# Therapist made me go to the ER, should I trust him?



## HackerZC (Jan 2, 2011)

Had some issues at home last week. Long story short I put a gun to my head at one point because I was so upset. After the moment passed I called my therapist and told him what happened. Well, he called back and forced me to go to the ER despite the fact the "crisis" (if you could call it that) was over.

I told him it was a waste of time, as I was fine by time he got back to me. Still he forced me to go, or else he'd call the police or something. 
The thing is, he knows that 3 years ago I had my best friend call the police on me and say I was suicidal when I wasn't. He knows it was a horrible and traumatic experience for me, and he KNOWS I'd rather die than EVER be put in that sort of situation again. Still he backed me into that corner. In fact because of this I actually started to get upset, have panic attacks, and really DID consider killing myself for a moment... just to get out of the situation. That's how scary the whole "ER" idea is to me. 
I told him I'd happily come to talk to HIM, or do anything else except go to the ER... but none of it was good enough for him. 
I even told him that I knew the entire reason he was making me go was to cover his own ***, that it had nothing to do with my "safety". 

Well I ended up being right about everything being a waste of time and money. I went in (drove myself) went through all the BS involved, and was home a few hours later. I even called to let him know I was headed home and he sounded all surprised, as if he expected them to keep me or something. WTF!?

So, I've been seeing this guy for 3 years now. He knows how big of a red button issue the hospital thing is with me. He knows I have serious trust issues with doctors as well (I've been lied to, coerced, threatened, trust betrayed, etc). Yet he does this crap to me despite the fact I told him everything was fine (which it was, by time he got back to me). 
Clearly he hasn't been listening to me for the past three years, or he doesn't trust me enough to believe me when I say I'm fine. 
So if he won't trust what I say, why should I trust him at all? Clearly he is NOT someone I can "go to", because I know he'll just ignore what I say and force me into a situation I don't want to be in.
Should I even continue to see this person or should I just say bye? I'm not sure what to do honestly. 
I WANT to give him the benefit of the doubt, but everything I know is telling me that I can't trust him anymore. At the same time I understand where he was coming from. I understand he has a professional responsibility and he has to protect himself... but at the same time I have a responsibility to protect myself. 
I'm really on the fence over this entire thing.


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## user12345 (Jan 10, 2012)

Once I was in rehab, and I was feeling suicidal. One of the counsellors there threatened to call the police on me, and he knew that one time my dad threatened the same thing. It made me so angry and I almost walked out, I started packing my bags to leave even though I had no plan. 

The next day I confronted him, and I told him how upset it made me. He told me a story about his ex-girlfriend who tried to kill herself. She went to the hospital, and he left for about 30 minutes. When he got back she was dead. Suicide was a touchy subject for him and he never wanted something like that to happen again. 

Your therapist may have a really good explanation for why he wanted you to go to the ER, that you may not have uncovered yet. His intentions were to protect the both of you (him for the legal issues, you for your life). I'm obviously completely sympathetic to your situation - you told him several times that police/hospitalisation is a bad topic for you and you would rather die than go. He did not respect that, and him disrespecting you is unacceptable. You deserve better treatment... so, try to get it from him. You have been with him for 3 years and even in your post you express how you want to give him the benefit of the doubt. This shows that you probably aren;'t ready to leave him just yet. 

I know a lot of other posters will say 'leave him' and that's fine too, but from my experience... well, therapists are human too, they have emotions and feelings as well and your therapist cares for you, and wants you to stay alive. The only thing I found odd though was the fact that he made you go even though the crisis had passed. I suppose maybe he was worried about a relapse, but pointing a gun to your own head is a serious issue and if I were in his situation, I would have probably done the same thing, because I would want to protect you and keep you safe at least for that night. 

If you therapist has been helpful to you in other ways, please talk to him about this. Tell him how this made you feel, tell him how upsetting it was, tell him how unfair it felt... tell him you felt disrespected, ignored... and see what he has to say. If his answer isn't good enough for you, then it's time to say goodbye to your therapist. If it is good, then give it another ago. Therapists make mistakes too (mine made a big mistake once, a big violation of confidentiality. When I confronted her I told her we should stop seeing each other. She was visibly upset about what she did, apologised several times, and then explained herself. She made a mistake, owned up to it and apologised, so I forgave her. It made me trust her more to know that she was willing to open up to me like that as well, show her distress and how much she cared for me. We still keep in touch today and she is probably the most amazing person I have ever met in my life.) Humans aren't perfect, and neither are therapists. Yours might apologise too, and it's up to you whether you choose to forgive, or to leave, and it's no reflection on you if you decide to leave. 

In the end, it comes down to your gut feeling. Do you feel you can repair this relationship? Do you feel you can trust him again? If the answer is no,then walk away. You need trust in therapy and this may stop you from opening up in the future. if the answer is yes, stay, and see how it goes. 

