This story was co-published with The Daily Beast.

In August 2009, Mindi, a 25-year-one-time struggling new parent, experienced what doctors afterward ended was a psychotic episode. She had been staying in a cousin'southward spare basement room in De Soto, Kansas, while trying get on her feet later an unexpected pregnancy and an abusive human relationship. She'd been depressed since her daughter was born and was becoming increasingly distrustful of her relatives.

Isolated, broke and scared, one Saturday morning, she cracked. She woke to change her 5-calendar month-sometime daughter'south diaper. When Mindi looked downwards, she believed the baby's genitals had been torn.

Mindi'due south mind raced for an explanation. The one she came to? That her babe had been raped the dark before; that someone—she did not know who—had put sedatives in the air vents.

Mindi called her pediatrician'southward office. A receptionist told her to take her daughter to a children's infirmary in nearby in Kansas City, Missouri. Doctors there plant no show that the girl had been harmed or that whatever of what Mindi claimed had really happened.

Afterwards Mindi started arguing, medical staff sent her for a psychological evaluation and notified local kid welfare authorities, co-ordinate to court records. (As is typical in child welfare cases, the court documents exercise not include the full names of everyone in the family. Mindi has asked ProPublica to employ merely her commencement proper name, equally did other parents in the story.)

That night, government took emergency custody of Mindi'south daughter, who is referred to in court documents by her initials, Q.A.H. A courtroom-appointed doc afterward concluded that Mindi had experienced postpartum psychosis.

But Mindi rebounded later the episode. She began to attend therapy and to run into a psychiatrist, who prescribed an antidepressant. She found a task as a shift managing director at Kmart and moved into her own apartment. Each morning, she'd call the foster home where her girl had been placed and she'd read Q.A.H. a book.

In time, her psychiatrist, therapist and fifty-fifty a console of judges concluded that Mindi should become her daughter back.

"I found the help I needed to be healthy," says Mindi, a wide-eyed woman with a round face and a chatty touch on. "I was dealing with some mental battles at the time."

Dr. Stanley Golan, the psychiatrist who treated Mindi, diagnosed her with a mix of post-traumatic stress disorder—likely, a therapist later said, related to abuse—low and peradventure a kind of "mild delusional disorder." Still, the diagnoses, Golan said in courtroom testimony, "do not interfere with her parenting and she is able to adequately care for Q.A.H."

"You tin can have these diagnoses and be symptom-free," he testified.

Indeed, in September 2011, Mindi, who was in another relationship, gave nascency over again, to a boy named Jace, whom she'southward now raising capably on her own. Citing Mindi's awaiting instance over Q.A.H., Kansas government took Jace at birth and placed him in foster care. But they soon returned him afterwards finding no evidence that Mindi posed any risk to her son. Every bit a family therapist testified, Mindi has provided a "nurturing, loving environs and had met all of [Jace'south] needs."

All the same four years later on, later on a protracted series of court fights, Mindi does not accept her girl back.

"I couldn't run across how they could go on i while I had the other," said Mindi, sitting on the carpet in a living room with her son, surrounded by toy trains and a pile of books. "I don't recall I should have to fight for my own kid to come abode." (Missouri and county child welfare officials declined to discuss the case.)

The question in Mindi's case is non about what authorities did when she plunged into a mental wellness crisis—nearly anybody involved in the instance, including Mindi's own attorneys, agrees it was likely appropriate to remove her babe that day. Instead, the issue is whether a mental health diagnosis itself, in the absenteeism of any harm, should be enough to keep Mindi from ever getting her daughter back.

Under a concept sometimes called "predictive neglect," Missouri and about thirty other states let courts to finish a parent'southward connectedness to a kid if authorities conclude a mother or father has a mental illness that renders them incapable of safely raising the kid. Officials usually must present evidence that the illness poses a threat. Nearly cases involve significant mental illness, not run-of-the-mill depression or anxiety. Yet there demand be no evidence of actual harm or fail, just a conclusion that there is a adventure of it.

