Personally, I hope and am glad that certain therapists don't take suicidal patients. People need to know their strengths. No one that goes through school is told "you need to be capable to take and handle every patient, even if you are uncomfortable." Hell no!

Would you make your family doctor provide surgery? No. They didn't specify their schooling in surgery. Maybe they could do it just fine...they know anatomy, proper procedure... But would you want them to? When you have an incision scar the size of Texas afterward, whom is to blame?

Ladies (or gents, but prolly mostly ladies, haha), would you ask the aesthetician that waxes your eyebrows to make an exception and do a Brazilian for you? They had to do it during school after all...they should know how. Waxing is waxing. They've been doing faces and underarms for ten years and haven't done more than three Brazilians ever, but it's waxing all the same. They should do it anyway! If they don't, they're horrible aestheticians! Uneducated and incompetent!

Would you berate a landscaper for not growing their own flowers? Tell a master French chef that they're a sham of a chef because they make a crap sushi platter? Go to a top-rated psychologist in their field of bipolar treatment and consider them uneducated and incompetent because they weren't comfortable treating your eating disorder?

...If someone isn't comfortable with something that I am hiring them for, why would I bother hiring them anyway? Most therapists specify what their expertise are. When I go to my acupuncturist, I schedule with the provider that specifies experience with mental health instead of the one that does sports injury. Is either provider better than the other? No! Better at or more knowledgable about certain things? Of course!

People have specialties, and that's a good thing. It means the availability of better-than-average care. If a therapist isn't comfortable at all with something but takes the patient asking for it anyway because technically they've read the text books and do want to help people, THAT is incompetence. Know thyself.

Also, there is a certain point when things can go from troubled treatment with a capable provider to being a liability. I used to work in a medical office - when there, there was a situation when a patient had been seen for an ED for yeeears with ups and downs. It came to a point when there were nothing but downs for a very long time, presenting many critical situations. No matter what the provider did, said, prescribed, recommended, whatever....the patient would not follow through, and their risk of life threatening repercussions rose and rose despite continuous warning, though they kept coming back. After months of this, if the patient had a heart attack, how would that reflect on the provider? "Why didn't you do more?" Right? Their relationship was terminated after much trying.

When a patient in your care is getting worse because your care isn't working or they aren't following your care plan yet they keep coming...that sounds like a perfectly legitimate reason to terminate the relationship for liability reasons AND for the sake of the patient.