When Karin Blak’s troubled marriage ended, she was recommended a therapist by a friend. But she grew increasingly uncomfortable as he made inappropriate personal disclosures, including around his sexual health, touched her and invited her into his home.
It later emerged that although he was a practising psychotherapist with other clients, he was unqualified, having dropped out of his psychotherapy course “because he didn’t want to adhere to the rules”. The bad experience culminated with him touching her and telling her: “If I was 10 years younger, I’d be sitting next to you by now”.
“The way it made me feel was that my issues were too big for any therapist to help me with, it was bordering on me feeling hopeless – if a therapist couldn’t help me then who could,” she said. “Once you start feeling hopeless, that’s a dangerous path to walk. That can end up with all kinds of suicidal ideation. I did go down that route at one point, it was probably just after stopping seeing him.
“At the time I didn’t know. I think that’s an issue for a lot of people, they don’t really know what they’re looking for, and they don’t know when boundaries are being overstepped. That’s exactly the situation I was in. I wasn’t aware a therapist shouldn’t be giving you hugs and holding your hand and inviting you home.”
Blak has since trained as a therapist herself, and written a book, The Essential Companion to Talking Therapy, which looks at the difference between ethical and unethical therapy. She often works with clients who arrive traumatised from experiences of bad therapy.
She was one of more than 100 people who got in touch with the Guardian after it reported that experts were calling for all psychotherapists in England to be regulated. The readers shared their concerns about the psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists they felt had given bad or harmful advice.
Among them was Elinor*, whose adult son has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He tried to obtain psychotherapy on the NHS but was declined as local services said his needs were too complex.
He found a phone counsellor registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), who, Elinor was shocked to learn, told her son he would support him to come off his antipsychotic medication without consulting a psychiatrist. After this, her son deteriorated until he became so unwell he needed to be sectioned, “undoing two years of being reasonably well and holding down a part-time job”.
She tried to complain to the BACP but was told she required her son’s permission, which he was too unwell to give. “A good counsellor would raise a safeguarding alert if a client with schizophrenia was talking about quitting meds, rather than encouraging it like that, abusing their position of power and trust,” Elinor said, adding that mental health experts should know that people with psychotic illnesses are often suspicious of their diagnosis and medication.
Sophie* quickly became uncomfortable with the approach of her therapist, who overshared about her personal life. “I thought: ‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’” she said.
Her therapist also dismissed the things Sophie wanted to talk about, instead focusing on the idea she might be neurodivergent as “the magical answer to everything”. The therapist told her three times she should seek a diagnosis, despite Sophie’s opinion that being labelled as having a disorder would not be helpful for her.
“She told me more than once, inappropriately, I thought, about her own neurodivergence and seemed preoccupied with directing me towards the same diagnosis,” she said. “I just felt hectored into the prioritisation of things the counsellor had decided needed fixing.”
She terminated the therapy after the minimum number of sessions, and is now considering complaining to the BACP.
Suzanne* turned to a psychologist because she was feeling depressed and anxious and was having problems in her marriage. She initially found therapy helpful, but soon found herself listening to her therapist telling her about his life, to the point that she “felt like I was paying for him to tell me about [things he was working on]”.
She asked him whether she could be neurodivergent, and he definitively assured her she wasn’t – something he was not qualified to do – instead assuring her that her marriage was to blame for her mental health struggles. He advised her to divorce her husband, despite the fact she was a new mother and not financially independent; advice she felt was “well-meaning but detached from reality”.
After terminating therapy, she obtained autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses on the NHS. She considered filing a complaint but felt she didn’t have “the mental capacity to deal with it”. She now feels “wary” of returning to therapy.
All names except Karin Blak’s have been changed.