States typically practice non rail how many parental termination cases are related to mental affliction, or how often parents have lost children based on a diagnosis. New York, one of the few states that does tally such cases, has about 200 parental terminations annually based on mental inability, a category that includes both mental illness and "mental retardation." If there were a similar rate nationally, that would amount to several thousand cases per year. The cases are typically sealed, and there's no style to know how many involve court overreach.

But if it'southward impossible to know how many parents lose children unnecessarily because of the stigma of mental illness, it'south articulate that the process for deciding such cases is securely flawed.

Courts' decisions rest on the recommendations of evaluators who often do non observe parents at home or examine their actual tape of parenting. Instead, they rely on psychological tests and case notes.

Incomplete evaluations are an "owned problem," said Joanne Nicholson, who directed a unit that conducted parenting assessments for Massachusetts kid welfare agencies and is one the land's leading researchers on parents with mental illness.

"Parents are often evaluated without a real assay of their supports, of the life they actually live," said Nicholson, currently a psychiatry professor at Dartmouth College. As a result, "the diagnosis starts to speak louder than real life."

Children can also pay a toll when courts overstep. Research shows that forcing children in and out of dissimilar homes can leave lasting emotional scars.

The logic of removing kids from parents with serious mental illness is straightforward. Studies have shown that serious mental illness correlates with higher rates of child fail and corruption. Parents who tin't accept care of themselves aren't going to be in a position to have care of a child. And delusional thinking can lead to irrational, dangerous behavior.

"You have to put protection first," said Mary Kay O'Malley, who worked for years as a foster care caseworker, is at present a professor at the University of Missouri Police force Schoolhouse and has dealt with many cases like Mindi's.

Slideshow

Life After a Girl is Taken Away

Mindi's girl was taken by authorities afterward Mindi had a mental health crisis. Mindi has never been able to get her daughter back, even though she's now capably raising a son.

When officials fail to intervene to protect children from mentally ill parents, the results can be tragic, irrevocable and front-page news. In one notorious 2008 instance, a Long Island, New York, mother drowned her three children after canton officials failed to respond to repeated warnings from relatives that she was dangerously unstable.

Simply O'Malley says she's seen agencies and courts unnecessarily cut off parents from their children. She says that'southward what happened to Mindi.

Six months after Mindi brought her daughter to the infirmary, in February 2010, a parenting counselor reported that Mindi "is gear up to be at that place for [Q.A.H.] emotionally, mentally, and [she] can support Q.A.H."

"The parent changed in this case," said O'Malley, who consulted for Mindi'south attorneys for free after learning about the case. "Merely the courtroom didn't."

The laws permitting termination of parental rights were by and large written in an era when serious mental illness was assumed to disqualify patients from participation in normal life, including parenting. Parents like Mindi may have been institutionalized. In many states, the mentally ill or intellectually disabled could exist sterilized. The phrasing in the police has often changed—states have removed words similar "feebleminded" and "depravity"—but the same concepts echo.

Indeed, a 2012 presidential commission report constitute that "parents with psychiatric disabilities feel the most significant bigotry when they attempt to exercise their central correct to create and maintain families."

"When [mentally disabled] people were institutionalized, they could not keep their kids. At present they're living on their own, and they're not allowed to keep their kids," said Patrick Yewell, who recently retired from a career as a foster intendance caseworker, supervisor and ambassador in Kentucky'due south kid welfare system.

Rudy, a 42-year-old Due west Indian-born human in the Bronx, New York, was also denied custody of his daughter. His take a chance to raise her now rests largely on a psychologist's evaluation consisting of 2 visits and a review of Rudy's records.

Rudy has long struggled with chronic bipolar disorder, for which he has been repeatedly hospitalized. Rudy is also intellectually delayed—an IQ test placed him at the borderline of intellectual disability.

He has no history of violence, abuse or neglect. His merely child, J, who is now 3, was removed from the hospital immediately afterward she was born and placed in foster care. Rudy has been asking to be allowed to raise his daughter with help from his female parent and sister.

