I have my ex-psychologist on tape telling me all about how she interacted with my friend, also her client (among half a dozen closely related people she was treating simultaneously), the day he attempted suicide. I have her clearly describing for me the way she tried to make a deal with him that she wouldn’t take him to the hospital if he would agree to let her come home with him, among other things.
I have her on tape saying something to the effect that her insurance company would have heart failure if it was aware that she “chooses people over rules”.
I have 11 hours of tape, all of which she was aware I was making.
What is the likelihood of her license being either pulled or at least made provisional, dependent on whatever conditions the board comes up with?
By the way, my suicidal friend ultimately did commit suicide. Thanks in large part (totally unprovable, though) to her incompetence.
First of all, I’m sorry to hear about your friend’s suicide.
But you’re blaming your friend’s suicide on her?
It sounds like she’s discussing her patients with one another and that’s a no-no as far as I’m aware. So, uh, good luck with your quest to avenge your friend’s suicide.
No avenge… his choice and frankly, at the point he succeeded I believe it was a reasonable choice. He was out of options and life had nothing left to offer him worth hanging out for.
It has nothing to do with a desire to harm, it has to do with my very genuine conviction that this therapist is harming more than she’s helping, and because I have audiotape, I’m in an unusually strong position to prove what she’s doing. Usually it’s very hard to demonstrate that a therapist is behaving badly, it comes down to who you believe.
Well, if you have tape of her soliciting sex from one of her clients (I’m not sure what ‘she wouldn’t take him to the hospital if he would agree to let her come home with him’ means) you should probably turn it over to whichever licensing board is active in your area.
Stoid, what you’re describing is so wrong. First, unless your friend signed a release form, there’s no way in hell this psychologist should have been sharing this information with you… she shouldn’t even have acknowledged that she was treating your friend. That is a direct violation of HIPPA. Second… and Third… the behavior you describe crosses so many ethical boundaries I’m nearly speechless.
You have the power to stop this person, and you should.
I’m not a psychologist, but Sr. Olives is on his way to becoming one so I asked him what he thought. I read him your post and he replied, ‘‘Uh, that’s pretty bad.’’ He says it’s very likely if you report this that some action will be taken. He recommended you contact the American Psychological Association Ethics Board. I think that information is available on their website.
Hopefully someone with experience reporting this sort of thing will pop up. If this lady doesn’t answer for such repeated and gross violations of ethical conduct, bad things may continue to happen to vulnerable people.
There’s no ethical dilemma here, report her plain and simple.
If she is in the right, she’ll have her name cleared and if she’s wrong she’ll get her license suspended and that’s that.
There is a reason for a state license board and this is one of the reasons that it exists. Because a professional person’s competence isn’t up to you a layperson, it’s up to them.
Report her and let the state decide whether she is at fault or not.
I think your question has been well-answered. This is something that ought to be brought before the licensing board. They can make that decision.
I just wanted to comment that this is the first time I’ve heard someone say “well, it was probably a good idea he killed himself” about anyone they didn’t hate.
Well, I didn’t quite say that, but close enough. Does it freak you out? I feel that way about both the people I’ve known in my life who committed suicide, both of whom had very similar problems, and who killed themselves the same way. The other one was the first man I ever lived with.
They were both hardcore drug addicts and absolutely hopeless compulsive gamblers. They both tried for years to change, both failed. Both just became increasingly miserable. My friend referred to had actually done some real damage to himself the third time he tried, robbing his brain of oxygen and resulting in noticeable deficits. That just sealed the deal.
Medication, therapy… none of it worked in the end and his life was very similar to the life of someone dying of a terminal and painful illness. It became a quality of life issue - he wasn’t going to get better, and his life was almost completely without peace or joy. In the same way we (most of us) can let go of someone in physical pain who wants to end it, I could let go of my friend, whose psychic pain was no less acute and life-diminishing.
I don’t believe in life at any price.
The sad part was that he was unable to change, not that he ended the painful life he was living.
I was sucked into her narcissistic thing , but she ran a number on me one particular day that actually did leave me speechless, and I never went back. (it involved threatening our relationship as a means of controlling me…insanely fucked up, and I’m plenty knowledgeable enough to have instantly perceived that the person crossing the line in that moment was definitely her. But I still wasn’t quite strong enough to tell my friends about it, and I paid for that decision.)
No, she was telling him she wouldn’t do what she was obligated to do, which was take him to a hospital, if he would agree to let her come to his home and watch over him there. It didn’t happen like that thanks to us, his friends, who had located him about the same time she did, called the hotel and told them to break down the door. She was pretty pissed off at us for intruding and upset that he thought SHE had sent the hotel people after promising she wouldn’t.
Oh, and she also described to me how bummed she was that he didn’t seem very grateful to her for saving his life… she’s a piece of work, I’m not kidding.
Yeah. This is the side of depression nobody wants to talk about. The reality that for some people, it doesn’t get better, and nothing they do makes it better, and often they’re so miserable all they can do is spread the misery to others.
It’s hard for me to say that, given how much faith I have in evidence-based treatments for depression. It’s hard for me to say that, knowing that often when people feel they’ve ‘‘tried everything’’ they really haven’t, and that depression by definition is a disorder of irrational thinking and distorted perceptions. But sometimes… suicide is a rational decision.
The sad thing is, with your friend, we’ll never know what influence having a rational therapist might have had on his choice to end his life. And I hope you’re doing well, Stoid, because it sounds like you’ve suffered directly as a result of this person’s failure to do her job correctly.
I’ve never been blatantly mistreated in that way, but I’ve felt betrayed by therapists in the past, mostly for using treatments that haven’t been proven to work when the self-proclaimed experts implied otherwise. Three months with a CBT therapist did more to change my life than 6 years with these ‘‘experts.’’ I spent age 17 to age 23 in abject misery… those were my college years, that was my young adulthood, and I’m never getting it back. Not because I didn’t work hard enough, not because I wasn’t 100% motivated and willing to make any change necessary, but because they failed to give me the tools I needed even when I begged for them.
There really aren’t too many things that make me angrier than bad therapists.
Well, I heard back from the board of psychology. They are very interested in following up. I pulled up the bad transcription I had done of the sessions and I was blow away again by the things that she said. They were just so wrong on so many levels.
This is my therapist talking to me in session about my lifelong friend who has tried to commit suicide and is also her patient:
I actually think putting people above the rules is a good thing. But I think she’s putting her own feelings above the rules, and that’s bad.
.
And what does she base her opinion that sending people to hospitals is so bad*? Yeah, I’d try to avoid them if possible, but sometimes 24-hour care is necessary.
*Most are bad for detoxing, but not for general mental health. Heck, the ones I know of will still let the psychiatrist be the main doctor and set up the general treatment plan. How the heck is going to their house a better option?