Just to complicate things, caring and competence do not always go together. I have had treatment from mental health professionals who cared deeply, but which was incompetent and downright dangerous. It ruined my life (and theirs, to a far lesser extent, because of the professional implications).

My experience has been that caring has sometimes clouded professional judgement. People have tended to want to make themselves the saviours of the situation and have broken all the guidelines 'because they care'.

This has even happened with my current T, who when she temporarily decided that she'd been too available and giving, told me she'd done it 'because she wanted me to have a different experience from the previous damaging ones'... and in doing so, damaged me.

Those initial experiences were in two of the systems The Poet mentions- public mental health and foster care. Ironically, I can only afford private therapy now because of the compensation I got for the damage that was done.