Authorities first took J because of significant concerns about her mother. J's mother, from whom Rudy had separated before J was built-in, had already lost three other children to foster intendance. I of the children removed from J's mother and placed in foster intendance afterward died at the easily of a relative of J'due south mother. And like Rudy, J'due south female parent suffers from mental illness and intellectual delays.

On June 28, 2010, Rudy watched equally two Nassau Canton caseworkers and a cop walked out of the hospital with 4-day-old J. (ProPublica confirmed details of the instance through court documents and multiple interviews.)

Rudy, who has closely cut hair and often dresses in baggy sports jerseys, recalls the solar day his daughter was taken equally the saddest of his life. "I asked them why they took my daughter, and they didn't reply," Rudy remembered in a soft stuttering voice with an accent left over from his childhood in St. Croix. "I asked them if I could hold her before they took her, and they wouldn't permit me hold her."

Rudy began what would become a weekly ritual: Riding 2 trains and a bus every Tuesday from the Bronx to Long Isle to spend 75 minutes with J in a room in the county kid welfare role. Some caseworkers were suspicious of Rudy. "The major concern for the family is both parents' mental health issues," kid welfare officials wrote in a courtroom certificate.

Others described him as a loving, if inexperienced, begetter. One caseworker note from a visit in September 2011 described Rudy as "gentle and caring," rocking J to sleep on the burrow at the county office.⁠ Two weeks afterward, a different worker wrote that he was "getting more skilful at caring for the child."⁠ J's mother, meanwhile, stopped showing upwards for visits and failed to appear in courtroom.

But but over a year after J was first placed in foster intendance, two Nassau Canton officials pulled Rudy into a meeting room later on a visit with J and told him that the county planned for J to be adopted by her foster family, case documents bear witness.

"They said I have a mental illness, they were trying to see if I would sign away my rights," Rudy said as he sat one recent evening in his Bronx apartment, a pot of rice steaming on the stove. "They expected it to go smoothly, they expected me to surrender my rights."

In New York, counties are required to engage an attorney for parents at run a risk of losing their kids, but Rudy hadn't still been given one. Unsure of what was happening, Rudy went home and called his sis Rubeka, in Tampa, Florida.

"He sounded actually upset. Not actually angry, just more hurt," said Rubeka, who works every bit a psychiatric nurse.

Rudy and Rubeka consulted a lawyer and came upward with a programme in which Rudy would move in with his sister and mother in Florida then they could raise J together. J's mother, who was also facing the termination of her parental rights, and whose mental health, according to case notes, was deteriorating, agreed to the plan. (J's mother declined to discuss the example with ProPublica, except to say she supported Rudy's try to go custody.)

But Nassau County officials told Rudy that he should accept laid out the programme months earlier and that because and so much fourth dimension had passed, federal kid welfare constabulary required them to request termination of his parental rights. The canton's records suggest that caseworkers had warned Rudy about this; Rudy said he did non sympathize he could lose his rights so quickly and that he waited because he believed J's female parent was going to regain custody. Caseworkers also noted that visits between Rudy and J had gotten harder equally she grew older—she would oft cry inconsolably; she knew her father just as the human she saw on Tuesdays and considered her foster parents her real mother and father.

Only these were non the reasons Nassau County regime listed when they petitioned a canton courtroom to sever Rudy and J's legal ties. Instead, the canton filed to terminate his rights based on his mental illness. Under New York law, parents can lose their children if courts determine their mental disabilities render them incapable of parenting for the "foreseeable future."

The Nassau County Department of Social Services would not answer to questions from ProPublica near the case or any related policy issues. The county referred ProPublica to the New York State Part of Children and Family Services. That office declined to annotate likewise and referred us back to Nassau County. The foster parents' attorney and the attorney appointed to stand for J also declined to talk over the specifics of the case.

In the summer of 2012, a judge sent Rudy to Dr. Joseph Scroppo, a psychologist and attorney who has held appointments at several New York universities. Scroppo has a contract with Nassau County to perform forensic psychological evaluations and brand recommendations about whether parents should go on their children.

