WEDNESDAY, April 18 (HealthScout) -- Colorado has outlawed a controversial therapy technique linked to the death of a 10-year-old girl who suffocated during the ritual.
　　Candace Newmaker, 10, died last April while being smothered with pillows and a flannel sheet during a "rebirthing" session. The ritual was intended to improve the girl's disruptive relationship with her adoptive mother by forcing her to release a flood of rage and to simulate re-emergence from the womb.

Her therapists, Connell Watkins, 54, and Julie Ponder, 40, are standing trial on child abuse charges in Jefferson County District Court. They could serve as many as 48 years in prison if convicted.

"Candace's Law," signed by Gov. Bill Owens Tuesday, makes "rebirthing" illegal in the state. Dick Wadhams, Owens' press secretary, says the governor considers rebirthing "a reprehensible practice that he does not consider to be legitimate therapy."

The law, believed to be the first of its kind, makes it a misdemeanor to use the therapy once, and a felony for a second offense, punishable by up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine. Injuries to the patient would warrant separate charges.

The deadly episode occurred in Watkins' office and involved Watkins, Ponder and two other adults. Candace's adoptive mother, Jeane Newmaker, who brought the girl to Colorado from North Carolina for treatment of a "reactive attachment disorder," also was present. She will be tried in November on the less serious count of criminally negligent child abuse.

A transcript of the videotaped session, reported by the Rocky Mountain News, shows the girl, lying in a fetal position, wrapped in a sheet and penned in by sofa pillow. Soon after the ordeal begins she starts pleading for air, but the adults force more weight onto her.

Candace says she's going to die, and asks the therapists if they want her to.

The therapists: "You want to die? OK, then die. Go ahead, die right now."

Candace tells them she has vomited and defecated on herself. "Stay there with the poop and vomit," someone says.

When Candace finally stops moving, Ponder ridicules her as a "quitter." But the therapists wait 30 minutes more before unwrapping the unconscious girl from the sheet.

'Reckless and abusive'

The prosecution rested its case today, and jurors heard from an expert witness who testified that the therapy was "easily the most reckless and abusive treatment of a child I have ever seen," according to the DenverChannel.com, a local news site. Defense lawyers have argued that Candace died from a heart condition.

Watkins' business manager, Brita St. Clair, and an intern, Jack McDaniel, are also facing child abuse charges and will be tried in September.

Joan Blick, a spokeswoman for the Attachment Center of Evergreen, where attachment therapy was born in the 1970s, says the fatal incident "taints" both the treatment and the town. However, she says, neither of the therapists on trial in the Newmaker case was affiliated with the center, which has managed to keep up referrals and applications despite the negative publicity. The clinic treats about 50 children a year, says Blick, who adds that the psychotherapy does not subject them to restraint or "force of any sort."

Blick says "rebirthing" is extremely uncommon, and she had not heard of it prior to the latest case. Watkins has administered the therapy to several other patients since she started using it in 1999.

Attachment disorders are said to occur when there is "an interruption in bonding between parent and child occurs due to abandonment, neglect, abuse or early trauma," according to information provided by Blick's group. Children with attachment problems can be violent and unruly, doing harm to themselves and others. They are often also cruel to animals, pathologically untruthful, and "preoccupied with fire, blood, gore," the center says.

At particular risk, Blick says, are children in the foster care system, as are adoptees from countries such as the former Soviet Union, where they suffered great privation.

Nancy Winfrey, a Denver psychologist and a member of the Colorado Psychological Association's ethics committee, says her group had not heard about the Newmaker case before news of it broke, but probably would not have probed the incident because neither of the therapists involved is a psychologist. However, she says, it is never ethical to hurt a patient during treatment.
　　

From HealthScout