Survivors of Unethical Therapy

I was two years into my psychology PhD when a family emergency meant a semi-permanent return to the U.S. I became an ethical attorney.

All of my therapists have been MDs or psych PhDs and I think that education really does make a difference.

As you see all therapy as unethical, I assume that you’re not in therapy? Unless you’ve been adjudicated to participate in some form of therapy, or if you’re in a mental hospital, you can choose to stop therapy, too. It’s your choice.

I don’t believe that therapists have any craft — or sullen art — but rather a mixture of 60% training and 40% personality that goes into the brew of making an ethical, and good to great, therapists.

For clinicians the ability to listen and process information whilst the client is speaking is a must. All sorts of skills are taught at university. I’m not clear as to why you think that an undergrad psychology class would be good enough for a therapist.

But that 40% of personality is something that defines the therapist — from office decor to when and how to respond to clients. My experience has been that PhD therapists operate in a group with other therapists and shrinks to facilitate treatment.

I really don’t understand your contention that the definition of a therapist is somehow ‘arbitrary’ or that instructors, mentors, etc., might be mentally ill so that negates any instruction. All of we Pointy-Headed East Coast Ivy League Elites might be madder than any hatter (as if the West Coast academics are straddling the fence!) but that hasn’t made an Ivy League education — at the whims of madmen — any less prestigious. I’m uncertain if you’re damning all education and training? Or only that of a therapist? The odds of the latter would be dear.

I have never been harmed by therapy. I had some poor experiences with MDshrinks as therapists when I was hospitalized, but never harmful.

You’ve left out part of the equation of therapy when you don’t include client participation. My poor experiences when hospitalized might have something to do with the fact that it was during the time when I was mute. And there is a ‘therapy dance’ when seeing a therapist for the first five-to-ten sessions. You must become acquainted during that time. The therapist should let the client know what is expected of them.

I’ll need therapy until death. I’ve found no better way to remain grounded (and out of trouble and out of the hospital).

So you are dismissive of education and experience?

I have always thought both of some importance when choosing, e.g., a thoracic surgeon or a landscaper. Why would anyone need an education in a world where education was deemed to have no value and experience meant nothing?

I disagree that therapists make all the claims you say they do, and I'd be wary of any therapist that did. My counsellor would never assume he could treat me or 'cure mental illness', want to provide me with advice, or claim to have a better understanding of life than I do. His website actually says that sometimes it's the simple act of sharing the problem with somebody else that's the most helpful thing about therapy. He will ask me on a regular basis if I find what he does helpful. Not every therapist is how you describe. I've run into some like that, but that is not my current therapist.

I think the issue I have with clinical psychologists is not education so much as outlook. You spend a lot of time matching symptoms to a diagnosis (or that's what my undergrad felt like, anyways). That's useful when a diagnosis means the right medicine, but we simply aren't there yet when it comes to psychological problems. Positive psychology (using psychology with the aim of improving mental health, not just labeling problems) is only ten years old. The people who studied it will have just started practicing.

It's funny what you say about therapy being art, because that's my opinion as well. I actually think that a lot of problems people have with therapy is their assumption that's it's on par with medical treatment. The other problem is therapists who overpromise what therapy can do. Therapy can't be a stand in for things needed for mental health (like relationships); it can only help you get those things.

Personally, I've always felt like the artist in the therapy room is me. I can try out ideas, throw out feelings, think of how to put concepts together, get frustrated, start over. I want to create a better life for me and don't know how. I have life-block, and my therapist is the one gently nudging me in ways that could help me get past it.

I'm surprised you'd judge therapists on whether they have mental illness. We don't judge doctors when they get cancer. If the illness is impacting their work, they need to concentrate on getting better. But that doesn't mean they're not cut out to be a therapist.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many therapist websites, books, blogs that do not refer to therapy as "treatment" and that dont imply most or all of the other things. Here's what the American Psychological Association says:

"Psychologists who specialize in psychotherapy and other forms of psychological treatment are highly trained professionals with expertise in the areas of human behavior, mental health assessment, diagnosis and treatment, and behavior change. Psychologists work with patients to change their feelings and attitudes and help them develop healthier, more effective patterns of behavior."

This encapsulates all the things I mentioned, and adds some additional even creepier assumptions like knowledge of what constitutes healthy behavior, ability to diagnose, and ability to oversee behavior modification. Hard to square with the idea of therapy as art. Sounds more like indoctrination into some faith.

