Both Mercer and Matthew Speltz, director of the Child Psychiatry Outpatient Clinic at the University of Washington, agree that RAD is often misdiagnosed for children who suffer obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, severe depression and other mental illnesses.

Therapists who treat it often describe RAD as a disease so horrific most people are unaware it exists, a disease caused by pre-birth trauma, abuse by their birth parents or even satanic rituals. Unlike conventional therapists, who view current family relationships as at least part of the problem, attachment therapists focus solely on the child, which appeals to some parents.

"Parents with a difficult child are fighting the implication that they are to blame," Speltz says. "It's appealing to listen to a therapist who says the problem resides in the child, that there is something evil in them, and without serious intervention they will become the next Ted Bundy.

"The parents are as much a victim as the kids. They are desperate for help, and they are willing to consider anything; they are so vulnerable. These are kids who have learned to survive, they can change a family, they can drive a wedge between parents, and this gives parents the power back.

"These parents are easy marks for those who are selling an idea with no scientific validation," Speltz says.

Holding therapy also pleases parents because it involves them in the process. Indeed, during the therapy session at Risenmay's house, she was as much the therapist as VanBloem. For those who believe attaching with the mother is the key to solving a child's mental-health problems, it makes sense that the mother would be involved in the session.

Speltz and Mercer compare holding therapy to brainwashing. They say it bonds a child to his or her parents in the same way boot camp bonds soldiers to their military units.

Cult leaders, fringe-rehabilitation programs and religious organizations have long used intense psychological methods to "destabilize a sense of self in order to promote compliance with an ideology or organization," Speltz wrote in a 2002 study on holding therapy.

"What's totally unscientific and a figment of imagination is that when it does work it's working for the reasons holding therapists say it works," Speltz says. "This idea that you can reduce a kid to tears, and you are bringing them back to early infancy, it's pure nonsense. Or this idea that pent-up anger is stored in the gut — it's pretty primitive thinking. And it's kind of scary, because it suggests that the therapist has no training in physiology or anatomy."

"There's not a lot of difference between that and ancient theories that lumps in the head were indicative of personality, and that by moving those lumps you could change personality."