Psychiatrist dating former patient

As everybody but me seemed to appreciate fully, the takes a zero tolerance approach to relationships between psychiatrists and former patients. Last December, Barbara walked into our kitchen and, without a word, handed me her copy of , the College’s mail-out to members.

A mere six months after the divorce, in February of 2014, Simon married Ellen, and they remain together today.

There are, however, a few complicating factors about this story, beyond the regular emotional turmoil that so often accompanies failed romantic endeavors.

Memoir In implementing zero tolerance for sexual abuse, has the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario become a source of harm to the patients it’s trying to protect?

by Mary Rogan Illustration by Alain Pilon , Barbara, meet? If I’m feeling particularly perverse, I’ll say we met at the doctor’s office, which is true—only it was Barbara’s office, and she was my psychiatrist.

What about sexual relationships after the patient-physician relationship has ended?

You would think that these would be OK, so long as the physician did not abuse the relationship.

Skimming the story on page fourteen, I thought: you have to be fucking kidding me.

In reversing two key elements of its sexual misconduct policy, such that a doctor no longer has to wait a year before dating a former patient, and psychiatrists aren’t necessarily banned for life from dating theirs, the College had ostensibly given Barbara and me the thumbs-up seven years after we’d gotten together. After all, in the end I got the girl and the happy ending.

I searched the magazine from cover to cover, looking for my name in a corner somewhere with “apologies to” underneath. You might even argue that it’s worth a few innocent fish getting caught up in the net to catch the big bad fish, which is to say patients need to be protected at any cost from unscrupulous and dangerous doctors.

Such as the physician who used a therapy he called “pelvic bonding,” which involved pressing his patient’s face into his crotch to recreate the safe feeling she would have had as a child hugging her father.