According to my psychologist I am suicidal. I want to sue.

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Or rather, according to my psychologist, I was suicidal. Either way, it's a calumny. I have never been suicidal. What happened is this: the psychologist concluded that I was depressed. Then she asked me if I thought about death, and I innocently answered "yes." Then she asked me if I was planning to kill myself. I told her "no." Then she reworded her question at least two more times, seeking confirmation. Seven years later I read my psychological report and to my great surprise find that according to that woman I was suicidal. Suicidal? I didn't know I had ever been sucidal. That's new to me. Can you believe that bull****? The psychologist accused me of being suicidal on the basis that I confirmed her suspicions about my thinking about death. But who doesn't think about death? Who? I feel slandered and wish I could file a defamation lawsuit against that *****.

What did she get more money for saying her patient was going to off themselves?

They often do twist words around. My one kept telling me why I was anxious and what I thought. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I once got diagnosed with severe depression when I didn't have it. I was just stressed out. That diagnosis pretty much f***ed me up. I started to believe it.
I think of death too, actually I have probably thought of more suicidal things than you.

I'm not sure what you can do, but good luck all the same.

It doesn't matter if she benefited. She slandered me.

I think it's an AS/NT miscommunication...

Depressed and thinking about death is not the same as suicidal, though it's close. However, might it not be true that you were answering questions literally and your therapist wasn't thinking about the fact that you would answer literally?

If by "are you thinking about death?" she meant planning your own death, and you thought "death in general", there would have been a mismatch between what she asked and what you meant. In which case, she would have perceived suicidality where it actually didn't exist.

Either that or she has a broader definition of "suicidal" that includes "depressed and thinking about death in general".

IMO she really should have been more specific on her report. For example, "Client reports feeling depressed and thinking about death." That would make more sense than interpreting your statements. Less information gets lost when you are specific.

It was bad communication and possibly bad record-keeping but I don't think you have any reason to sue. Unless you were needlessly hospitalized or otherwise abused, you really don't have a case... It's like a doctor assuming you have food poisoning when you say, "I ate some funny-tasting fish and now my stomach hurts", except a psychologist can't do any tests to determine that it's actually just gas.

Why is saying you're suicidal "slander"? It sounds to me like she was simply mistaken about your symptoms.

Last edited by Callista on 22 Dec 2008, 9:09 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Not everything in our medical reports are true. There are some things in my report that aren't true. But before sixth grade, I am not sure what is and what isn't true. Only thing I know is it is written I weighed 8 lbs and 14 oz. when I was born but in my baby book, my mother wrote 8lbs and 8 oz. My mother probably told the doctor that because she got the numbers mixed up.

I even saw something written in my IEP report from junior high about my hobbies and I knew me riding my bike around town was not true. I have only done it twice when I rode my bike to town and then never again because it was tiring. We lived out in the country.

There are some things here I don't understand:

Who else saw the report?
Have there been any repercussions over the past 7 years because of the therapist's error?
Why does it feel like slander for someone to say you were suicidal?
Why doesn't it just sound like an insanely stupid mistake?

Those are good questions. Mw99. Did her writing you are suicidal in your file impact your life in any way? Did anyone else see it?

I definitely wouldn't be seeing her anytime soon. I don't think trying to sue her would do much good, but who knows. Just try to put it out of your mind. It's hard, I know, but it will help.

When I read my diagnosis report, I noticed that there were a handful of inaccuracies in the report. I don't think it's possible to eliminate inaccuracies and in some cases even wild inaccuracies, just depending upon the situation. Everybody's human, psychologists make mistakes just like everybody else. It's like playing "whisper down the lane" - it doesn't matter how clearly you tell the other person, there's always a certain amount that's lost in translation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_down_the_lane

As to "who doesn't think about death", I'm generally of the impression the answer to that question is "NTs". I'm lead to believe that most people really generally don't think about death... like, ever... unless they have extreme depression. Or unless they have some kind of brush with death in a literal sense like they fall down in the street and a car screeches to a halt inches from their face and they see their life flashing before their eyes. Then they think "holy s**t I almost died". But they don't generally think about death outside of those kinds of unusual circumstances. And so although it's not the same thing as planning suicide, I could see where someone might interpret it as being "mildly suicidal". Thoughts like "maybe I'd be better off dead" don't fall in the same category as thoughts like "there's a sharp knife in the kitchen, that could work". The former is considered "suicidal ideation" but doesn't produce the "red alert" that the later produces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicidal_ideation

Given that the wikipedia article there says that fully 1/5th of the people who actually committed suicide in that study in Finland had talked about it with their shrink during their last visit prior to the event, I would think that they're apt to take any amount of suicidal ideation as a serious issue that needs to be carefully monitored.