Once again I totally understand what you are going through, and Im really sorry you had to go through that... I'm just trying to show you a different point of view, even though I fully see your side (and agree with about 95% of it!)


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## HackerZC (Jan 2, 2011)

Thanks for replying. I actually am having a hard time deciding what to do, so it's nice to hear the opinion of someone else. I see him tomorrow morning, so the timing was perfect.

You had said:


R91 said:


> The only thing I found odd though was the fact that he made you go even though the crisis had passed.


That's one of my main issues with everything that happened. What happened happened, but it was over and was no longer an issue... until he decided to make it one. I mean I went years (7 or 8 I think) without seeing anyone for anything simply because of the fact that other people seem to have a knack for unnecessarily creating problems, or taking a bad situation and making it 100x worse.

But anyway all of it was essentially started by my mom. She knows I can't afford to see a therapist, a psychologist, buy meds, etc. without her help, and she had said she was kicking me out and not helping me with anything anymore. So in other words she was completely pulling the rug out from under me. Then she grabs the phone and pretended to call the police and say she wanted me out of the house. 
She knew exactly what she was doing to me. 
Considering what I thought was about to happen I was pretty much ready to die in order to avoid the situation. In fact I didn't even know the call was fake until enough time had passed by that I knew no one was coming.

That's the kind of crap she does to me, on a fairly regular basis (though not to the same extent as that night), and my therapist knows it. I know he was all worried about her doing something else to push me over the edge again, and that's why he was so persistent. The thing is there is nothing that anyone in any ER or hospital can do to "fix" my situation at home, so I have no idea what he expected them to do. 
He also knows (because I told him so) that if I ever wanted to die I'd just kill myself, I wouldn't TELL anyone I was going to... I'd just DO IT. He also knows that if I ever did make up my mind that I wanted to die I'd do whatever was necessary to carry through that plan. You could lock me up in some rubber room for years if you wanted, but eventually the right opportunity would present itself and I would act. He and I know full well that there is no way of stopping someone who is truly determined to kill themselves. So again, I have no idea who he thought he was protecting, or why he was even trying. 
The reason I'm here right now is because: 
1) I don't actually want to die (or hurt myself in any way), and 
2) While I was being led to believe my life was about to be destroyed, it never actually WAS... so I didn't have enough of a reason to go through with it. 
It had nothing to do with my therapist or calming down or any such nonsense. 
Fact is there are certain situation I am simply not willing to live with. Having my freedom or ability to make my own choices taken away (particularly when I have committed no crime or offense to another), Ending up homeless or destitute, Being blind or otherwise paralyzed, contracting a terminal disease, situations involving physical torture or mutilation, etc. 
I would much rather die than allow myself to be subjected to those situations. It's as simple as that.

Anyway me and him will talk tomorrow, and we'll see what happens. I'm seriously thinking of not going anymore... to anyone. Part of me feels like all any of this therapy/psychiatry stuff is doing is making everything more complicated, more stressful, and has the potential for creating too many problems. I can honestly say I was better off when I did everything on my own. None of this sort of stuff ever happened to me, and I was tougher and more able to deal with things.


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## Pam (Feb 14, 2009)

I can relate to a lot of the ways you feel. If you don't mind me giving some unsolicited advice, a long time ago in my 30s, I realized that I would always feel suicidal IN RESPONSE to a situation that gave me very high stress--usually rejection/abandonment. And in these situations, I would impulsively do dumb things such as suddenly trying to light my hair on fire. Of course this would just anger people and I'd still never get the right kind of attention I needed. But I didn't really want to die either! I just felt overwhelmed with the bad feelings and I guess I was trying to get away. But I'd always feel a bit better a few days later.

So what I did, and wanted to suggest to you, was I got rid of all sharp knives, there will never be any guns around me, I even got rid of Advil PM just so I don't decide to take the whole bottle and wake up in the hospital anyway. It was like I "suicide-proofed" my environment--you know, instead of "child-proofing" it. That way, when I felt like I'm out of control and might do something stupid, at least I would have to go a little more out of my way to end up killing myself. Like yeah, I could go crash my car, but first I'd have to get the keys, put my shoes and coat on, walk outside, start the car, drive off my street, etc, and SOMEWHERE in there, I'd probably realize what i was doing and maybe pull over and cry or something. ANYTHING rather than killing myself. 

So it worries me that you have a gun so handy. You said you don't want to kill yourself, so make sure you don't! Get rid of it, or at least make it pretty impossible for you to load it. Like you could keep the bullets at another location. We don't want to do something we'll regret!

