When Therapists Fail

You might consider it a public service. The New York Times has published a compendium of bad things that therapists do. Apparently, there is more to it than we might imagine, especially considering how thoroughly controlled and licensed the profession is.

The only problem with the Times piece is that it is all anecdotal. Surely, there are incompetent therapists out there. How many is the question. The Times does not offer a response. The survey that the Times used counted 2,700 self-selected responses.

For example:

In her first session with a new therapist in San Diego, Elise, 37, immediately felt turned off. Not because of anything the therapist said, but because of the fact that she was riding a stationary bike during their conversation.

Maria Danna, 35, was alarmed when her therapist in Portland, Ore., “vigorously shook a maraca at my face” in order to “pick up the energy I was giving off in session.”

And Carson, who sought help from a psychiatrist in Ohio for severe postpartum depression and anxiety, felt troubled when the doctor sent her thousands of text messages and eventually revealed his sexual feelings for her.

Many are the varieties of unprofessional behavior. If you add ineptitude and abuse you will end up with a fairly long list.

And then there are the more obvious failings:

Therapists are supposed to maintain physical and emotional boundaries with clients. Violating those boundaries might look like regularly disclosing intimate personal details; touching a client inappropriately; flirting; offering gifts; or trying to establish a social relationship outside of the office.

Some problems seems more banal:

A number of readers who wrote in described therapists who were chronically late, ate during a session, failed to inform them of fees, missed appointments or ghosted them. And more than 130 people said their therapist fell asleep during therapy — sometimes going so far as to start drooling or snoring.

This is certainly unobjectionable. Too many therapists have no standards and no boundaries. They have no sense of professional decorum, apparently because it is not taught in their doctoral programs.

The other problem here is quite simple. There is no one form of therapy. There are many and assorted therapie, from Freudian psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral treatment. Within each category are numerous variants.

Thus, saying that all therapy is therapy is false. And yet, the profession is hardly a beacon of professional decorum, perhaps because too many of its practitioners are young social worker, or perhaps because too many of them are still working out their own problems.

Of course, the Times declares in the article title, that therapy is good. Slightly ironically, because all of the examples it offers are of bad therapy.