"This can only happen in British Columbia, Canada, where clients have absolutely no protection against abuse." Respectfully I disagree to say that this problem is pandemic and perhaps endemic to the profession as it exists in the kind of world we live in today. Abuse by psychotherapists happens everywhere and has been happening wherever and for as long as psychotherapy has existed. Read just some of the many books on psychotherapy abuse. Begin with Jeffrey Masson's book "Against Therapy." It is very important. Then try Theordore Dorpat's work. It is very insightful and telling. Then go on to Al Siebert's work, "Peaking out: How My Mind Broke Free from the Delusions in Psychiatry." This is an awesome story of routine psychotherapy abuse. Then read Paula Caplan's book. And so on, and so on, and so on. Read all these excellent books written by very intelligent and very well-informed authors who are or were insiders in this profession (and/or the many other equally capable authors who have written on this vast subject). Then see if you still say this can only happen in B.C.! The list of critics who have described in great detail the vast extent and depth of abuse of psychotherapy clients by therapists is now an entire literature so large that one could begin a whole graduate Ph.D. program to earn a doctorate in the study of all this terrific scholarship that now exists on this vast study of almost-routine psychotheapy abuse. After studying this literature, you may begin to wonder if the profession of psychotheapy could continue to exist if it did away with abuse. I think it could exist without abuse and that it would be a terrific public service it did become non-abusive, but it would then become a profession that would look very different from what today is usually referred to as psychotherapy. So we really don't know if there can be psychotherapy profession without abuse in the kind of world we live in today. I myself think that most of the rest of our social institutions would have to become much less abusive if we are to ever have a world in which psychotherapy is routinely non-abusive.
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