How This Archive Handles Criticism
Corrections & Criticisms
An archive that demands accountability must practice it. This page documents how this site responds to published criticism: errors we have made are conceded and corrected, on the record; errors made about us are enumerated, with the critic's own published sentences as the exhibits. To date, one substantial public critique of this site exists — a June 17, 2020 blog post by professor emerita Jean Mercer. It is treated here exactly as we ask the APA to treat the record: point by point, on the evidence.
First: The Correction We Owed
When a critic is right, the record gets fixed. Publicly.
CONCEDED & CORRECTED: Diagnostic-manual authorship
Dr. Mercer's article correctly noted that the DSM — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — is published by the American Psychiatric Association, not the American Psychological Association, and that the psychological APA does not control the DSM's contents.
She was right. Earlier versions of this site's material were imprecise on that point. Every page has been corrected: the DSM-5 is the American Psychiatric Association's manual, used daily in practice by the American Psychological Association's 115,700+ members — and nothing this site asks of the APA involves altering the DSM. Child Psychological Abuse, V995.51, already exists in it. Every request concerns what the American Psychological Association alone controls: assessment standards, training, ethics enforcement, and its public statements.
This remains the only correction her article produced — and, as of this writing, the only acknowledgment of error to appear on either side of this exchange.
Then: The Errors, Enumerated
Each entry pairs the article's own published sentence with the documented record. No characterizations. Exhibits.
A secondhand account, published as evidence
"I wasn't present at the delivery, but what I have gathered is that someone in the office took the petition and said 'thank you' and the Childress group then left."
— Jean Mercer, June 17, 2020The author states, in the same sentence, that she was not present and is relaying what she "gathered." The delivery of the petition — 16,000 signatures, later 26,000+, handed to Mary Hardiman of the APA on June 6, 2018 — is a documented event referenced in correspondence to the APA's own board and in the referral to the Attorney General of the District of Columbia. A professor emerita published office hearsay as her account of a documented event, and disclosed as much in her own sentence.
An assumption, published as a finding
"I think I am right in assuming that Gottfried has not spent his time studying the various aspects of psychology he mentions…"
— Jean Mercer, June 17, 2020The author assumed — her word — and did not contact the person she wrote about before publishing. The record she did not ask about: years of documented study and correspondence engaging Bernet's Five-Factor Model, Harman's prevalence research, Perry's neurodevelopmental work, Warshak, Baker, Kruk, Miller, Gottlieb, and Childress — and the delivery, to the APA's own board in February 2017, of the full clinical framework with citations to Bowlby, Minuchin, Beck, and van der Kolk. Whatever one concludes about those sources, "has not spent his time studying" was an assumption she published without checking — and said so.
A demand for evidence that was answered — and never engaged
"Gottfried claims that he has personally witnessed 30 deaths of separated parents in the last 4 years, but does not provide any evidence for this statement."
— Jean Mercer, June 17, 2020A fair challenge in 2020 — and it was answered: the memorial page of this site now documents the deaths, with names, photographs, and public sources, and the government's own data on custody-circumstance suicides is set out beside it. In the years since, the author has never engaged the memorial page or the sourcing that answered her challenge. The challenge improved this site. The silence that followed it is her record, not ours.
The thesis, misstated
"The thrust of Gottfried's statement is that the American Psychological Association is responsible for 'countless' deaths associated with judges' decisions not to give custody of children to one of their parents."
— Jean Mercer, June 17, 2020That is not this site's thesis, and the correction was published in 2021. The documented position — then and now — concerns the APA's own contradiction: an institution that told the President of the United States that "decades of psychological research" establish the trauma of parent-child separation, while answering the parents of the family courts, for those same decades, with a statement of "no official position." The argument has never depended on any custody ruling; it rests entirely on the APA's own signed documents.
The "(usually)" aside — and the mothers it erased
"…claim that a former spouse and a judge have interfered with the author's relationship with his [usually] children."
— Jean Mercer, June 17, 2020The parenthetical frames this harm as a men's-grievance genre. The record: the memorial on this site includes mothers — among them a former federal prosecutor who named her family court case in her final public statement — and a British investigation later documented mothers who died during proceedings in which "parental alienation" had been claimed against them. A University of Manchester study found serious health harms across 45 mothers in family court proceedings. The separation harms parents. The aside erased half of them.
This page will be updated the same way for any future published criticism: what is right will be conceded; what is wrong will be enumerated, in the critic's own words. The standing invitation to every critic is the same one extended to the APA for ten years — engage the documented record. It is all here.
The Full Record & TimelineAll quotations from the June 17, 2020 article are verbatim and preserved in the evidence file, together with the complete article. This page characterizes published statements and documented events only; it makes no claims about any person's character, competence, or state of mind, and attributes no wrongdoing beyond the published errors enumerated. © Kenneth R. Gottfried.