Summary. Family law increasingly describes ordinary misconduct in clinical terms. Selfishness becomes narcissism, and disagreement becomes gaslighting. When amateur psychology complicates a child custody dispute, courts and lawyers often respond with professional psychology: therapists, custody evaluators, parenting coordinators, and multidisciplinary teams. In most cases, that is the wrong response. Most child custody disputes turn on facts, credibility, risk, and compliance with court orders, which are questions courts exist to decide. Mental-health expertise belongs in cases with genuine clinical issues. It should not stand in for fact-finding when a family is merely angry or dysfunctional.
Clinical vocabulary distorts evidence
Litigants increasingly use diagnostic terms for behavior that ordinary language describes better. A former spouse can be selfish, dishonest, vindictive, or manipulative without having a psychiatric disorder. Humans behave badly for jealousy, anger, and possessiveness all the time.
The label matters because it changes how evidence is read. Once a parent is a “narcissist,” a denial becomes gaslighting and a request for parent-time becomes control. The evidence is no longer tested. It is sorted to fit the conclusion. Courts should refuse that circularity. If a mother says the father is a narcissist, the court doesn’t need to accept or reject the diagnosis to decide whether he insults her in front of the children, misses exchanges, or parents appropriately. Each of those propositions needs its own evidence. The accusation proves none of them.
Most of the dispute is fact-finding
Ask what the case actually requires. Did one parent withhold the children? Did one repeatedly disparage the other? Were allegations made that turned out to be false? Which witness is credible? These are questions of historical fact, motive, and risk. Utah Code § 81-9-204 frames custody around the child’s best interest and directs courts to consider conduct, including abuse and co-parenting ability. Those factors have psychological dimensions, but the inquiry is evidentiary. Texts, missed exchanges, and testimony can establish conduct and its consequences without translating them into psychopathology.
Estrangement is the hard case, and it is still a causation problem
Parent-child estrangement invites errors in both directions. A rejecting child has not necessarily been manipulated. Rejection can come from neglect, frightening behavior, or ordinary adolescence. But a child’s rejection does not, by itself, prove that the rejected parent caused or deserves that rejection. The court must examine the conduct of both parents rather than treat the child’s reaction as proof of its own cause. “Parental alienation” should not become a default label that preempts evidence, and neither should its dismissal.
The court’s task is reconstruction. What did each parent say and do? When did the child’s attitude change, and what happened just before? Which allegations are corroborated? That is difficult work, but it is difficult fact-finding. Where the court finds that one parent drove the rift, clinical help may be the right remedy, such as reunification therapy. The distinction that matters is between clinical treatment as a remedy after findings and clinical opinion as a substitute for findings.
Delay is not neutral
Deferring to professionals in place of deciding has a cost. When one parent is undermining the other’s relationship with the children, every month of assessment is another month of that conduct working. A six-month evaluation to find a psychological explanation for behavior that texts and missed exchanges could have proven does not preserve the status quo. It lets the estrangement harden while the case waits.
More professionals also do not mean more accuracy. Each additional participant adds another layer of interpretation, another dispute over scope, more expense, and more delay. Rigor comes from the quality of the evidence and the court’s reasoning.
Treatment is not adjudication
Therapy can be valuable, but a custody dispute does not turn a treating therapist into a forensic investigator. Treatment and adjudication have different purposes and different methods. When the line blurs, therapy becomes litigation machinery. The therapist hears a one-sided history, counsel seeks the therapy records, and the therapist is asked to opine on a dispute they never investigated under forensic conditions. Putting a parent’s therapy at issue may also invite privilege fights under Utah R. Evid. 506. Treatment should stay treatment. It should not become informal discovery.
The same principle applies to how courts hear from children. Where the court can interview a child in camera, direct inquiry avoids the selection and interpretation that come with a therapist, guardian ad litem, or evaluator in the middle. Secondhand reporting is not safer because a professional delivers it.
Evaluations are hard to test
Even setting aside whether an evaluation is needed, the process is difficult to check. In Utah, evaluators are–scandalously–not required to record interviews with parents, children, or collateral sources. The report says what the evaluator says was said. The court, opposing counsel, and the parties cannot compare it to the source. Cross-examination may expose weaknesses in the evaluator’s methods, notes, and conclusions, but it cannot recreate an interview that no one recorded. Cross-examination that tests the evaluator’s memory of the interview does not test the interview.
The vocabulary compounds the problem. Reports often find “concerns” about ordinary conduct, such as a parent’s tone in an exchange or a child’s hesitation, without saying what the concern predicts or how it would be disproved. A finding that can’t be wrong can’t be tested either. This is the same circularity as the narcissist label, with a professional credential attached.
Evaluators also offer recommendations on legal custody and parent-time—decisions that ultimately belong to the court. A recommendation does not relieve the judge of independently evaluating the evidence and applying the governing law. In my experience, evaluators do not always understand the governing statutes, and that gap is common enough to be a serious concern. A recommendation built on a misunderstanding of the legal standard does not become helpful merely because it arrives with clinical authority.
None of this means evaluators are never useful. It means the court is being asked to rely on a process it cannot audit, in cases where ordinary evidence would have worked better.
The strongest objection, and the limit
The best argument for evaluators has two parts. Custody decisions are predictive, and a court must estimate future risk, not just find past facts. Judges and commissioners also have limited time, and an evaluation can supply investigation the calendar can’t. Both points have force.
They do not justify routine referral. The desire to predict future risk does not establish that a particular evaluator can predict it reliably. The court should require an explanation of what is being predicted, what evidence and methods support the prediction, and what limits apply to the conclusion. A professional credential is not that explanation.
The limiting principle is this: expertise is appropriate when the decision depends materially on specialized knowledge that a factfinder lacks. Serious mental illness, suicidality, substantial developmental disorders, clinically significant trauma, and complex substance use qualify. Hostility and emotional intensity do not.
What to do instead
When opposing or considering a request for an evaluation, ask:
- Can the disputed issue be proven with ordinary evidence (messages, records, witnesses, the schedule’s actual history)?
- Would the court’s decision change based on a clinical finding, or only on findings of conduct?
- Is there a narrower, faster option: an early evidentiary hearing on the contested facts, a proffer, an in-camera interview, or a targeted order enforcing the existing schedule?
If the answer to the first is yes and the second is no, the case needs adjudication, not assessment. If a genuine clinical question is present, define its scope in the order so it doesn’t expand into a general inquiry into the family.
Courts have judges because disputes require judgment. In garden-variety child custody disputes, we should expect them to use it.
If an evaluation is ordered, ask the court to require recorded interviews, production of the evaluator’s complete file, and a clearly defined scope in the order.
Utah Family Law, LC | divorceutah.com | 801-466-9277