About a week and a half ago, a friend sent me an article about the use of the MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) in custody evaluations involving battered mothers. It's an article from the Spring, 2005 edition of the ABA Family Law Quarterly, entitled "Use of the MMPI-2 in Child Custody Evaluations Involving Battered Women: What Does Psychological Research Tell Us?" (39 Fam L.Q. 87) by Nancy Erickson.

I suppose we should start with defining our terms.

The MMPI-2 (hereafter, just "the MMPI"), has been around since 1942. It was first developed to assist in weeding out people in the military with psychological problems. It was updated in 1989, and tests the person who takes it on ten "scales," for such maladies as depression, hypochondria, psychopathic traits, paranoia and schizophrenia.

When they score your questions, they see how you scored on each "scale." They refer to this as the "T-scale." If you score above a 65 (sometimes 70), it's considered clinically significant.

Once they have this all together, they determine the participant's three highest scores. So, if you had scored highest on scale 2 (depression), second-highest on scale 4 (psychopathic deviate) and third highest on scale 9 (hypomania), you would get a score of 249.

The psychologist or psychiatrist administering the test then uses the score to reach a conclusion about the person's psychiatric makeup. At least, that's how it's supposed to happen. At the Battered Mothers' Custody Conference I attended in January, we heard that there are computer services to evaluate scores and spit out responses. (congratulations! My Dell Inspiron says you're crazy!)

Now, how does this relate to battered mothers? Well, they evaluated thirteen studies that evaluated the three-number score that women who took this test and had been victims of domestic violence got. In six of the thirteen, there was a code with a three-point combination of 4, 6 and 8, also known as "psychopathic deviate," "paranoia," and "schizophrenia." Schizophrenia, by the way, is defined as "confusion in thought processes; feelings of being overwhelmed."

Let's take the last two first. OK, paranoia. You're just coming out of a relationship where a person you loved and trusted with your most intimate thoughts, fears, dreams and hopes has not only decided he doesn't love you, but in fact will make you a target for all types of abuses. And you present with trust issues? You don't say!

Schizophrenia, also known as confusion in thought processes. You're in the midst of a custody battle, you don't know what's going on, someone's trying to pull the rug out from under you, you probably are working very hard to make ends meet (and only occasionally succeeding), and your thought processes are confused? How is that possible?

But let's go back to the "4" scale, psychopathic deviate. Now, the description given is that it implies "anger," which one might assume someone who's been the survivor of domestic violence would have a good deal of. But, let's be clear, a disguising of "psychopathic deviate" is not something that you want to hang on your wall. The typical high scale-4 person is, basically, the description a batterer would give of his victim, showing, among other things, "impulsiveness, poor interpersonal judgment, unpredictability, social alienation, and a reduced sense of responsibility and morals." Also, these folks have trouble adjusting to marriage and work, and sacrifice long-term goals for short-term desires. (One could argue this last one is a tradeoff a battered woman must make all the time, trying to survive to the next day and not being able to plan for ten years down the road.)

Clearly, you would not want such a person getting custody of a child, would you? This is a monster. I mean, when they crafted this test, they must have talked to the worst, the lowest of the low. We're talking Gacy, Dahmer, Bundy, Manson, right?

Wrong. First of all, they specifically excluded anyone from the group who had committed capital offenses. Per Nancy Rhodes in Comparison of MMPI Psychopathic Deviate Scores of Battered and Nonbattered Women, 7 J. FAM. VIOLENCE 297 (1992), "The group they used was a group that was "predominantly female," who had been placed in a psychiatric setting by the courts for "stealing, lying, truancy, sexual promiscuity, alcohol abuse and forgery."

This is of some note. You see, "Behavioral indicators of sexual abuse include running away from home, substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, truancy and shoplifting. Such antisocial behaviors are also associated with physical abuse and neglect."

Uh-oh.

So, what we're saying here is that we based the psychopathic scale on women who have exhibited certain problems. And these problems are, very frequently, symptoms of abuse in an earlier time. We've taken the personality traits they exhibit, and we've distilled them into a test.

Then, we give them to a woman who has just been abused.

And, surprise! She scores high!

Let's put this in terms of the psychiatrist testing. "Your Honor, this woman who claims she was abused was tested on a scale developed by looking at women who have done things which are frequently traits of being abused. She scored high. Ergo, she's a psychopath. Let's give her children to the man she claims abused her, because, clearly, she's making up the abuse."

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH! *bangs his head on table*

OK, but, let's just (for the heck of it), go with the argument that scale 4 is valid, and a person who scores high for scale 4 behaviors will show those behaviors and shouldn't be around kids. What happens to the scores of someone who has recently been abused after the abuse ends?

Guess what. It goes back down.

(Someone might suggest that, if we want to discourage the behaviors in scale 4 we don't like, we could end the abuse for women, instead of taking their children away, but that would, of course, be way too simple.)

(BTW, the article also discusses -- and debunks -- much thought there was a predisposition to being a battered woman. If you have normal scores, and you go into a battering relationship, you may very well come out with high scale 4 scores.)

Now, one last thing. When servicemen used to come back from the war with flashbacks and bad psychological "baggage" from the war, the term used was "shell-shock." It has since been called "post traumatic stress disorder."

And, not surprisingly, if you are a survivor of domestic violence, you frequently will suffer from PTSD.

Except, a more severe form than people who are in combat.

But the MMPI doesn't HAVE a scale for PTSD; rather, they created a "supplemental scale," which just uses the answers to the current questions, instead of specifically asking questions directed at finding out whether the testee has PTSD. As I understand the problem with this, it's like this. Let's say we need to know whether a person likes sweet foods or foods that are not so sweet. We ask the question: "Would you like broccoli or chocolate ice cream?" If they say chocolate ice cream, it means they like sweet foods.

Now, let's say we want to know, additionally, whether the person likes sugary beverages or more natural offerings. Adding a scale for this would involve adding questions such as, "Would you like Coca Cola or milk?" Adding a supplemental scale for this would involve asking the broccoli-or-ice-cream question, and using THAT answer to determine whether or not they want sugary beverages. (And if you think that works, just check to see how many people have a Coke classic with chocolate ice cream.)

So, we aren't testing for PTSD. Wonderful. But, at least the abuse survivor feels safe because it's over when she's being evaluated for custody, right?

Wrong. In a custody dispute, according to Erickson, "The victim must see the batterer in court. Additionally, she usually has contact with him when visitation starts and ends, and sometimes she must even have some contact between visitations in order to make visitation arrangements and communicate with regard to the children. These constant reminders of the trauma of the abuse may delay her healing process and may extend her PTSD symptoms. Those symptoms, in turn, may cause a forensic evaluator to view her as a poor candidate for custody."

Ya don't say.

As Erickson concludes, the whole issue "raises the question of whether custody evaluations should be carried out with abused women in transition, because their acute state of psychological distress may influence an accurate evaluation of their capacity to parent."

Failing that, we could stop using a scale developed with a large number of abuse victims as the control group and be surprised when others who have been abused display the same traits.

Or, at the very least, we could stop labeling them psychopaths. That's not too much to ask.

Is it?