Update on December 13, 2010 post regarding therapy abuse article:
Journalist Deborah Lee is working on a story about sexual abuse by mental health professionals and is looking for a female survivor in her 20s-30s willing to share her story. The interviewee must be willing to be identified by name and have her photo published in this article for a national women’s magazine. If you’re interested, email me through the Contact page and I will send you Debbie’s contact information.
This is a great opportunity to educate the public about therapist abuse, so if you’re up for the exposure, please consider participating!
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11/2/11 Update: Debbie has completed this article. However, she is still interested in talking to survivors. If you’d like to share your story, please email me for her contact information.
~KC
How about a male assaulted by a female social worker when he was young ?
Best regards; Tom Stinson
Hi Tom,
This article is geared specifically toward women (it’s for a women’s magazine) and female victims. Hopefully, more of a dialogue will open up around this type of abuse in the near future, and there will be more opportunities for people like you to tell your stories.
Seems like a big ask to have a photo and name for such a sensitive subject. Perhaps it is different in my country…I still don’t get respect from subsequent treatment providers, I doubt I’d fear much better in the media.
Yes, it’s a leap for any one of us to be willing to go that public. Scary stuff! But can you imagine an article in a women’s magazine that has no photos? If you want to inform the public, start a dialogue, and have readers identify with the women in the story, then we need to be willing to show ourselves.
I just ended the abuse from my male therapist. I would be willing to do the article. I’m 26 and my therapist is 59.
Just want to use this space to say it happened to me in the early 1990’s. My psychiatrist at the time convinced me that intimacies with him would be therapeutic for me. Now, looking back, I can see there was a grooming process that started from the beginning….his compliments raised my self-esteem, my depression improved..he asked me to relate any sexual fantasies I had of him. He phoned me late in the evening to check on me. I felt almost like his *peer*.
Therapy stopped as soon as he helped me with my buttons. Or had it stopped earlier?
When he decided it was over he told me he had sex with me because he felt sorry for me like he feels sorry for street people. He made it all my fault by saying, “You promised me you could handle this! Why aren’t you handling this”?! He lied and told investigators that I was a “known prostitute.”
I didn’t care if I lived or died.
A year to the month later I read in the newspaper that he had been arrested for being intimate with a female patient in his motel room and keeping her against her will. He has lured her there saying she needed to go to a woman’s shelter to get away from domestic violence at home. He was going to book her her own room but lied and said there were no more rooms available. She would need to stay in his room until he could place her in the shelter.
She was nineteen years old.
I’m now sixty-four years old and I’m still working on these traumas. I still have nightmares. I still have regrets. I still feel at fault. Therapist exploitation has affected four generations of my family.
Please write more about therapist exploitation. Please write more about patient’s boundaries