Pound Pup Legacy

http://www.amfor.net/acs/

Adopted Child Syndrome (ACS)

According to public opinion polls, most Americans agree that adoption is at least a "risk factor" to a child's developmental, behavioral and academic development. The belief that adoption has a psychology of its own is evidenced by clinical studies amassed both prior to and since the late 1940s when the states began making adoptees' origins secret.

That adoptees are prone to specific behaviors referred to as "Adopted Child Syndrome," says famed attorney and Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, is just another "abuse excuse" to avoid reponsibility for their actions, including felony crimes. But this is the same Alan Dershowitz who, in his op-ed piece in the LA Times, suggested using "Torture Warrants" -- court ordered to control what Dershowitz calls the "inevitable" use of torture by U.S. law enforcement in the "war on terrorism." He claims torture is "constitutional," regardless that it is also detrimental to a democratic society. He rationalizes that its sanctioning by warrant would make it more accountable and transparent. "If we are to have torture," he argues, "it should be authorized by the law." Notwithstanding that falsification of sealed birth records, and adoption itself, have never been deemed "constitutional" or democratic, Dershowitz seems to be missing the point of our profiling people who are victims of adoption abuse, not as an "excuse," but as a "reason" for the prevalance of sociopathology and violent crime among those whose lives were forever manipulated by adoption politics and lawyers "in their best interests."

In 1978, Dr. David Kirschner coined the term "Adopted Child Syndrome" as underlying "Dissociative Disorder," in his paper, "Son of Sam and the Adopted Child Syndrome," Adelphi Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Newsletter, 1978)... and in the same year, the Indian Child Welfare Act (Public Law 95-608) was amended to provide adult adoptees of Native American heritage "different rights" than non-Indian adoptees.

In the 1980s, adoptees who exhibited "Attachment Disorder" were further categorized as a "sub-set spectrum" of adoptees who, to varying degrees, exhibit eight specific antisocial Adopted Child Syndrome (ACS) behaviors -- according to noted psychologists, Kirschner, Sorosky, Schecter, Carlson, Simmons, Work, Goodman, Silverstein, Mandell, Menlove, Simon, Senturia, Offord, Aponti, Cross and others. However the "spectrum" is never defined, so it is argued that all adoptees are at risk due to the complexities of adoptees' dual identities and secret pasts. Although Brazelton referred to ACS as "malarkey" in the press, psychiatrist David Cooke said "Adopted Child Syndrome is simply a new name for a phenomenon that has been observed since the 1950's" (by Paton). The ACS behaviors most commonly referred to are:

• conflict with authority (for example truancy);
• preoccupation with excessive fantasy;
• pathological lying;
• stealing;
• running away (from home, school, group homes, situations);
• learning difficulties, under-achievement, over-achievement;
• lack of impulse control (acting out, promiscuity, sex crimes);
• fascination with fire, fire-setting

By 1982, in children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)

for hyperactivity, a 17% rate of non-relative adoption was found, --or eight times the rate for non-adopted children -- and it was estimated that 23% of all adopted children would have ADD;. Today that percentage is much higher. As Jean Paton pointed out, "Do you have to be truant, or drop out of school, steal, get into juvenile detention homes, in order for people to realize that you need to have someone tell you about your origins?" Apparently the answer is still YES.

Years laters Kirschner still maintained:

"In twenty-five years of practice I have seen hundreds of adoptees, most adopted in infancy. In case after case, I have observed what I have come to call the Adopted Child Syndrome, which may include pathological lying, stealing, truancy, manipulation, shallowness of attachment, provocation of parents and other authorities, threatened or actual running away, promiscuity, learning problems, fire-setting, and increasingly serious antisocial behavior, often leading to court custody. It may include an extremely negative or grandiose self-image, low frustration tolerance, and an absence of normal guilt or anxiety." ("The Adopted Child Syndrome: What Therapists Should Know," Psychotherapy in Private Practice, vol. 8 (3) Hayworth Press, 1990)....

Kirschner concludes his paper with "Finally, I believe that most adoptees have the same emotional vulnerabilities that are seen in dramatic form in the Adopted Child Syndrome, and that all adoptees are at risk."

