Abuse by Mental Health Professionals-Did this happen to you?

amother

Saddlebrown

Sun, Jan 22 2017, 6:11 pm

amother wrote:

I was on anti depressants, and my psychiatrist wanted to talk with my therapist to make sure my treatment plan was on target. She got into a huge argument with him, I have no idea about what.

Next thing I knew, she accused me of having borderline personality disorder, because "People with borderline create fights among other people."

For the next few sessions, she kept analyzing every word I said through the prisms of whether or not I had bpd.

This is after months of no progress whatsoever, because she usually talked about herself all the time. I knew more about her than she knew about me.

Finally I spoke to my psychiatrist, who said that I should get the hell out of there. I switched therapists, and finally started making progress.

It seems like many people are diagnosed with BPD because they make their therapist "feel" uncomfortable aka the therapist is incompetent and is not getting proper supervision to deal with his/her own feelings so that it not interfere in the therapeutic relationship with the client.

Another problem with misdiagnosis is that the therapist has certain terminology that the client doesn't have so they are miscommunicating. For example, a client will say that she "pushes people away" which will come off as one thing to the therapist but really what the client is doing is "avoiding" people who trigger her. That seems to be happening with a few different things, for example, a client can say she is seeing things and the therapist can interpret that as hallucination when the client is actually having a flashback. Both avoidance and flashbacks are part of ptsd but the therapist will miss these bc the client did not have the proper terminology to describe it. That is where people are being misdiagnosed, especially trauma survivors who do not necessarily know how to explain flashbacks, avoidance, hypervigilance, gaslighting, crazy making behavior, etc. and are therefore being misdiagnosed as having BPD or schizophrenia and not getting the help they need for their trauma/ptsd.

This has happened (and is still happening) to quite a few people and is even worse when it is happening to children who are at the mercy of mentally ill abusive parents who project themselves onto their kids so it seems like the kids are mentally ill while the "loving, devoted" parent gets away with abusing their child who are then being medicated for no reason.

If there are any therapists reading this, what do you think can be done to prevent clients from being misdiagnosed either because they made the therapist angry/uncomfortable or because they do not have the correct terminology to describe their symptoms?