. However, there are innumerable psychological treatments on offer, many of which are not so obviously harmful but that can also carry risks. Consider that, before her rebirthing treatment, Candace underwent other forms of attachment therapy, such as ‘holding therapy’ wherein her mother Jeane held her for an extended, uncomfortable period and restricted her movements. Candace was also pinned under her mother during a session of so-called ‘compression therapy’. Throughout these different psychological treatments, her mother licked her to induce rage. These strange interventions are perhaps harmful too, but less strikingly so than the rebirthing procedure. Yet they all continue to be practised in some US states and elsewhere around the world.