Scroppo'due south evaluation was exhaustive compared with many in other parental rights cases. He met with Rudy solitary for nearly x hours. And so Scroppo watched Rudy collaborate with J for 30 minutes. He gave Rudy an IQ test, asked him to define words, stack blocks and read a few sentences.⁠ He reviewed Rudy's mental wellness records, including his hospitalizations for manic episodes, and example notes from the child welfare department.

Scroppo ended that Rudy could not be trusted to raise his daughter.

Rudy'south "score indicates that he is probably capable of semi-independent living but would experience meaning problems if he were to endeavour fully contained living," Scroppo wrote. Citing Rudy's hospitalizations, Scroppo concluded that Rudy "is now, and for the foreseeable future, unable to adequately intendance for the subject field child."

During a hearing in May 2013 in Rudy's continuing parental rights case, Rudy's lawyer, who was appointed to the case when the canton filed for termination, grilled Scroppo on his evaluation.

"Your testimony...suggested that [Rudy] would have difficulty functioning fully independently; is that correct?" Rudy's lawyer, Lauren Broderick, asked.

"Yes," Scroppo replied.

"[But] wasn't it your understanding that [Rudy] was cooking his own meals at the time of your evaluation?" Broderick said, looking down at her notes.

"I'1000 not sure whether he was cooking his meals or not," Scroppo said.

"Did you inquire?" Broderick asked, looking up.

"No, I did not," he said.

"Wasn't it true at the fourth dimension of your evaluation that [Rudy] was paying his bills?" she went on. "He was responsible for his ain hygiene?"

"Equally far as I knew, yes," Scroppo said.

Broderick continued to push button Scroppo to offer evidence from Rudy'southward life. Instead, Scroppo said, "I based the [categorization of] semi-independent status on the test that I administered to him."

New York's constabulary allows mothers and fathers to present alternative evaluations in court, though funding is not always made available to pay for them. Rudy's sister and brother scraped together several thousand dollars to hire an evaluator for a second stance.

Dr. Barry Rosenfeld, a psychologist who directs clinical grooming at Fordham University, did non but administrate tests. He spoke to the people in Rudy's life to get a improve sense of him—and pieced together a very different motion picture.

He discovered that in the early on 2000s, Rudy shared an apartment about Tampa with Rubeka and their brother Mitchell. Mitchell had a babe male child and Rudy would take care of him. "My son was around three or four. We'd become out for the night, or on the weekends, and Rudy worked less than us, so nosotros'd leave my son with him," Mitchell said recently over the phone from Florida. "I never had any worries about that."

Rosenfeld learned from Norma Gonzalez, a caseworker who'd met regularly with Rudy in the apartment edifice where he lived when J was born, that "[Rudy] successfully manages his own day-to-day needs and has done then consistently for 3 years."

Rosenfeld noted that Rudy's programme to enhance J with his sister indicated non incapacity, just a responsible recognition of his ain demand for assist. "At that place appears to be no show that [Rudy]...is unable to adequately plan for care for his girl," he wrote.

ProPublica asked a third party to read the two evaluations and to assess the soundness of their methods. Maurice Feldman, a psychologist based at the Center for Applied Disability Studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, researches parenting capacity evaluations. He said that the two evaluators relied on different methods and assumptions.

Scroppo's evaluation didn't take into business relationship the assist Rudy planned to have from his family; Rosenfeld's did. "The first evaluator makes the assumption of the scenario that the parent has to parent the kid totally independently," Feldman said.

Feldman also said that even though Scroppo's report was relatively thorough, it exhibited a common flaw: It measured mental disability in isolation from its impact on parenting.

"There is a conceptual leap that the first assessor used," Feldman said. He concluded that because Rudy scored "low on cognitive and personality disorder measures, therefore he tin't parent," Feldman said. "Only that is a fallacy."

"There is nothing in the showtime evaluator's study, none of the materials cited, that would lead me to believe he can't accept care of his girl."

Scroppo declined to speak with ProPublica about Rudy'southward instance, citing professional obligations to confidentiality. But he did speak in broad terms near mental wellness evaluations in child protective cases, which make up a significant part of his practice.

