These “therapists” are good at convincing parents that their children have extreme problems which call for extreme treatments. The scary thing is, a lot of these children appear to have been perfectly normal to start with, and only developed serious problems after being subjected to abusive therapies (and may have first developed mild problems in response to incompetent parenting).
These therapists promote a fantasy idea of how “normal” children should behave (like constantly gazing lovingly and attentively into their parents’ eyes, wanting nothing more in the world than to instantly comply with every request their parents make, etc). In a lot of these cases, it sounds like the parents just had psychological problems of their own, and were thus having difficulties coping with the normal demands of parenthood. Seeing their children as the cause of their misery, they head off to “therapists” until they find one who tells them what they want to hear, namely that the child, not the parent(s), is the problem, and that the therapist has a solution which involves the parent being in total control of the child, and the child eventually coming around and acting like the aforementioned fantasy child.
It’s really scary how widespread this stuff is. Sure, the extreme cases where a child actually gets killed are rare, but there are a huge number of children who have been and are being subjected to “treatments” of this sort. It’s very lucrative for the “therapists”. It’s a good idea to keep your dangerous-scam-alert meter set to go off anytime you see/hear the term “reactive attachment disorder” or “RAD kids”. If you run into a parent who claims their child has this “disorder”, be alert to the fact that the child may simply be a victim of these dangerous “therapies” and that the parent may have been sucked into what essentially a cult.
I’ve read reports from parents who got sucked into this (and later realized it was a scam) that the therapists responded to parents’ questioning of the odd-sounding “treatments” being recommended by having them join a “support group” of other parents who were already employing these treatments and convinced they were helping or were the child’s “only chance”. A lot things that people would flatly reject based on their own independent evaluation, they can be persuaded to accept when provided with a peer group that reinforces the validity of idea.
A lot of kids are labeled with attachment disorders when they are just trying to cope with a lot of stress from abandonment, institutionalization, and then being put in a new foreign family with little or no preparation. Kids do the best they can to cope and don’t need to be labelled mentally ill as they act out in situations way beyond their control.