Therapy, Web tiff is near solution

PROVO — A legal tiff between the creators of a controversial Web site and proponents of holding therapy appears to be nearing a resolution.

For more than a year, the Cascade Center for Family Growth has tried to shut down the site — www.kidscomefirst.info — which they said unfairly linked the Cascade Center to the deaths of several children.

On Friday, however, an attorney for Cascade offered to drop the lawsuit against the site's creator, Alan Misbach, if Misbach would in turn drop a counter lawsuit seeking monetary damages caused by the Cascade suit.

And that means Misbach's site would stay up.

"Holding therapy in the state of Utah is gone," said Laura Thalin, who filed a claim of defamation against Misbach for information on the site. "Let's all get on with our lives."

Cascade, the only place in Utah that practiced holding therapy, has been reeling since its director, Larry VanBloem, died in a car crash in December.

Weeks later, the state's Division of Occupational Licensing put VanBloem's business partner, Jennie Gwilliam, on probation and ordered her to stop practicing holding therapy.

That action effectively killed the controversial form of therapy in Utah.

Cascade became the subject of national attention when a Springville couple was arrested and charged with child-abuse homicide for allegedly punishing their adopted 4-year-old daughter, Cassandra Killpack, by force-feeding her fatal amounts of water on June 9, 2002.

In several televised interviews, the Killpacks said they learned the punishment technique at Cascade.

Although prosecutors cleared Cascade of any wrongdoing, the case sparked a heated debate over whether holding therapy is an effective tool to treat troubled children — or whether it is a form of medical quackery that amounts to child abuse.

Proponents of holding therapy, such as Thalin, say it is the only treatment that works on children who are suffering from reactive attachment disorder, a condition that prevents children who have been abused from bonding to their natural or adoptive parents.

Its detractors, such as Misbach, say holding therapy is dangerous and has no scientific basis. His attorney, Evan Schmutz, has said that while Misbach's Web site does include several pictures of children who have allegedly died from holding-therapy techniques, it does not link their deaths to Cascade.