Meanness and Psychiatry

We came across this tidbit discussing the personality of psychiatrists in the WSJ Health Blog

Psychiatrists, well, they can be a little weird, as one of the shrinks on the lively blog Shrink Rap acknowledges in an intriguing post headlined “My Therapist is a Creep.” [...]

But there are some therapists whose strange qualities go beyond the pale. Dinah tells the story of a shrink she knows, whom she calls “Cruella” to protect the professionally odd. Cruella is smart and a competent prescriber of meds. But Dinah would never refer a patient to her.

How come? “Because she’s weird and not nice,” Dinah writes. She’s “weirder than any TV shrink I’ve seen, prone to outbursts, and doesn’t relate well to people.” Therapy with Cruella, Dinah learned through a friend, was “just as I’d imagined; she was weird, kind of nasty, and just the thought of talking to her about my deepest darkest or looking to her for comfort made me …well… shiver.”

The soft 'sciences' of psychiatry and psychology have a well earned reputation for being odd ducks. And it is a good thing that somebody is recognizing that there might be a problem here. Might

Yet here we have someone who probably went into the field in an attempt to fix the very problems they are attempting to fix in others. Someone who is probably, without too much effort, demonstratively harmful to others.

I am saddened that the field is unable to police themselves in matters of type. But I am no longer shocked.

Here we have a field whose primarily claim for existence is to help people, and they cannot face those who harm in their own midst beyond the comment of "they are an odd duck" and a sometimes repressed shudder.

Physicians, heal yourselves.