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

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slander (nolo.com): A type of defamation. Slander is an untruthful oral (spoken) statement about a person that harms the person's reputation or standing in the community. Because slander is a tort (a civil wrong), the injured person can bring a lawsuit against the person who made the false statement. If the statement is made via broadcast media -- for example, over the radio or on TV -- it is considered libel, rather than slander, because the statement has the potential to reach a very wide audience.

You'd have to show how the psychologist's report damaged you, how it was both patently false and an act of malice (instead any kind of professional opinion or inadvertent mistake). Then you'd be able only to recover the wages or other loss of income the psychologist's report cost you.

You spend a lot of time ruminating over the opinions of others in your past. That seems like a waste of your time and talent! They don't seem to be like powerful or important or special people, like not worth your time to worry over...

I'm more inclined to think along the lines of another poster: this was AS miscommunications.

When were you diagnosed with AS? That alone would change a therapist's way of communicating with you if s/he knows that because of your autistic symptoms that you're going to answer quite differently than a more neurotypical person. If the therapist doesn't know you have AS, and you're an adult, and it's not disclosed, an ASD is not going to be the first thing s/he will think of.

Something to think about. And something else. It was seven years ago. What's any of it have to do with now? How is it going to affect you now?

Okay, that's one example... but you also don't know who wrote the book. They may have themselves been depressed. The guy who wrote Heart of Darkness hated writing and was depressed a lot... became famous for the book tho. And even if the guy who wrote the book was NT and not depressed or anything, having written one or two questions in that book is not an indication that they thought about death with any kind of regularity. They may have been having a conversation with a friend and mentioned the book they were writing and the friend suggested the questions.



That's also not applicable because it's a psych evaluation, which is a specialized reason for asking people questions about death or their beliefs about death. It doesn't indicate that the people asking the question think about death with any regularity, it only indicates that they're interested in getting the results of the pscyh evaluation so they can judge how they want to treat you, whether it has to do with hiring or something else.



Again not applicable because a) these are specialized reasons for thinking about death, b) most people don't have a will much less a living will and only think about life insurance or burial plans either when someone they know dies or when someone is trying to sell them life insurance (or if they happen to sell it themselves) c) none of these things indicates that an individual thinks about death with any regularity. Given what I've read on the subject, the average NT doesn't generally think about death unless there's some specific reason to think about it. They don't perseverate on things the way we do. They experience the reason, they think about it, they move on and they forget about it. And then when the psychologist asks "do you think about death?" they answer "umm... no I can't say that I do". Because even if they have, they don't think about it often enough to remember it much (and don't generally even associate things like life insurance with death in that context).

I am not the records keeper at the psychologist's office, so I can't fully answer your question. I know that, for instance, the psychologist who went with me over my psychological records, who was not the same psychologist I visited seven years ago, saw them. I think the question is not so much who saw my report, but who could see it and what could happen if they saw it. Judges have the jurisdiction to order psychological reports, so if I ever find myself embroiled in some legal case, say a child custody case, that woman's slanderous stalements against me could potentially adversely affect me.



Anxiety on my part.



Because it's a false statement against me that says a lot of negative things about my character and mental competency. It could potentially damage my reputation.



Claiming that a person is suicidal is a serious accusation. It's not a stupid mistake of any kind.

The question is not "What did someone say about you 7 years ago, but what will a competent therapist say about you now, and in the future?" What you were like 7 years ago really isn't an issue, especially if a current therapist says "That other therapist was entirely incorrect."

There is also something called doctor-patient privilege. If you ever go to court, they would have to subpoena your records, and they would have to have a great deal of cause to do so. The people I've known who were embroiled in nasty divorce and child custody disputes all got present-tense evaluations, ordered by the court. No one cared what someone had written about them 10 years before.

I really understand the power of people's stupidity to completely trigger a powerful reaction. It's happened to me too. It helped me when someone pointed out that it's not an all-or-nothing thing.



There are many people on this website who have been suicidal, and it says nothing whatsoever about their character or their mental competency. It says that they were in a lot of pain because life can be unbearably hard. That's all.



I don't consider it an accusation, but it clearly feels like one to you. You are very vulnerable about this, and I respect that. Please understand that you are not powerless here. One person's opinion of you expressed in a medical record is not going to derail your life. You have the power to show people who you are today, and that's what matters.

Needs to be remedied, consult your health care provider to ascertain whether this is possible.

Last edited by Jenk on 23 Dec 2008, 10:34 pm, edited 8 times in total.

I had a similar problem. Mine was a little closer when I said there were times I did not want to live. I never contemplated taking my own life. I also never dwelled too long on not wanting to live.

EDIT: I'm tempted to delete this post because Jenk edited the one I quoted to remove this passage... Anybody else care to comment? Was I too harsh?

I'm not sure that overreacting to well known human cognitive biases (which are impossible to avoid in entirety), would really help your case if someone were to choose to belabor a historical inaccuracy.

We're not talking about the scarlet letter.

Although it may be unfortunate there's also a lot of truth in the idea that people will become vile to you if you expect them to be vile to you. This happens because you behave differently when you expect them to be vile. If you can keep your expectations more reasonable, people tend to treat you more reasonably. That's irrespective of the kind of bullying that's experienced by people on the spectrum.

