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I'm not a psychiatric expert by any stretch. Just well-read enough (mostly via FR!) to know that this is big, big scam run by unspeakably evil adults. The official psychiatric diagnostic manual ("DSM-IV-TR" is the current version) does list this disorder. Naturally the scam artists pick one that they can point to as being "real". But legitimate psychiatrists apply very different diagnostic criteria http://www.behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/reactatt.htm , and certainly don't advocate anything along the lines of these wacko-sadistic "therapies" as treatment. The scam artists, have their own kooky set of diagnostic criteria, insist that the vast majority of adopted children have RAD, and also insist that mainstream forms of therapy "don't work".

Perhaps most importantly, legitimate psychiatrists will be quick to diagnose psychiatric problems in the parents, which obviously all parents who are willing to undertake "therapies" of this sort have. The root appeal of the scam artists version of RAD is that EVERYTHING is the child's fault, and the child is cured when the child has complete faith that the parents can do no wrong and has no desire to do anything except exactly what the parents want. A very appealing paradigm to psycho parents who don't want to face up to that fact that THEY are the ones with a serious problem. Also convenient for the "therapists" who are talking parents into forking over checks for thousands of dollars (Candace Newmaker's parents paid $7000 for the planned 2-week session in which she was killed) -- somehow, saying "Look, Mrs. Jones, you need to recognize that YOU are the one with a mental problem" doesn't keep the fat checks rolling in.

These scam artists basically define RAD as any behavior in a child which isn't exactly what the adoptive parent wants in his/her fantasy "ideal child". Like all cultish scams, these "therapists" set up "support groups" for parents in which only those parents subscribing to all this garbage are allowed to participate, and in which they are actively discouraged from/warned about changing to mainstream therapy (the idea that maybe there's just nothing wrong with the kids at all is obviously completely taboo). This is what accounts for parents with no previous criminal or psychiatric history (which few adoptive parents have, and even fewer who have enough money to pay for this garbage) being drawn deeper and deeper into a belief that it's okay to inflict these "therapies" on their child -- they meet regularly with other parents and a "facilitator" who reinforce the belief in the cult.

I once briefly taught a 3-4 year old adopted girl in a gymnastics class who probably did have RAD, though the parents never mentioned any such label. They did advise the coaches that she was adopted as a toddler and did not take the usual notice of authority figures or interact quite normally with other children. She was a perfectly non-disruptive child, but was somewhat off in her own little world, unconcerned with whether she could or couldn't perform the skills that the other kids were doing, and with a tendency to wander off without warning. She just didn't seem to notice the existence of the social structure around her, but it wasn't really a problem. Her perfectly sane parents didn't seem too worried about it, and I'm sure she largely outgrew it with nothing beyond ordinary chat/play therapy.

It's true that children who spent their first year or two in an bad orphanage or other situation where they had virtually no interaction with other human beings (many Eastern European orphanages just dump kids in cribs and leave them there 24/7, often until they're 4-5 years old), or only bad interactions, can have a permanent inability to form normal attachments, but most aren't seriously disruptive due to this. I'm sure they could all be MADE disruptive, though, by being subjected to regular psychological and physical torture such as these pseudo-therapies consist of. But then again, so could any perfectly normal child.