[precaryous]

Posted this before. But I'm mad as hell it keeps happening-

In my case the exploitation occurred in California. I moved to the Midwest twelve years later. When I first told the medical practitioners around here what happened to me, nearly all scoffed, "Well, that kind of thing doesn't happen around here...." The horror stories I follow on PsychCentral prove to me, yes it does. If our stories are not believed, all one needs to do is look online at the different licensing boards...and read about the medical and mental health practitioners who are being disciplined. Those revocations and reprimands are facts, not stories.

Psych Central demonstrates that the stories keep coming. We're not talking about what happened to me twenty years ago, we are reading/witnessing current accounts from the newly exploited. Those folks in the profession and upcoming students on this site and students from the other message boards who read this board should be outraged, ashamed and address it instead of standing open-mouthed in disbelief.

There should be no hooting and hollaring on other student's message boards saying, "Wow! Did you read about that account on Psych Central?
So graphic!"

I will tell you, students, my experience was graphic. And I will tell MY OWN story and be as graphic as I please. I am the EXPERT to my own story. Trust and believe.

This is happening. It's happened thousands of times before by mental health practitioners, clergy and those in a position of power. It needs more than one paragraph in your medical school ethics handbooks and should be discussed in class over several class periods. Please don't let it happen a thousand more times.

Client exploitation causes long-standing damage. It harms the client AND the practitioner. I am perplexed there are so few MH practioners who openly condemn it. Instead, I hear, "Oh, that sort of thing doesn't happen around here...".

YES IT DOES!

I think what is even worse sometimes is the hypocrisy: they openly condemn these things and suggest they would never act out, blame the client etc - and then do it all the time. I had a therapist like that, it wasn't sexual, but I fought with him for a while, hoping that he would see his patterns and accept responsibility, but to no avail. The response I most often got was to go to more sessions and discuss my anger with him, how it relates to my history etc. I never had anger issues before and my reactions were very much to him, not to someone else even though I do tend to react to manipulation and gaslighting similarly when someone attempts it (and won't allow it long). It became pretty maddening and I definitely felt harmful effects that were not there in my mind before at all; luckily stopped seeing him before it could have escalated.

Anyhow, for me it's this grandiose hypocrisy is what I despise in many in the so-called "helping professions".