To Our Members and Colleagues

Dear Colleagues,

 The Association for Child Psychoanalysis offered this text to send by email, FAX, or phone message to your congressman and senator.Please feel free to copy and change it as needed.Use Find My Representative or How To Contact Your Elected Officials to obtain your representative's name and contact information.Here is the suggested text:This is _________ your constituent from (city or zip code)I am contacting you to express my deep concern and outrage about the current administration’s new policy of forcefully separating young children from their parents at our Southern border. Tearing children from the arms of their parents and sending them to unknown locations is a form of child abuse and torture. It is also cruel and abusive to the parents who are often looking to get out of poverty or for an asylum to save their lives and the lives of their children.As a child and adolescent psychologist, social worker, or psychiatrist (state your particular discipline) and (psychoanalyst when applicable) with over XX years of experience treating youngsters and their families and teaching child development and child psychotherapy I and my colleagues know that this type of separation causes children shock and unbearable fear, with anguish and depression for the rest of their lives. It has a similar effect on the workers who separate children from their parents or take care of them as caretakers and it is called in adulthood  “burn out syndrome."Child development research on attachment and loss (see for example John Bowlby 1973) has conclusively demonstrated that young children who were separated from their parents abruptly for even a few days, or weeks suffer from lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder. Having been traumatized they often struggle with chronic anxiety, depression, night terrors, and bed wetting. They develop significant difficulties concentrating, playing, learning, and forming trusting relationships with others. Feeling deeply betrayed and abandoned they may harden and over time become antisocial as a result.I strongly urge you to do whatever is in your power to end this immoral policy that is destroying the lives of innocent parents and their children.