I actually did threaten suicide once when I was in Navy boot camp in '97. (It's a long story.) But I've only been suicidal (as in, contemplating methods) twice in my life.

I also read that people with AS are 50x more likely to commit suicide than NTs -- according to a study, but unfortunately the article that mentioned it didn't link to the study and I wasn't able to find it online, so I can't say anything about the quality of the study. I would actually like to know. But amongst NTs suicide only happens in something like 1/1000 of people, which means that even amongst aspies, it's still only like 5%, which means it's still less likely than a variety of other causes of death. But from the perspective of a psychologist, if they knew you were AS beforehand, it's also reason to be more concerned about the possibility of suicidal thoughts.

Well, it would be libel rather than slander anyway because it is written, but I also do not think it is libel, unless it damaged your reputation or life in some way (like forced hospitalization).

Here is a definition of libel:

"A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation."

Another definition says that the falseness and damage must be deliberate, which I doubt it was in this case:

"A false and malicious publication printed for the purpose of defaming a living person."

I'm sorry it upset you, but I doubt it is libel. It was probably just a miscommunication, as others have written.

An example of libel would be if the psychologist sent an e-mail around telling your acquaintances that you were suicidal in order to negatively impact people's perceptions of you. Or if they deliberately included this false information in a report to another psychologist for a malicious purpose (like unnecessary hospitalization).

I experienced something like that too. I think they do that. You can say hi, and they'll decide you are suicidal, depressed, happy, conspiring to take over the world, or just being friendly. It's really hard for me to look at psychology scientifically anymore because there's just too much perception bias going on, and you can only get away with that if you have a PhD, otherwise, you don't know what you are talking about.

I never really thought of it before, but someone mentioned NTs don't think about death. I guess that could be true, but it was NTs that ever made me think about it. Like, in English class in high school, we kept journals, and the questions came from this book called the Book of Questions. I don't remember if we answered this in high school or if I did this on my own after graduation (until my church confiscated the book saying it was evil), but it asked how would you prefer to die and what ways of death scare you type thing (it also had questions like the one the church decided made the book evil--if a member of the opposite sex offered you 10 grand for an intimate night with him/her, would you do it?). The other time I thought about it...

I met this guy once at a sports bar. He happened to own some private investigation practice, and he asked questions that he said came from the job interview/psyc eval for the LAPD. One of the questions was, "Do you believe in ghosts? How would you react if you saw one?" I answered I'd be curious and ask lots of questions like, "Do you realize you are a scary ghost? Did you see God yet? Etc." My friend with me didn't believe in ghosts at all. He told us the answer to the question is how you feel about death. So, I am curious about death (which is true, like what happens afterwards) while my friend is in denial that death is going to happen. See, if asked that question now, I would probably say that I would be concerned about my children if I saw a ghost (like it better not mess with them). Now, I sort of fear death in concern for my children and me being there for them.

NT's do think about it a lot as there wouldn't be wills, living wills, life insurance or pre-purchased funeral/burial plans. The psychologist should have asked in what ways have you thought about death? And maybe how often do you think about it? Psychologists should never ask leading questions. Child protective services do that often too. Same with attorneys, etc. It's a known trick to get the person to say what you want them to say. Mean girls do that too like int he movie Mean Girls.

I saw someone that qualified who had no idea what they were talking about; much less so than some I'd seen who were less qualified. The PhD misdiagnosed me and behaved unprofessionally. If I subjected myself to my case records from back then, the inaccuracies and logical/reasoning errors would probably send me over the edge. Like they almost did at the appointments.

Must be annoying, to read that you were suicidal, when you were not. I can imagine since my psychologist also wrote all sorts of absolute crap, assuming she knew everything about my mind because she studied psychology. Ugh, that was so annoying, to read that bullsh*t, it gve an entirely wrong image of my situation. I have some philosophies, which she noted, but she didn't have a clue of what they were about. She didn't get a thing of them, which ended up in a ridiculous story in which I looked like some depressed ret*d who thought to be philosophical but didn't get the logics. Of course my mother believed it; imagine your daughter can be right sometimes and an adult, even one who has went to college, can be wrong.

Even though I knw it is annoying and sometimes insulting, I don't see why you should sue her. The only thing she did wrong was that she was being dumb. She didn't do her job well and made mistakes. But that's human, she didn't do it on purpose to harm you. She made mistakes, but I don't think she was willing to harm you, she thought that what she did, was right. I don't think you ever had problems from what she wrotew, you discovered what she wrote seven years later.

And what would her charge be? I don't live in the USA, so I don't know, really, what you can sue her for.

Prove her wrong by not killing yourself. No need to sue.

That might be a calumny to her reputation in the field of psychiatry.