Good luck with your therapist. If you're not sure about continuing, one idea is to see him every other week, just lessen it a little and see if you like that better. I've been seeing mine 2x a week, and really I think it's too much. If I have a bad session, I don't have time to calm down and am still upset or mad when I go back; if I have a good session, I'm starting to think that I need more time in between for it to "digest" and also have time to concentrate on my real life. But at the same time i agree to seeing them that often because i don't want to miss out on anything good. I hope it goes well for you and you get some understanding from him, and about why he still wanted you to be checked up on at the ER.


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

I wonder if your shrink wanted you to go to the ER cause he is afraid of lawsuits. Like if you were to bump yourself off, maybe your family could sue him because he didn't do anything when you told him you were just about to kill yourself?


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## Eski (Aug 6, 2011)

Playing devils advocate here but lets say his therapist did just leave it and told hackerz to go get some rest after what he had been told, then, lets say hackerz went and killed him self. That's something the therapist would have to live with for the rest of his life, knowing he could have done something but didn't.

I doubt hes theripist is that cold hearted that he thought about nothing else other than his own arse and being sued, you know?. He might have just panicked and made sure he did everything he could to have stop hackerz from killing him self.

just another way to look at it...


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## HackerZC (Jan 2, 2011)

Pam said:


> ...I realized that I would always feel suicidal IN RESPONSE to a situation that gave me very high stress--usually rejection/abandonment. And in these situations, I would impulsively do dumb things such as suddenly trying to light my hair on fire. Of course this would just anger people and I'd still never get the right kind of attention I needed. But I didn't really want to die either! I just felt overwhelmed with the bad feelings and I guess I was trying to get away. But I'd always feel a bit better a few days later.


This is pretty much how things work for me as well. It's always really high stress situations where I feel backed into a corner with no way out, and it's usually my mom that causes the stress in the first place. I don't do any of the little attention seeking self harm things like cutting or any of that (for me it's "all or nothing"), but it is impulse that makes me reach for that gun. Of course it's reaching for that thing that actually snaps me back and makes me stop myself. In that sort of situation going through the motions like I do really seems to help. It sort of takes being that close doing something to make me say "yeah, this isn't what I want", and like magic things just start to get better. You said you're usually feeling better in a few days, but for me I'm typically fine in less than an hour.



Pam said:


> So what I did, and wanted to suggest to you, was I got rid of all sharp knives, there will never be any guns around me, I even got rid of Advil PM just so I don't decide to take the whole bottle and wake up in the hospital anyway. It was like I "suicide-proofed" my environment--you know, instead of "child-proofing" it. That way, when I felt like I'm out of control and might do something stupid, at least I would have to go a little more out of my way to end up killing myself. Like yeah, I could go crash my car, but first I'd have to get the keys, put my shoes and coat on, walk outside, start the car, drive off my street, etc, and SOMEWHERE in there, I'd probably realize what i was doing and maybe pull over and cry or something. ANYTHING rather than killing myself.


Already tried this before, and I find it doesn't really work for me. 
1) I'd actually go through all the extra steps, and have before. 
2) You can't suicide proof anything from me to be honest. 
When I was 13, the first time I went to psychiatrist for depression, he asked me if I ever thought of dying and if I ever thought of a way of doing it. The answer to both questions was no, but it actually put this idea in my head that made me think of how I WOULD do it if I ever needed to. Well I've been thinking about that for 17 years now. That's how I know that you can't stop someone who is truly determined. There are so many ways to hurt/kill yourself that you actually can't eliminate them all. 
3) I honestly believe the only way I COULD kill myself was if I made the concrete decision to do so, and for me to arrive at that conclusion there would have to be a LOT of evidence that my only options were to suffer horribly or die. 
To me the idea of being alive simply for it's own sake is pointless. I refuse to live in perpetual physical or emotional torment simply to appease someone elses sense of morality or religious beliefs. Screw that.



Pam said:


> So it worries me that you have a gun so handy. You said you don't want to kill yourself, so make sure you don't! Get rid of it, or at least make it pretty impossible for you to load it. Like you could keep the bullets at another location. We don't want to do something we'll regret!


An unloaded firearm can't do it's job. I might not be all that fond of myself, but I have enough self respect that I'm not going to allow myself to be the victim of someone else, and I sure as hell am not going to let anyone else be one either. I'm the kind of person who will put himself in harms way to save a stranger, simply because I feel like it would be the honorable and right thing to do. That's one of the reasons I have them.
Fact is I trust myself to get myself through things far more than I trust others ability to help me get through things, and if I ever did decide to kill myself then that would be my choice, and I expect people to respect the decisions I make for myself. It doesn't matter if you agree with me or not, but simple fact is it's my life, my body, my choice. It's about living and dying on my own terms... not someone elses.



komorikun said:


> I wonder if your shrink wanted you to go to the ER cause he is afraid of lawsuits. Like if you were to bump yourself off, maybe your family could sue him because he didn't do anything when you told him you were just about to kill yourself?