In 1992, David M Brodzinsky, Marshall D Schechter & Robin Marantz Henig, authored "Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search For Self." Using their combined total of 55 years experience in clinical and research work with adoptees and their families, the authors use the voices of adoptees themselves to trace how adoption is experienced over a lifetime. Studies have shown that being adopted can affect many aspects of adoptees’ lives, from relationships with adoptive parents to bonds with their own children.

On September 23, 1992, Attorney Donald Humphrey, himself an adoptee, called attention to the Syndrome as a factor in cases where children murdered their adopters in "Violence in Adoption," a talk he gave at a conference of the American Adoption Congress.

In 1993 and 1994, the Syndrome was used as a defense in two cases of juvenile adoptees who murdered their adopters. Kirschner, a child psychologist, identified the Syndrome as a contributing factor with regard to Patrick DeGellecke who was 14 when he killed his adopters by setting fire to their home.

In "Heikkila," Courier News (NJ, front page story, 10-12-93), Laurence Arnold added that the Syndrome is further characterized by "an absence of normal guilt or anxiety about one's deeds" and newsstories that characterize young adoptees who killed their adopters as displaying "no emotion" or having "no remorse" support this. The New York Times account of Matthew Heikkila's crime, "How the Adoption System Ignites a Fire," by Betty Jean Lifton (3-1-94, p. 27), cites Kirschner as well as psychiatrist Arthur Sorosky, who helped set the precedent in the DeGellecke case with the Adopted Child Syndrome defense.

Dr. Patrick J. Callahan, trained in both death investigation and psychological profiling, (Forensic, Educational and Neuropsychology and Child, Adult and Family Psychotherapy in Yorba Linda, California, and who has consulted on high profile cases such as the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case), offers the most intriguing and probably the most accurate assessment of the psychological dynamics of adoptees--particularly adoptees who commit violent crimes. He asserts that adoption, whether legal or illegal, is a dysfunction of kinship, and that the adoptee perceives many people in his world as "strangers." What he has seen in many adopted children is the beginning of a cycle of violence against adopters or strangers or both, as AmFOR's pages at http://AdoptedPrisoners.com and http://www.AdoptedKillers.com support. He believes there may be a reaction experienced by the adopted child that is the most primitive wound to the psyche, and is experienced at the very essence of his/her humanity even in adulthood. By and of itself, the adoptee's specific loss of the most elementary biological kinship, in the process known as adoption, may cause "paleo-psychological regression" experienced as uncontrollable rage deep from within his/her own ancient history which, when focused, may find its end as predatory violence.

On 12-26-00, David Kirschner posted to the Internet newsgroup, alt.adoption:

"Rather, I have repeatedly emphasized the Syndrome describes a sub-set of adoptees at the end of a spectrum--and not ALL adoptees."

Not only does it appear that Kirschner has acquiesced under pressure to be politically correct via AdoptSpeak, but also, in that moment, he contradicted decades of his own research, beliefs and published statements. And, again, he does not define "the spectrum of adoptees," who have ACS, a point not lost on Kay Russell, anti-adoption activist, who posted a response to Kirschner under the screen name Saxon War Lord, as follows:

"Dr. Kirschner, is the spectrum a graduation of these symptoms? Would ACS be the end of the spectrum you're talking about, like the MPD end of the Dissociative spectrum? What I mean is, I would not expect ACS to be at the end of a spectrum of all stable unaffected people, then suddenly a sub-set of affected adoptees. So the next sub-set on your spectrum would be 'pretty disturbed' but not 'as disturbed' as those with ACS -- and next to that sub-set and other sub-sets affected, but to a lesser degree, and on and on down that spectrum....clear on down to the other end of the spectrum where we'd find adoptees who 'fair pretty well despite being adopted.'"

Kirschner never responded.

Until the book, Chosen Children, and AmFOR's web page at http://AdoptedKillers.com made this information available, free on Internet, no one work had linked the majority of serial killers and others by the abnormality of their adoptive status. Increasingly, profilers, psychologists, sociologists, educators, journalists, script writers, defense attorneys and other researchers understand and explain adoptees' behaviors in the context of their adoptions.