Wasn't about judgement. The point was about the validity of supervision/mentorship as a qualification. The biz seems to attract a lot of troubled types so a trainee could get sketchy guidance.

I've been reading The Inheritance of Shame by Peter Gajdics where he files a complaint against his unethical psychiatrist who'd created a therapeutic cult and tried "conversion therapy" on him.

The complaint was "investigated" and the clear psychological harm done to him was dismissed. Of course during the investigation, Peter was painted as severely mentally ill. Even his collapse caused by medication overdose (his psychiatrist had him taking near lethal doses) was used to paint him as unstable.

"Informed Consent" forms were supposedly signed for things such as ketamine infusions, but he was so drugged up as to not be able to think clearly, so dependent on the psychiatrist who had induced extreme dependency that he would have signed anything.

And the complaint resulted in a mere slap on the wrist: a "review" of the psychiatrist's practice. He was still able to practice and accept patients. Among the numerous patients who worked for him for free on various tasks like cooking his meals and writing for him, he also married a patient cum "employee".

In the law suit after the complaint, the most intimate details of Peter's therapy were used to discredit him and paint him as a psychotic, delusional person with severe borderline personality disorder. His traumas were all dug up and things the psychiatrist had done were given little weight. He ended up having to settle out of court.

Peter emerged with clear post traumatic reactions and while recovered now, undoubtedly went through a lot and was unable to get justice.

My damage was not as severe but there are echoes of the grievance process in my case. It seemed I was open to review rather than the therapist. The therapist made inconsistent claims including things he couldn't possibly know unless he was a mind reader. I thank my stars I wasn't talked into taking drugs. They only would have complicated my difficult to diagnose health issues.

Treatment =/= cure

Therapy doesn't help every person. But then again no treatment for any condition helps any person. And some therapists are better than others. But overall therapy does work, and to say otherwise is irresponsible. People are already scared enough of therapy without misinformation. We can talk about the bad things that happened to us, but that's not the same as saying therapy is useless or bad.
If you had a medical doctor who made a mistake or behaved unethically or exploited you would you then tell people not to go to medical doctors?

There is a large body of evidence showing that therapy is helpful for treating depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. Research has been done on different types of therapy, including showing that CBT and psychodynamic therapy are about equally effective.

It's pretty easy to say that some behaviors aren't healthy. In practice therapists help modify behaviors when the costs of those behaviors outweigh the benefits. For example, me not checking my email isn't healthy... I don't check my email because it makes me anxious, but the fact that I haven't checked it makes me even more anxious about checking it, creating a vicious cycle. My therapist is helping me work on modifying that behavior to break the cycle.
If I was a business executive with 5 secretaries working under me and it was their job to check and deal with my email then me not checking my email wouldn't be unhealthy.
It's about context and the consequences of the behavior(s).

Saying something is an art is just saying that it isn't formulaic, and there's a degree of nuance and intuition involved. It's a figure of speech.

Thank you for putting it so articulately!

Budfox, I think therapists need to be more honest about the fact that therapy won't work for everyone, and that that there can be negative, not just neutral and positive, outcomes. We need to be honest about the fact that we're in the early stages of understanding the brain, and that treatment for mental health issues isn't as effective as treatment for illness that happens elsewhere in the body. But LabRat is right in saying that overall, therapy is helpful.

In terms of your quote, the only issue I have is the bit about helping someone change their feelings, which I'm not sure is possible, at least not directly. A lot of the rest makes sense to me. I'm not a psychologist, but I did spend four years studying psychology. I do have a better understanding of patterns of behaviour, symptoms that need to be shown in order to make a diagnosis, and which type of treatment will likely be effective with certain kinds of issues, than the average person on the street. I'm sure more training would have given me an even better understanding. Psychology gets its info from scientific experiments - - it's not a faith. But psychology as its thought about today is only fifty years old.

I personally prefer counsellors to clinical psychologists because I think treatment for mental health isn't found through analysing everything to within an inch of its life, and because psychologists overestimate how much they can help me. At this stage in my life, I need the art.

Thanks!
Just wanted to respond to this part... I'm not sure if maybe we're using the word "feelings" differently?

It may not be directly in the strictest sense, but the whole point of CBT is that by changing our thoughts we can change our feelings and our behavior, isn't it?