Well I'm positive that was part of the reason. I know enough to know how these things work. If I had ended up doing anything to myself he could have been sued, lost his license, etc. That's why I told him flat out that I knew he was just trying to cover his own ***.



Eski said:


> Playing devils advocate here but lets say his therapist did just leave it and told hackerz to go get some rest after what he had been told, then, lets say hackerz went and killed him self. That's something the therapist would have to live with for the rest of his life, knowing he could have done something but didn't. It may have been more than that, but I know it was one of the main reasons.


But then you have to start asking the really difficult questions like "who really knows what is best for someone else?" and "how do you know that by 'helping' you aren't actually doing more harm?". 
I know for me that a lot of the things most of society considers "help" really aren't all that helpful. I mean I have friends, I have a romantic relationship, I work full time, I have interests and hobbies, I have a life. Mind you it might be kinda cruddy and I might feel it sucks, but I DO have a life. Imagine the damage someone could do by taking me away from what little I have and sticking me in some hospital to "help" me. I'd loose my job, have no contact with friends, not be able to do any of the things I DO like to do... it would essentially destroy what little I had left. Tell me how that's being helpful, because in my eyes it's the exact opposite of help... it's harm. This is what i mean when I say "being backed into a corner". I might not have much, but what I do have is mine, and I'll be damned if I'm just going to let someone come along and take any of it away from me. 
Suicide (or even threatening it) is not a crime where I live. So what in the hell gives anyone the authority to deny me of my rights or freedoms? Why do the 4th and 6th amendments no longer apply to you?
The way I see it, the way the mental health system works right now it's nothing more than state sponsored/approved kidnapping, and is eerily similar to the imprisonment of political prisoners in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and North Korea.


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## Just Lurking (Feb 8, 2007)

Your therapist was doing his job (and probably following through with what he's legally obligated to do in the case of a suicidal patient).

I'd be more concerned if he did nothing.


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## Lateralus (Oct 28, 2007)

Just Lurking said:


> Your therapist was doing his job (and probably following through with what he's legally obligated to do in the case of a suicidal patient).
> 
> I'd be more concerned if he did nothing.


That was my thought also. And although it was a waste of money, you got through it, and if there comes another time you have to go to the ER you can look back on this and realize you came out OK and maybe it's not as scary as you always thought. Maybe your therapist realized it was a good chance for exposure as well as the right thing to do.


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## Pam (Feb 14, 2009)

HackerZC said:


> ....Fact is I trust myself to get myself through things far more than I trust others ability to help me get through things,....


I'm exactly the same way. I have to rely on my self because others just haven't been there for me for most of my life. I have said to counselors before "I can't afford to trust you! Or some stranger on the suicide hotline! I'm the one who's kept myself alive all this time, and I will be the one who keeps doing it." I really would like to be able to depend on someone else, but I'd rather not!

I hope you weren't offended by my suggestions. That's all they were. I can see you like your gun (and I am well, kind of anti-gun) That's just my personal opinion. I respect other people's choices and hope I didn't come across as someone who's trying to tell you what to do.

And yeah, you're right--if a person wants to off themselves, they will do it one way or another. But I know someone who spontaneously went in the bathroom, and took a bottle of Darvocet and many Xanax pills and ended up in a coma for a few days. Then when he woke up, he didn't even remember doing it. He said he was "checking my body to see what part was hurt because I must have been in a car accident? But I couldn't find anything and I didn't know why I was here then" and we had to tell him--No, you weren't in an accident--you overdosed. He didn't remember it and he sure didn't mean to do it either, so it's a good thing it didn't work. That's the kind of suicide that i think would be really tragic if it happened--one that wasn't intended. :no


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## Monroee (Aug 26, 2009)

Just Lurking said:


> I'd be more concerned if he did nothing.


This. Absolutely.

I don't understand how you can't see this from your therapist's point of view. It's not like you were thinking of doing something & told him. You actually went ahead & put the gun to your head. That's a serious action that obviously your therapist is gonna have a serious response to. If I was the therapist, I would have sent you to the ER as well, without a doubt.


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## percyblueraincoat (Jun 2, 2009)

Deleted.


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## kfreakingimbo (Mar 6, 2012)

My therapist and people around me suggested I go to the ER when I started cutting recently. I called to find out what happens, and they told me I would be evaluated and then transported to the hospital which the psychiatric unit and be in there for at LEAST three days. I refused. Therapy in general hasn't been helping me and doctors and hospitals scare me. I haven't cut since because I have been around friends and family and am basically being watched like a hawk. I also have to start group anxiety therapy and find a one-on-one therapist again. It doesn't stop the fact that I want to cut and I'm doing everything in my power by to until I'm away from people again. I completely understand why you didn't way to go. I hope everything is getting better for you.


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