Lyme — The New Hampshire Board of Psychologists has suspended the license of a psychologist from Lyme for 10 months in a case that involves ethical boundaries and a therapist trying to help a troubled teen with a difficult home life.

The suspension of Alethea Young’s license, which was imposed in an order earlier this month and begins next month, comes in a long-running case brought to the board by the patient’s estranged father, who says Young’s actions led to his separation from his daughter.

Young, through her Norwich-based attorney Geoffrey Vitt, said that she did what she felt she had to do to protect the girl from her father. The patient, who now is an adult, sides with Young in legal filings.

According to the July 6 order, the board found that Young had engaged in unprofessional conduct by violating an ethical boundary during the course of her treatment of the then-teenaged patient in 2013, and that Young was not sufficiently remorseful for her actions.

“In light of the evidence and testimony, there remains a risk of harm to the public and public safety,” the board wrote.

The board said that the penalty was necessary because Young failed to seek consultation or peer supervision in her treatment of the girl, even though she acknowledged that she had never been as involved with a patient as she was with this one. In addition to providing the girl with therapeutic services, Young also at times took on additional roles in helping the patient. The board also faulted Young for failing to acknowledge her ethical violations.

“Dr. Young’s testimony was devoid of any understanding of potential harm to the victim and the victim’s family and lacked insight and perspective as to the severity of the ethical violations,” the board wrote.

The Valley News is not naming the patient, who was born in 1996, or her family members because she was a minor at the time the events at issue took place.

Young, who is in her early 60s, began treating the girl around the time the girl’s parents divorced in 2002, according to a settlement agreement Young signed with the board late last year. The relationship expanded beyond therapy when Young started helping coordinate educational support for the girl in 2013, when she was in high school. Young spent time driving her from school to tutoring to the patient’s home, and the two also had dinner together on “numerous” occasions, according to board documents.

Young further intervened when the girl came to her on Aug. 8, 2013, asserting that her father had shaken her and slapped her in the face, according to the agreement. During this period of crisis, Young allowed the patient to spend the night at her home and subsequently worked with an educational consultant, Karla Bourland, to bring the girl to meet the patient’s mother in Montpelier.

Young, a mandatory reporter, did not report the girl’s allegations regarding the father to police in Vermont and New Hampshire until Aug. 10, 2013, and she did not make a report to the New Hampshire Division of Children, Youth and Families until Aug. 13, five days after the patient’s report, according to the agreement.

As a result of the events of that August, the girl subsequently moved in with another family, according to family court records. She has not had direct contact with her father since.

Records show that Young billed the mother’s trust for services unrelated to therapy, including weekend care, dog care, food, shelter, entertainment, transportation and caretaking.

As a result of Young’s actions, the board found that she violated New Hampshire’s Child Protection Act and several provisions of the 2002 American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. The ethics code, for instance, says therapists should avoid a “multiple relationship” in which they play both a professional and other role in the life of the same person.

In the settlement agreement, Young agreed to continue not treating patients under the age of 18; she had stopped doing so after the patient’s father first filed the complaint with the board in late 2013.

Young also is required to pay a fine of $7,500, with $2,500 suspended if she complies with the other terms of the agreement. She had to participate in 42 hours of continuing education in the areas of maintaining professional boundaries, ethics; record-keeping and billing practices; and multiple relationships.

She was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, including cognitive and personality testing, and to have her practice reviewed by a supervisor for at least a year.

The settlement agreement included a suspension of Young’s license of up to one year, subject to a June hearing at which Young had an opportunity to demonstrate why she should not be required to serve it. It was following the hearing last month that the board made its decision to suspend her license for 10 months, beginning on Aug. 6.

At the hearing, Young and Vitt told the board that the complaint and settlement agreement already have had a negative impact on Young’s work, according to the board’s July order. She has not taken on a new client in two years, has had a 40 percent reduction in her caseload and income, and has had to stop teaching.

In addition, Vitt told the board that a suspension could end Young’s career.

The patient submitted a statement to the board on Young’s behalf. In it, she credits Young and Bourland with helping her to develop the study skills she needed to graduate from high school.

“(The high school’s) tutoring would not have been able to put in the significant time and support that I needed, and I would have failed without Dr. Young’s educational and therapeutic program,” the patient wrote in the May 2017 letter.

She also said that she had nowhere else to turn following what she described as the assault by her father in 2013, after which she said she “feared for my life.” She needed assistance from Bourland and Young to get to her mother, she wrote.

“Later, Dr. Young’s assistance processing the assault and my feelings of fear, among other things, was essential to helping me live a normal life again,” she wrote.

The patient’s father, through his Lyme-based attorney Colin Robinson, said that he did not assault his daughter and that there is “no physical evidence” of his having done so.

Robinson said that DCYF investigated the assault allegations and found “no credible” evidence to support them.

The father filed a lawsuit in Grafton Superior Court against both Young and Bourland in 2016. It includes allegations of kidnapping, interference with the custody of a child, intentional infliction of emotional distress and defamation. Judge Peter Bornstein rejected the father’s arguments in a summary judgment in March; the father has appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court.

Robinson said that Young and Bourland could have chosen to bring the girl to law enforcement if they didn’t feel it was safe for her to return home.

“Nobody put these people up to doing what they did,” he said. “In fact, they had an alternative.”

Instead, he said, they chose a course of action that resulted in “alienation and harm.”

Vitt, however, said that it wasn’t Young’s actions that separated the child from her father, but the father’s own actions that did so. He provided a 2013 evaluation by a guardian ad litem that supports his point.

“Requiring (the patient) to have contact with her father before she is ready to do so will send a message both to her and to (her father) that his behavior was acceptable and that it was a mistake for (the patient) to disclose it to her therapist,” the guardian ad litem wrote.

Although Young signed the settlement agreement, Vitt disputes the idea that her actions constituted an ethical violation. He said that the patient was not hurt by Young’s actions.

Young cannot appeal the board’s decision because the board’s rules don’t allow for it, Vitt said. But he does question the process the board uses, which involves the board serving as the expert, investigator and the judge for each case.

Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.

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