Like right now when I make a mistake I feel like I'm a bad and worthless person and that I should punish myself.
When I get in a minor argument with a friend I feel deeply hurt and abandoned.
But those are things that I'm working on and making progress with in therapy.

Whenever I'm doing a thought record I'm basically reframing my thoughts and combating cognitive distortions, and by the time I'm done I usually feel better about the situation and myself. And with time and practice we can eventually retrain our brains to do this more naturally/automatically, often changing how we feel in response to certain situations.

It's not clear to me at all that therapy "works". I see more evidence that therapy harms. People ought to be scared. First-do-no-harm is not taken seriously at all. There is rampant victim blaming. Informed consent is a joke. Stories of damaging therapy are systematically suppressed or ignored.

That is a straw man argument. Nobody is suggesting that therapists or MDs ought to be avoided because of a single bad experience. It's about systemic rot. My position comes from extensive personal experience and personal research over last 10 years.

My original point was that I see no basis for the position that therapists occupy. For example, what makes your therapist qualified to oversee your behavior around email? I compulsively check email and FB at times, but i see no point in assigning some stranger the task of overseeing or interpreting this behavior.

I do not use mds - I trust western medicine less than I do therapists.
I do not believe that overall therapy works and I think it is irresponsible to put forth it does. There is no good of measuring it. Their data collection is slanted towards themselves. Certainly there are clients who report being helped by it, and I have no interest in telling them they have not - but even a blind hog finds an acorn sometimes.

Have you read any of the peer reviewed literature published examining outcomes for various types of therapy? That's the evidence that therapy works.
In terms of our own experiences and others' anecdotes, it's easy to fall into confirmation bias. Studies and larger scale meta analysis show that overall therapy is more helpful than harmful, though, of course there are exceptions.

It's not so much a straw man as an analogy. Someone whose baby got a vaccine, developed a fever from the vaccine, had a seizure, and died can go online and find plenty of other people who were hurt by vaccines or whose kids were hurt by vaccines. There are very real and sad cases of this.
But then those people take it too far and think that because they and so many other people they talk to were hurt by vaccines that they do more harm than good. They're not talking to or paying attention to the countless other people who've had good experiences with vaccines, and they're not acknowledging the lives that have been saved by vaccines.
And then people get scared away from vaccines, and vulnerable people get hurt.

If therapists were completely unnecessary to get the benefits of therapy, then why do people benefit from therapy (as demonstrated in a plethora of studies)? I'm sure there are a million different answers because different people need different things.
My therapist provides a reality check regarding my cognitive distortions. He provides a safe place for me to talk about and process things. He points out things I can see or am selectively ignoring.

I think therapy becomes unethical and damaging in part because the practitioners absorb grandiose and distorted ideas about their abilities.

Many therapists claim to address wide ranging issues like grief, anxiety, depression, trauma, anger, relationship problems, addiction, eating problems, behavioral issues, and more.

Anyone who presumes expertise in all these areas such that they can advise or "treat" any person that shows up... I would have to regard them as dangerous.

I think therapists are granted power that is absurdly out of proportion to reality. Power corrupts, and within context of a secluded 1-1 relationship, that gets pretty scary.

In my view studying psychology only qualifies one to share general knowledge about psychology. It does not equate to better insight into human nature, knowing what is healthy or not, or ability to orchestrate a series of healing relationships.

Yes, if therapy was billed as simply an outside person to talk with, it would deliver what it promises. But I think therapists promising sagacity, wizardly, reparenting, superparenting, transformation and healing is magical thinking. Unfortunately my therapists believed their own publicity.

I trust common sense + direct accounts from therapy consumers more than convoluted studies full of conflicts of interest.

Also for therapy to be ethical, i think evidence has to be convincing, not just show that therapy kinda helps once in a while for reasons nobody can explain.

I regard manipulative relationships, synthetic drugs, vaccines, invasive medical procedures, routine "screenings", MD visits as toxic and avoid them as if my life depends on it.

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I want to extend my sympathy to OP and OP's attempt to reach out to all survivors of unethical therapy with the message of solidarity and support.

HD, I appreciate your call for solidarity, empathy and support very much. And I am so sorry to see that, once again, this beautiful act of compassion is being sacrificed for the sake of yet another useless debate that doesn't help anyone. Sorry again that your well-meaning act was unappreciated and dismissed.