"Evaluators are tasked with evaluating the specific parents, not the support system or other persons in their lives," Scroppo explained. "It's driven by the fact that only the parent is going to accept ultimate conclusion making over the child. Although the parent may have —and I think it would affair if they did—a team to help them, information technology would hinge on their ability to exist responsible. The police is for me to look at the parent in and of her self."

Academic studies have plant that mental health parenting evaluations often take this cocky-sufficiency view of parenting. Just every bit Feldman argues, "Nobody raises their child in a vacuum."

The American Psychological Association guidelines actually encourage evaluators to reach out to "extended family members and other individuals when advisable (due east.g., caretakers, grandparents, clinical and social services providers, and teachers)."

Yet often that doesn't happen. A decade ago, DePaul University researchers reviewed 190 evaluations from Chicago'south child welfare system. Almost none of the evaluators chosen on family members or others besides the parents. Oftentimes, the evaluators relied on unmarried short interactions with parents or failed to observe them with their children. More recent studies by researchers in New York and at the University of California, Berkeley found similar patterns.

"The tests are already less than perfect at measuring what they were designed to measure out—IQ or psychopathology—and they are far less than perfect at measuring parenting," Karen Budd, the DePaul study's pb researcher, told ProPublica.

One reason evaluations come up up short is money, said Nicholson, the Dartmouth psychiatry professor who researches parents with mental illness. "Really thorough evaluation is pretty resource-intensive, and nobody wants to do them," Nicholson said. "Nobody can actually afford that. Or they say they can't. Taking a child away is expensive, too."

Even Scroppo agrees that these cases tin be difficult calls: "The severity of the mental disease is important in making any determination. And sometimes the line is not articulate."

When Rudy is well, he is soft-spoken and thoughtful. "I am really focusing on being a father to my girl. My dad was a good dad—he worked hard, he took care of us, and I desire to do the same thing for my daughter," Rudy said last fall, after returning from work at the grocery store where he stocked shelves.

He as well knows he would probable struggle to raise J by himself. Rudy has bouts of numbing depression and loftier-paced mania. At their worst, Rudy'south manic states can flare into delusions. He has believed that he'south a man of affairs and that YouTube videos conduct hugger-mugger messages. The last time he was hospitalized was in the winter of 2013. He and his sister Rubeka say the stress of the case, and the threat of losing his daughter, finally overwhelmed him.

But raising J alone, of course, hasn't been the programme. "If he slipped into an episode, we would know it," Rubeka says. "Nosotros would have been there to support her together."

Rudy acknowledges there are no like shooting fish in a barrel answers nor perfect endings. The case has at present dragged on for near iv years. And more hearings are scheduled for June in the Nassau Canton family court.

J has "been in foster treat a long time," Rudy said. "It will exist hard to take her out of foster care. [The Section of Social Services] is saying that she bonded with the foster mom. It's a tough case, y'all know."

When authorities have a kid, a 1997 federal law mandates that they must provide parents with access to the programs and services they need to reunite with their children. If the consequence that brought a kid into foster care is homelessness, kid welfare systems must find parents housing. If it'due south drugs: treatment. If information technology'southward abuse: parenting classes. Parents can be compelled to attend anger management classes, seek counseling or exit an abusive partner.

Merely the police does not explicitly cover disabilities, mental or physical. And in the absence of a clearly applicable federal standard, at to the lowest degree v states—Alaska, Arizona, California, Kentucky and North Dakota—have listed mental illness as one of a few "aggravating circumstances" that exempt authorities from having to provide assist to attempt to piece families back together. Among the scattering of other circumstances? Murdering, torturing or sexually abusing a child.

In New York, courts can relieve kid welfare departments of having to prove they have made efforts to reunify families if judges deem a female parent or father as well mentally disabled to parent. That has been Nassau Canton'due south position regarding Rudy. "The department is non under any obligation to make reasonable efforts to render the kid and to make recommendations [for services] to him," the county's lawyer said in a Nov 2013 hearing.

