For me the word patient has connotations of power. I think that medicine/ health care has taken a wrong term, instead of a doctor working with the bodys natural healing, the use of drugs now dominates, a lot of the evidence for the effectiveness is dubious. I find the doctor patient relationship to be hugely unbalanced in terms of power, I go for a consultation and have to accept their approach to healing usually based on using drugs. The doctor is the expert. I expect a relationship with a T to be more one where we are co-collaborators working together to understand me, though I also expect there to be an element of healing through the relationship (I've read the stuff about how a good relationship will actually change the neurology of your brain, though the research on that may be as dodgy as the research on drugs). In psychiatry I feel that there is a huge power issue with the doctor making some kind of dubious diagnosis, which can be kind of stating that the person is not acceptable as they are. Those diagnoses are being developed alongside the drugs to enable the testing of certain drugs on certain 'types', but actually people are all different and cannot be grouped together in that way. The whole thing kind of ignores a person's lived experience, and the fact that this society has developed in a terrible way so that the wealthy have opportunity and others are oppressed by them. When my T called me her patient I was massively pissed off.

I hope nobody minds that the topic has flowed away from the original question. I don't really know about that. My T doesn't self disclose much, it feels right at the moment.