Thank you for saying this. It means a lot.

Hd7970ghz

Apologies if i have contributed to taking the thread away from what OP intended, but calling the discussion useless seems rather weird. OP left things pretty open based on the original post. Discussions about unethical therapy are bound to provoke strong reactions and some disagreement. Is the objective to just repeat over and over that therapy has been unethical or harmful, or is to have some substantive discussion about that?

I welcome discussion and disagreement! It is important! I just hope the conversation stays productive and doesn't veer off into ad hominem, invalidation or put downs. Let's keep it civil as best we can.

Goodness. I think myself eligible and able to define the shrinks that I’ve known as nothing like what you describe. I am not damning or praising all psychotherapists, yet you’re damning the lot. I think that damning all — cognitive scientists, e.g., would be as far from the mark.

I had four semesters of psychology as an undergrad, nineteen months for my MPhil Psychology and a little over two years in my failed attempt for my PhD in psychology. (A few neuroscientists are now calling mental disorders ‘diseases of the brain’ — and I hope that they’re right.) I know something about the subject.

Yes, shrinks claim therapies for a host of mental disorders because therapies addressing issues such as anxiety and depression share common roots. I do not believe that I’m unique in benefiting from varied forms of psychotherapies.

I don’t know of any shrink who doesn’t specialize in treatments for various psychotherapies for more specific disorders. I’ve usually had discussions with my candidates about my needs and any number of ways to manage the crap in my head.

I think that you meant to infer that absolute power corrupts absolutely ? We cede to those more powerful — more knowledgeable — daily. When I have plumbing problems, I call a plumber. Problems with my automobile, I call a mechanic. Problems with my mind, a shrink. Why in the world would I think that I know how best to treat my own mental disorders when I’ve shown, again and again, that I don’t act in my own interests; that I harm myself and, potentially, others?

Why would you believe that ‘psychology’ would be so diminutive when you would gladly put yourself into the hands of a doctor of general medicine? I trust mine to defer to the differently-educated when treating both my mind and body. One-hundred-years from now all 20th-early-21st century treatments will probably sound quaint. It has not been my experience that psychology is as broad or as narrow as you wish it to be.

You must have suffered greatly to have reach the conclusions that you espouse. I’m very sorry for that. I can’t see that the harsh/unethical treatment that you received has anything to do with the beneficial and ethical treatment that I have received these 33 years. I don’t mean say that I cannot empathise with your sentiments when I write of my experiences differing from yours.

The overarching ability to empathise with one another is surely Darwinian evolution?

I don't think threads/discussions like this are useless. What else could we realistically do on a message board than discuss topics and different points of view, even debate? What is kinda sad though is that threads like this tend to get moderated and even closed, while those with adoring comments on therapists while a client is becoming so "attached" that they repeatedly overlook serious professional, often unethical errors are not interfered with. I also almost never see the members who are critical about therapy personally attacking other posters out of proportion - the other end is more common and seems to be left to continue. There is clearly a bias that is not handled on an equally respectful basis.

Good point. I think this is partly related to our tendency as a society to refer to anger etc as "negative" emotions, and love etc as "positive" emotions. When the reality is, anger may be the healthier response in certain situations than love would be. But an excess of either can be cringe-producing. We need a "closed to due hate or love bombing" emoji

I sometimes wonder if there is not a temperament bias -- people who are OK with debate tend not to attack personally, while those who are not OK with debate, and different values and points of view, do tend to attack personally.

As someone who is comfortable with debate, but learned to expect to be rejected because of it, it seems to me it may be a more general phenomenon that just on PC.

The fact that most therapists, and therapy culture in general, seem uncomfortable with debate, just make me wonder a bit. . .Going to therapy with people who didn't/can't respect my basic temperament, just like most of conventional society. . not sure that was healthy for me. I didn't "change" -- I was already faking niceness and conventionality as best I could -- with some bad emotional and other consequences for me personally.

And as for the matter of "fit" -- how is one who is unconventional and not very socially oriented to begin with expected to understand and "know" about that, just going into therapy for "help"? Seems a very short-sighted, cliquish/cultish, uncurious attitude on the part of therapists.

Really scary stuff, here, when, you start to unpack it.

HT - I think that raises a good question. Is therapy a place for debate? New thread? I know my ts feelings on that.