Reactive Attachment Disorder - It's Time To Understand

Slide 15 of 23

Presentation Notes:

Anxious - The "in your face" child with very destuctive behavior
Differential - The child who has hidden their anger deep inside, easier to live with, but harder to treat

The DSM-IV (1994) defines Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) as markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts, beginning before age five, as evidenced by either:

1. Inhibited Type: persistent failure to initiate or respond in a developmentally appropriate fashion to most social interactions, as manifest by excessively inhibited, hypervigilant, or highly ambivalent and contradictory responses (e.g. responds to caregivers with approach, avoidance, and resistance to comforting, or frozen watchfulness); or
2. Disinhibited Type: diffuse attachments as manifest by indiscriminate sociability with marked inability to exhibit appropriate selective attachments (e.g. excessive familiarity with relative strangers or lack of selectability of attachment figures) (313.89, p. 116).