Letter to a Former Child Abuse Investigator

You, sir, owe me and my family an apology. In December 1981, you came into our home and broke up our family when you accused my parents of neglect. Our basic needs were not being met. However, my parents suffered from unemployment, mental disability, and poverty-- and still, they were good parents.

You couldn’t tell the difference.

Both of my parents had serious mental illnesses (dad, schizophrenia, and mom, bipolar disorder), but you weren’t competent enough to assess our situation accurately, because there is no mention of their mental health anywhere in the child abuse investigation report. Did you ever figure out they were fundamentalist, religious, right-wing nuts? No. Instead, you tried to pin drug abuse on my *Mormon* parents. That remains laughable to this day, since neither of my parents did drugs or even drank alcohol. They still don’t. Instead, they now take psychotropic medications, which is what they needed in the 1980s. When they didn’t get them, they remained seriously mentally ill, including attempting suicide and dealing with paranoia that the ignorant State of Iowa Child Protective Services workers would come in and take their children. Oh wait, that happened. It wasn’t paranoia.

You can’t apologize to my brother David, because he committed suicide when he was 23 in 1996. He was so traumatized by the foster care experience that he made crank calls to our former foster parents until right before he died. I wanted him to let it go, but he was broken. All of his siblings are witness to how often he talked about the foster care experience as the original source of his anxiety and depression.

Take a bow, you picked on mentally ill poor people who were actually decent parents. By scaring them nearly to death, you turned them into even more non-functioning adults than when they met you. You were obviously right that this family needed serious help, but your decision to split us across three counties was not helpful.

How many other shattered families can personally attribute their demise to your devastating lack of skills?