A Judge’s Guide

EXPERT HELP
child advocate also can do the fact gathering for the court. However, in all
likelihood, a child advocate will not have the training necessary to draw certain
types of conclusions.
The psychiatrist will be focused intensely on interviews, many of which will take
place in his or her office, rather than in the field. A psychiatrist is especially
trained to observe and draw conclusions from behavior, speech, and interactions.
Absent a judge’s specific request, a psychiatrist may decide not to observe family
members in their homes. Diagnoses need not be part of the process according to
the profession’s AACAP guidelines, because the purpose is not to make a
psychiatric diagnosis, but conduct a custody evaluation. Psychiatrists have
expressed doubt through AACAP that psychological tests are helpful in any but
the most puzzling mental health cases, and then only to support an opinion that
the psychiatrist arrived at through interviews and observations. 21
A psychologist will do one thing differently than a social worker or a psychiatrist.
There will nearly always be the component of psychological tests. Judges often
want tests because the results seem like hard data in a realm of otherwise soft
information. However, the rub is this: There is no test for parental capacity.
Mental health professionals know that. 22 For some reason, judges and lawyers
tend not to know that. Furthermore, there is no test for determining who is a
batterer, a battered victim, a child sexual abuser, or a victim of sexual abuse.
Some judges keep asking psychologists: “What is the parenting capacity of this
adult?” The only credible answer that a psychologist could give would be based
on multiple sources of information: interviews, direct observations, review of
records, self-reports, and finally, standardized psychological tests.
Over and over again, psychologists are warned by their profession’s leaders to
treat test results as hypotheses that must be checked with data from other sources.
The APA guidelines state that the psychologist must use multiple methods of data
gathering and never overinterpret clinical or assessment data. 23 Testing can
provide information relevant to the threshold issue of mental or emotional
disturbance or personality functioning. Usually, that data is not directly relevant to
the legal issue. 24
Nevertheless, psychologists find much gold as they mine tests for information.
What they are looking for are personality traits that could bear on good parenting
practices, even while not amounting to evidence of actual parenting styles. Tests
that are mined for this information are from either the “objective” category (that
is, tests that yield statistics that can be interpreted according to standardized
methods) or “projective” (for example, tests that call for more free form
responses like sentence completion or interpretation of drawings, and are
subjectively interpreted).
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