The rationale for denying services is often explained this style: If a parent is indeed so mentally ill that they're never going to be able to safely enhance a child, why elevate that family through an extended legal case and compel taxpayers to brand futile expenditures?

But without setting upward supports and services, in that location may be very little fashion to know whether a parent tin can raise a kid. Rudy was not offered parenting classes or help moving to an flat where J could join him. No caseworker tried to help Rudy detect a program that could support him to heighten his girl, though supportive-parenting programs be in New York City.

"Nobody ever offered me any help," Rudy says.

In Missouri, where Mindi's case unfolded, the state's obligation to explore support for mentally ill parents has become an issue in the courts.

In 2012, a country appellate court reversed a termination based largely on the testimony of a psychologist who'd administered tests but never actually observed the female parent with her child.

"Fifty-fifty a mental condition that renders a parent unable to provide acceptable intendance for a child alone does not provide a basis for termination if the parent has access to boosted support because parenting is oftentimes 'a group effort,' " the appeals courtroom wrote. "It is considering of the frequently grouping nature of modern parenting that [the law] does not let for the termination of parental rights simply because a parent cannot shoulder the entire brunt of raising a kid on his or her own."

While ProPublica spoke to dozens of attorneys around the country virtually questionable cases, few termination cases are appealed and fewer still are reversed—college courts are typically deferential to trial court decisions. Missouri appeals courts and the country's Supreme Court have overturned at to the lowest degree seven other mental-health-based terminations since 2000. We establish another 7 cases since 2000 in which New York appellate courts overturned mental disability terminations.

In the terminal decade, states including Idaho, Utah and Vermont take added language to their child welfare statutes to protect parents with disabilities, including psychiatric disabilities. "A court may non remove a child from the parent's or guardian'due south custody on the basis of...mental illness," the Utah law reads.

But mental health advocates say progress is too slow. They say that even in states where mental illness is not listed explicitly as a reason for terminating parental rights, parents still face bias and aren't getting the help they demand.

"People have focused on the language of disability or mental affliction in the laws, and that is of import," said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director of the Bazelon Eye, a mental health advocacy groups. "Merely yous likewise need to provide supports."

In 2011, two years after Mindi's child was removed, Missouri'south legislature adjusted the kid welfare laws to recognize the rights of disabled parents. The change came afterwards news broke of a blind couple whose infant had been removed over concerns that their disabilities impaired their ability to raise a child.

The measure affirmed that zilch in the state's laws should "be construed to let discrimination on the basis of inability or illness." Children cannot be removed, nor can parental rights exist terminated, the bill maintained, "without a specific showing that there is a causal relation between the disability or disease and impairment to the kid."

As it was originally introduced, the Missouri legislation noted that in making child removal and parental termination decisions, the country "shall consider the availability and use of accommodations for the inability or disease, including assistive engineering science and back up services." That language—the sort that advocates for parents and for people with psychiatric diagnoses say is needed to stop unnecessary family unit separations—was removed from the terminal legislation.

In Mindi'due south case, her daughter's foster parents and the state of Missouri asked the judge in 2011 to terminate Mindi's parental rights and for Q.A.H. to be adopted. The reason her rights should be terminated? Citing land law, lawyers for Q.A.H.'southward foster family unit wrote that Mindi has "a mental status which is shown past competent evidence either to exist permanent or such that there is no reasonable likelihood that the status can be reversed."

The petition rested largely on reports of the event three years before, when, after the delusion about her daughter'southward rape, Mindi brought her daughter to the hospital.

In 2012, a Missouri trial court granted the petition to terminate Mindi'southward parental rights, formally severing her connection to Q.A.H. Mindi was "unable to knowingly provide [Q.A.H.] the necessary care, custody, and command" because, the judge wrote, she "has delusions that and so go her reality."

Earlier in the example, Mindi had regained custody of Q.A.H. after eight months of separation just to lose it again after refusing to permit visits from Q.A.H.'s father, who Mindi says was calumniating. Such lack of cooperation is not legally sufficient to permanently separate children from their parents, but the judge who terminated Mindi'due south parental rights chalked upwardly her claim of abuse to ongoing delusions—though no bear witness was presented on this, one way or the other. Q.A.H. was placed back in foster care, this fourth dimension with a new couple.

