Quote Originally Posted by Anymage View Post
Small but important quibble: what actually happens is that when someone else is cutting the checks for the therapists, their interests and yours can diverge. This is something that gets seen an unfortunate amount at institutions. Outside those situations, the fact that you can fire your therapist means that they're a lot more conscious of your needs.
Somewhat true. There was definitely a conflict of interest there. Although given what was going on, I think even outside of an institution I would have been afraid to fire him. I don't want to go into it too much, but I felt that the threat of forced hospitalization based on issues that I wasn't actually having was definitely there. The implicit threat was that I'd be considered a potential school shooter - even though I had made no threats and would never have hurt anyone. Unless "being depressed and wearing a lot of black" is a potential school shooter, or using everyday phrases (think "I'm going to kill that kid if he wanders off early and leaves the rest of us to handle his stuff again").

I have unfortunately experienced more minor stuff outside of institutions as well. Nothing as terrifying. I did have a guy try to diagnose me as borderline personality disorder while using the fact that I had a girlfriend in college as a major symptom. And I've had one instance where me reporting back that I had stopped a particular antidepressant due to it triggering suicidal impulses was listed simply as me being noncompliant with prescribed meds. Those do make me nervous, especially given medical records are a thing and they tend to be treated by future practitioners as basically true. So having stuff like that in the record can make it very hard to access treatment. I've already been subjected to the whole "oh it's just your mental illness" for stuff that very much turned out to be something physically wrong with me, too.

I do agree that therapy is bandied about as a cure-all, often in the sense of just trying to get people to stop feeling emotions that others find uncomfortable. And while I'm sure that there are discussions going on somewhere about people who have had triggeringly bad experiences in therapeutic contexts and how to help them, I wouldn't know where to find them.
That's a somewhat separate rant, admittedly. I also think a lot of the problem is people tend to view "therapy" as sort of a monolithic block. There's a reason, for example, that I went to a neurologist and not my family doctor for my migraines. And there's a particular tendency to tie therapy to effort in a way that if therapy doesn't work for a particular person, it's because they're not doing therapy right.

I haven't found the discussions like that going on anywhere, honestly. Maybe the occasional anecdote. But I think it would need real, professional research, and it seems like the mental health community is just barely starting (in the last maybe 2 years) to acknowledge that some people can be harmed by therapy at all. The idea of genuine trauma caused by treatment seems to be off the radar.