Cases in which adults go out of their way to be vile to another person just for the sake of being vile to them are pretty rare. Most people genuinely want to be good people and to help the people around them. This has been scientifically proven more than once.

Last edited by ike on 23 Dec 2008, 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I always go by these ground rules when asked about suicide or death. I developed these answers after a few close calls of being reported to authorities. I'll break it down by topics.

Suicide questions.
Example: "have you ever had thoughts of suicide?"
Pretend to the thrown off by this question. Put on a confused and slightly offended look on your face, as if you found the question hurtful in some way. Answer "no" in a tone you would use if someone asked you whether or not you'd visit the South Pole wearing only your underwear. If the therapist keeps pushing with questions, give this mini-speech: "I haven't had those thoughts. I can understand the logic of someone who's suicidal, but I'd never do it myself. It's just so... (pause) permanent and irreversible". This tactic worked wonders for me. Now that doesn't mean it stopped the thoughts; it only got the therapist to leave the topic alone.

Death-related questions.
Example: "have you ever thought about death?"
Always always always! make some reference to old age, especially when talking about yourself. It's also acceptable to mention your relatives who are old. Key phrases are "not for a long time", "eventually", and "happens to all people". The following phrase will keep you in the clear, and sounds almost poetic: "Death is part of being human, even though I don't think about it. When it happens, I just want want to be remembered and make sure my kids are taken care of." This way, you're making it seem like something far away, and putting an altruistic spin on it by mentioning your future kids.

It's sad that we have to use scripted phrases to keep ourselves out of trouble. But given how society trips us up at every convenient moment (and gets pleasure from it), we have to use every defense strategy we know that works.

Yes ike. Though this comment is in reference to an erroneous statement made on an individuals permanent medical record. If at some point you apply for a position to work with other vulnerable individuals, an occupational health check is required, your records may therefore be accessed to check suitability. Comments such as 'suicidal tendencies' are undesirable. If false statements hinder your future in this, or any other manor, should it not be remedied?

Last edited by Jenk on 23 Dec 2008, 11:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Contemplating methods to commit suicide does not make you suicidal. Seriously attempting to muster up the courage to commit suicide does.

I take it you suppose the writer of this article and his readers are all suicidal:

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net ... ly_suicide

Very interesting answers. I have also been working on my own scripts.

I just don't see that as being terribly likely.

Let me explain, by relating a little story. Tiff and I were through one of the worse hurricane seasons in Florida. And according to the local news, during one of the worst of them, a guy in a storm shelter let loose some attack dogs on the people in the shelter who had no way to escape (dobermans I think, I'm not certain). The guys job? He was an anger management counselor for the state... with a history of violent behavior. Opened the cage and said "get em!"

Now if they let him be an anger management counselor, I have a difficult time imagining a singular instance of one psychologist, with no kind of peer review or anything saying that a given patient had been suicidal over 7 years earlier, being cause to deny someone a job today. (Or for that matter being a reason to deny them anything really.)

Hell, I threatened suicide in Navy boot camp, and when they let me go, they told me "you can try again in a few years". I have no desire to try again, but that's what they told me. Granted they could have been blowing smoke... I just don't think people consider it that big a deal years after the fact and with no corroboration. I think people are much more likely to be interested in what's going on today, as was previously mentioned.

I'm sorry that my comments seemed harsh to you, they weren't intended that way.

That's the definition I was given after I nearly threw myself off a building.



No, because the context is wrong. He's not contemplating methods of ending his own life, he's contemplating methods in response to thinking about becoming a suicide hotline worker. That's completely different. He has some other reason to think about it totally unrelated to any potential suicidal ideation on his own part. It's being suicidal when you are contemplating, weighing the pros and cons of how to kill yourself, not just thinking generically about how people attempt suicide. There's detachment in the latter - the former is deliberate planning and implies that you actually are mustering up the gumption.

I just want to say this, because the OP really wanted some feedback, and I think a piece is still missing from the discussion:

If you express to people (in RL) that you want to sue your therapist for misdiagnosing you seven years ago, that will probably have a greater negative impact on people's opinion of you than the original error. The original error is seven years old. The fact that you're so angry you want to sue her may make you seem a little over the top to your average person. And since you're concerned about how you appear to people, I feel like I would be irresonsible if I didn't say that. Please know that I'm not judging you. I'm just pointing out the facts. I've been there and I've said stuff like that when I was in a state of high anger, and it didn't get me where I wanted to go.

I look back on it and realize that if I'd taken a deep breath, and done what I could do, and let go of the rest, people would have had more respect for me, not less. And I would have had a greater sense of my own power and not felt myself to be a victim of other people's blindness.

I don't know if you want to take any of this in, but there's my perspective from a little further down the road...

So you were never serious about it and never thought you'd do it but then one day all of a sudden you felt an irrational impulse to throw yourself off a building?



And yet these are the questions psychologists ask their patients:

"have you ever had thoughts of suicide?"
"have you ever thought about death?"

If you answer "no," you are lying. If you answer "yes," you are suicidal/depressed.