The judge also said in his opinion that Mindi had fabricated strange faces while sitting in court, an "affect," the judge wrote, which "is quite unusual in termination of parental rights proceeding, merely is consistent with mental health diagnosis given by [the court-appointed psychiatrist]."

Mindi's lawyers and other attorneys who represent parents like her say the judge's reaction is common: Actions and statements that might laissez passer without notice in people without a mental illness are pathologized in people with a diagnoses. "People who have those records at the back of their listen are looking for something to support their theory that she'southward non stable," said Sandra Wirtel, Mindi's court-appointed attorney.

Mindi and her lawyers appealed the 2012 ruling, and the following year a Missouri appellate court sided with her. The trial courtroom determination, a 3-guess panel ruled, "utterly fails to institute that [Q.A.H.] would be harmed by a continued human relationship with Mother."

The appellate judges added that the estimate's ascertainment of Mindi's facial expressions "does non constitute reliable and substantial evidence on the critical question of Mother's present mental condition."

Mindi began preparing for Q.A.H. to render, setting up a bedroom with a pink bedspread. They had non seen each other for nearly a twelvemonth, and to rebuild their relationship, Mindi and Q.A.H. were allowed to brainstorm visits. Her daughter was bigger, more talkative, her nighttime blond hair at present in long curls. At first, Q.A.H. was shy, feeling out her relationship with this woman she'd been separated from. Only then she asked her mother to play a game Mindi had made up when Q.A.H. was younger. "She remembered that," Mindi said.

Mindi thought her daughter would be home for Christmas. But in late 2013, Mindi'southward lawyer called her to tell her the case was non over. Q.A.H.'south foster parents, joined by the state, had appealed the case to the Missouri Supreme Court. Visits were halted once more. The judges heard arguments in the case 2 months ago.

When she's with her son, Mindi can, for a moment, forget that for the last three years her life has been consumed past the fight for her daughter. Mindi enrolled in higher once again. She spends a lot of time at her Baptist church building—Wednesday night Bible written report and Lord's day services. She now lives in the dwelling of a family friend who is mostly abroad—Mindi's male parent died when she was immature and she's estranged from her mother.

Belatedly last year, she started to run into with the foster parents for monthly mediation sessions. Q.A.H. had lived with them for more than 2 years now.

To her attorneys, Mindi'due south case nevertheless seemed like a sure win. In 2007, the Missouri Supreme Courtroom restored the parental rights of a young mother who'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Judge Richard Teitelman sits on the Supreme Courtroom of Missouri. Speaking broadly about such cases, he told ProPublica, "given the number of people in this world who are bipolar, or accept some mental illness and who raise children very effectively,information technology would not seem to me that it should exist a condition matter—that anyone can say, if you're mentally ill you tin't be a parent, you can't take a child. That does not seem to acquit with today'due south reality."

In the early afternoon of March 25, Mindi received a phone bulletin from the lawyer appointed to stand for her in her parental rights example. The news was what she feared. "I but lost my daughter," Mindi wrote in a message to ProPublica.

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled, 6-to-one, that the lower court should be granted broad discretion in making decisions nigh the facts of a parental termination case. Though the judges noted that the state still had an obligation to bear witness that a parent's mental condition poses a risk to the kid, they wrote that since the trial courtroom had believed Mindi was a danger, the Supreme Court, which did not hear testimony from witnesses, was in no position to disagree.

Judge Teitelman issued a short alone dissent. "The evidence in this instance...fails to demonstrate clearly that the Mother is currently unable to fairly care for the kid and that she volition be unlikely to do so in the futurity," he wrote, adding that the court'due south conclusion had been "simply speculative."

In early on May, Q.A.H.'southward adoption went through. Mindi has no contact with her daughter.

This project was supported by the Reporting Honor at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Research assistance was provided by Lecia Bushak and Amy Zhang.