By James Thalman
Deseret News staff writer
A group of lawmakers barely hesitated Thursday to endorse a bill that would outlaw so-called holding therapy in Utah. The move follows the death of one child and the targeting of an Orem clinic by the Attorney General's Office.
The Child Welfare Legislative Oversight Panel unanimously approved the proposed legislation the same day that state business licensing officials announced they were targeting an Orem clinic linked to the therapy and to the June death of a 4-year-old Springville girl.
The state accused the Cascade Center for Family Growth in Orem of placing children in both physical and emotional danger by practicing coercive or holding therapy without obtaining adequate parental consent.
On Monday, child-abuse homicide and child-abuse charges were filed against the girl's adoptive Springville parents, Richard and Jennete Killpack, accusing them of forcing water down the girl's throat as punishment for taking a sibling's soft drink. The couple says it was taught the therapy by personnel at the Orem clinic.
The legislation doesn't include penalties for practicing the restraint therapy, which can involve treatments ranging from holding a child like an infant to pinning the child down to inflict pain, all in an effort to force the child to release pent up aggression and bond with adults in the process.
Sponsor Mike Thompson, R-Orem, said the Springville death is just the most recent tragic example that coercing and restraining children in the name of therapy is "deadly quackery."
He said if similar legislation he proposed during the last legislative session had been passed, the death would have been averted. That legislation, which would have prohibited licensed therapists from doing holding therapy, passed the House but was never voted on in the Senate.
The Cascade Center for Family Growth is accused by the state of practicing a physically and emotionally dangerous form of child and massage therapy. The center directors say they are being used as a scapegoat by Thompson to further his political agenda.
Thompson said his only political agenda is to keep children from being hurt under the guise of therapy. "I'm trying to protect children and parents from totally unapproved therapies. This is voodoo therapy. This is child abuse."
Although coercive therapy has never been included in traditional mental health therapies, support for it and anecdotes of miraculous recoveries abound. Therapy supporters had been invited to Thursday's meeting but none attended.
That's typical because those who offer it or participate in it always operate outside public scrutiny, said Christopher Barden, a nationally known psychiatrist and widely quoted critic of coercive therapy.
He told lawmakers the treatment shouldn't even be called therapy because labeling it as such implies it has been shown to be therapeutic.
The only evidence that it works is the worst kind — anecdotal — and it has never stood up to any kind of basic scientific review, Barden said. He likened the fervor of its supporters to those who also believed in bloodletting and leeching as a cure for physical illness, noting that George Washington died after bleeding out a quart of blood in a single day on the advice of his physician.
"I don't think these people are trying to injure, but they are shockingly ignorant and are applying that ignorance to children with terrible results," he said.
Not only does the therapy not meet even the most basic scientific criteria, it amounts to human experimentation and fraud, he added.
There are those who say they got better because of it, Barden said. "But just because an outcome and a treatment appear related doesn't mean cause and effect. That is like believing that eating dinner is what makes the sun go down in the evening."
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