Stalking As An Occupational Hazard of Psychotherapists

Mental health professionals are more likely to be stalked than the average person but we receive little or no training in the concept of stalking or its management. I was stalked by a patient for ten months. and learned this the hard way. The experience is forever engraved in my brain. If I am stalked again, I will know better what to do. I want to tell you what I have learned so that you will not have to go through what I did. Mental health professionals can learn why the nature of our work can invite being stalked by a patient, and what we can do to stop it when it occurs, and some tips to prevent it.

I will be doing a presentation on this subject on Saturday, October 3, 2009 at the Westchester Chapter of the Clinical Social Work Society. It meets at the Mental Health Association, 29 Sterling Avenue, White Plains, NY. It is open to mental health professionals. The meeting starts at 10. My presentation will start at 10:30.There is no charge.

Why Diets Can Be Dangerous

Why Diets Can Be Dangerous

Plenty of people are on diets. But there are times when a diet turns into a whole other process and becomes an eating disorder. No one intends for this to happen, but it can when someone becomes so exhilarated at seeing a weight loss and feeling so in control of their weight that they make their diet even stricter and more weight loss follows. And then the diet becomes even stricter, and so on and so on. Without realizing how and when it happened, food choices become more and more narrow, and dieting becomes addictively out of control, like a runaway train. That is how someone who started a diet can become anorexic. When losing weight takes over your life, and your behavior around food becomes more secretive, you may find your life becoming more and more isolated. No matter how little you actually eat, thinking about food can take over your mind. After awhile, some people find themselves binge eating, then purging to rid themselves of the food.

Eating disorders are potentially life-threatening conditions. If you find that your dieting has begun to get out of control, do not wait to get the professional help you need. The longer you wait, the more entrenched the eating disorder becomes. Make sure that you consult with a psychotherapist who has had specialized training and experience in treating people with eating disorders. Being in treatment with someone who has not had specialized training and experience can result in your condition becoming worse. Directories of mental health professionals who specialize in eating disorders can be found online at the websites for National Eating Disorder Association, Academy for Eating Disorders, EDReferral, National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, and even one with the odd name of Something Fishy. People can and do recover from eating disorders, so do not wait.

What if deciding to meet with a therapist makes you anxious?

The decision to consult with a therapist for the first time can evoke feelings of anxiety. You have probably been living with this problem for some time, and despite how unhappy it is making you, it is old and familiar. Doing something about the problem means stepping out of your comfort zone and taking a riskIt is a brave thing to do. Nevertheless, it may make you feel anxious, which is a very normal feeling under the circumstances. It is much easier to decide not keep the appointment. But that only will defeat your purpose. Do the more difficult thing and meet with the therapist. Tell him or her how nervous you feel about being there. If the therapist is interested in hearing more about this, this should provide some feeling of relief.(After all, it’s not called the talking cure for nothing.) And this should make it easier to return to talk some more.

My first meeting with a new person

This is not, of course, a new person, but it is someone who is new to me. The first meeting is just an introduction, to get a sense of what brings this person here at this particular time, what the problem is, how long has it been going on, etc. It is really a bare-bones introduction to someone whom I might get to know more fully. A little bit at a time, over time. Who will this person turn out to be? What I don’t think about att his time is something I have discovered over and over again—that the process of getting to know this new person changes me in some way, making me different than I was before. Who will I turn out to be? This is something that I don’t think most people who are in therapy really know—that they are not the only one who becomes changed by the process of psychotherapy.

The first meeting with a psychotherapist

This is new, having a blog, not knowing how it will turn out. It’s a little like meeting with a potential new patient, someone with whom I might work over a period of time to help them resolve emotional difficulties. It is with some excitement, never knowing how this first consultation session will go. It is a meeting to check each other out, to see if there is some meeting of the minds and hearts that warrants meeting again. I think about whether I think I could be helpful to this person, and how I might be most helpful. And this new person can think about whether we “clicked”, seemed compatible, whether she or he felt reasonably comfortable talking with me about matters that are usually not so comfortable to talk about. And then to be considered is whether what I said made sense to her, or gave her a new perspective, something worthwhile thinking about.