KIRK MAKIN
March 10, 2009
BRAMPTON, ONT. — JUSTICE REPORTER
An 18-year-old asked a court yesterday to let him rescue his brothers from the clutches of psychiatric deprogramming therapists and “incompetent” parents battling for control of their children.
The young man injected himself into the parental alienation case after his brothers – aged 12 and 14 – were bounced from a hospital psychiatric ward into a foster home in December because they refused to participate in a court-ordered therapy program.
The therapy, ordered in November by Ontario Superior Court Judge Francine Van Melle, was aimed at exorcising poisonous thoughts toward the mother that their controlling father had planted in the boys’ minds.Judge Van Melle granted the mother sole custody and authorized her to force her sons into a deprogramming clinic.The court heard yesterday that, after the boys refused to go along with the deprogrammers, the mother had them returned to Toronto and committed to a psychiatric ward at St. Joseph’s Health Centre.
A child psychiatrist at the hospital, Nagi Ghabbour, quickly became convinced that the prospect of forced therapy had turned the boys potentially suicidal. Dr. Ghabbour said in a letter that the boys felt “trapped in the legal system,” and were filled with a sense of helplessness.Dr. Ghabbour urged an immediate end to any further psychiatric assessments or forced therapy, and called on the Catholic Children’s Aid Society to seize the children to forestall any further attempts by the mother to deprogram them.Yesterday’s hearing was to decide whether the eldest brother can intervene in CCAS proceedings to place his brothers in long-term foster care.”I am not enmeshed in this dispute,” the youth said in an affidavit. “Unfortunately, and tragically in a way, for my brothers and me, whatever I do is seen as a cancerous outgrowth of my dad, and so no progress can be made.”
The youth’s lawyer, Jeffery Wilson, said that a point has been reached whe
