Career
Doctor Humphreys is a parent-mentor and motivational speaker. He regularly writes about psychology and illness in the Irish Times and in the Irish Examiner, where he has contributed a psychology column for over ten years. He believes strongly in the impact of unconditional love, or its absence, on physical health.
He is the Director of a number of courses in Parent Mentoring, Interpersonal Communication and Relationship Studies at University College Cork and at All Hallows College, Drumcondra, Dublin.
Upbringing left a significant psychological imprint on Tony Humphreys and on his philosophy. He left school at fifteen and joined a monastery at eighteen for a period of 7 years.
He sought alternative spirituality and put himself through night school to obtain a degree and higher diploma in Physical Education, followed by an Master of Arts in 1977 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1983 in Psychology. Tony Humphreys promotes the of the aetiology of autistic behaviours first popularised by Bruno Bettelheim, and does not believe in the existence of the clinical manifestations known as autism or autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).
He continues to maintain that frigid parenting – conscious, subconscious or unconscious – is the root cause of "autistic" behavioural issues in the family.
The Press Ombudsman of Ireland adjudicated that "the offence was not only widespread but grave, could have been interpreted as gratuitously provocative, and might have been avoided or at least minimized if the topic had been presented in a different manner". Doctor Humphreys has taken the Refrigerator Mother theory further than others, with claims that abuse and emotional neglect are the cause of schizophrenia and a range of other childhood behaviours that are "labelled" as medical disorders, including oppositional-defiant disorder (ODD), attention-deficit disorder (Attention Deficit Disorder), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), dyspraxia and dyslexia in addition to ASDs. He believes that these "labelled disorders" are avoidant behavioural adjustments that enable a threatened child "to survive in a painful world of conditionality" and are curable through "unconditionally valuing and caring" relationships.
He has made similar claims for emotionally challenging environments causing the onset of asthma.
Both professional and advocate groups have decried his theory of the aetiology of schizophrenia.
