The interview lasted barely an hour. The psychologist’s subsequent one-page report stated that the mother was “cognitively limited,” and that her “mental status exam” reflected “primitive and irrational decision-making.” The report, signed by a psychiatrist, also noted that the parenting abilities of the mother, an immigrant from Central America, were suspect because of the kinds of foods she chose to feed the baby.
The child was taken from the mother’s custody immediately after the evaluation, and the removal was approved by a judge days later.
In late 2015, a father in the Bronx lost all chance at custody of his child as the result of another similar evaluation. He had met with a psychologist for an hour shortly after the birth of his child, according to the man’s attorney. The psychologist did not ask a single question about the man’s potential to be a parent, and never saw him in the presence of his newborn. He was instead given what the psychologist called an “abbreviated IQ test,” the attorney said. The subsequent report to Family Court concluded the father’s “cognitive limitations” left him unfit to care for his child.
Lauren Shapiro, the director of Brooklyn Defender Service’s family defense practice, said her organization had worked with dozens of families broken apart in large part because of Montego’s evaluations.
“We were shocked they were even being used by the court given that they didn’t follow the basic minimum standards for evaluating parents,” said Shapiro, who helped initiate the confidential 2012 survey.
Jama Adams, Montego’s clinical director, didn’t contest the findings of the 2012 review at the time, nor does he now. He said he and the clinicians he had hired had done the best they could, and had capably served untold numbers of families not captured in the limited review, before the city terminated its dealings with Montego in December of 2015.
Today, Adams looks back on the entire arrangement with the city as a kind of empty promise. The city, he said, had never been willing to spend the money it would have taken to produce high-quality mental health assessments. Meaningful examinations of parents or children would require taking weeks, not days, spending thousands of dollars, not hundreds. The city, he said, had set Montego up to fail. Adams said that failure had been shared by the judges in Family Court who relied on Montego‘s reports despite their clear limitations.
“These were snapshots,” Adams said of the reports. “But people started taking them as gospel.”