Uncomfortable experience with a psychologist. It gets worse.

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You've read Part 1, which talked about a psychologist who made me talk about feelings. You've read Part 2, which talked about the same psychologist who tried to make me share all the details about the time I got bullied. Now, here comes Part 3, the next one in the "Uncomfortable Experience" series. This one's about a different person, who I only saw for two sessions; I'm not sure what her job title was, but let's assume that she was a psychologist, to just to keep the continuity with the past two threads. Anyway, my stupid teacher (in 6th grade) wanted me tested for ADD, since she complained that I wasn't paying attention in her class. So, a few phone calls were made, and my parents drove me to her office.

She sat me down at a table, and proceeded with basic introductions and explanations of the whole procedure. That part felt (did I say "felt"? ) a little patronizing, but perfectly tolerable. Then she took out the test materials, and proceeded to ask me questions. The tests ranged from ridiculously simple (like finding a missing part on a drawing) to fun (like the Rorschach) to slightly weird (like the picture sequencing) to downright bizarre (like situational questions). The whole time, she kept writing something on a sketchpad almost non-stop. At one point, I wanted to look at the notes. I thought it was fair, since I'm the one she's writing about. However, when I tried to look at the notes, she turned the sketchpad so I couldn't see it. When I protested, the only explanation she gave is: "if you see the notes about yourself, it's going to skew the results." In frustration, I let out an exasperated sigh, and she wrote something that very moment. By then, I realized that I had to be "on my best behavior" or god knows what she'd write about me. I spent the rest of the session feeling very tense, knowing that my every word and my every move was being cataloged and judged.

One question in particular bothered me. The psychologist asked: "if there is a fire at your neighbors' home, what can you do?" I told her: "call 911." "What else can you do?", she continued. I was confused at what to tell her, and knew that she wouldn't let me see the answer key. So I told her my honest opinion (which was really stupid on my part): "try to climb in through the window, and if the fire is small enough, put it out yourself." I told her that because I truly didn't know that to tell her, but knew she wanted some type of answer. She looked at me with an expression that clearly meant something (thought I couldn't tell what exactly), and wrote something in her sketchpad. By then, I was on the verge of a meltdown, although I also knew if I had one, she's write it all down. Like everything else in life, the first session came to an end, and I went back to the waiting room.

Fast-forward two days, when the test results came back. The psychologist wanted both me and my parents to come to the session, unlike the first one, where it was just myself. She proceeded to spell out the test results, which weren't too good. I tested negative for ADD, but apparently, I had "immature emotional development" that she wanted to talk about. Half-hour later, my mom was crying, and my dad was slumped down with his head between his hands. I sat there with a combination of confusion and anger. All I could think was: "You f***ing sorry excuse for a human being!! ! You're making me watch my parents cry, and you don't even care! You could have had the decency to tell me to sit in the waiting room." Needless to say, the car ride home was the most uncomfortable one in my whole life.

Obviously, all this had an aftermath. I started to develop depression; real depression, not just a bad mood. My dad tried to console me by saying "it was just a test", and my mom suggested going back to the psychologist for another session. I flat-out refused. So how did I cope? I played video games for many hours on end, until I couldn't continue due to headaches and eyestrain. My parents were unusually lax about it (they normally limited my game time), particularly considering the fact that it was during the summer and they saw the state of mind I was in. I was able to get over the depression in about two weeks, but truly wished I never took those tests.

Like with the past two threads, here are my questions. If you ever took psychological tests, is it normal for a psychologist to treat a client like that? Were her actions, like having me in the same room, while giving out test results even ethical? And on a deeper note, do you think she even cares that she sent a client into depression?

for both my kids, the assessment results were gone over with me first, without my kids. my kids were part of separate sessions geared toward helping them understand the adjustments that would be made, like my son going to live with his dad and my daughter understanding needing more processing time than her teachers were currently giving her which was at the root of her frustration and feelings of failure, which weren't her fault.

That does sound fairly normal, and her diagnosis sounds remarkably like autism, even if she wasn't an autism expert. You should not care what the psychologist is writing, they make notes about behavior you may not even be aware of. You should not look at what they write. You should act as natural as possible. I do not understand why you were upset at her findings. You are on an Asperger's forum, aren't you OK with the possibility of having Asperger's?

Wow! When my daughter was tested, not only was she not in the office, the appointment was scheduled for a time when she was in school so that we could digest the results with her not there. She's younger than you, but I still think that wasn't a good way to do it. I think it's very unsettling and scary for kids to see their parents cry. The appointment with your parents shoud have happened when you were at school so they could have gotten hold of themselves and rehearsed what they were going to say to you about the appointment. Parents try to hold it together in front of their kids because it's scary for the kids, but psychs have a way of sucker-punching parents. I'm not surprised it sent you into a depression.

She shouldn't have done it that way. She should have made an appointment with them when you were elsewhere (school?). It seems to me that sometimes health professionals (like psychs and doctors) get so caught up in the details of their work (like scoring tests) that they forget that what is just part of their normal workday is really upsetting and disturbing to the people they talk to. It may be business as usual to them, but it sure isn't to you.

On the plus side, I can tell from the way you post about your parents that you are a strong family and that counts for a lot.

I understood the actual question to be whether it's normal to break possibly devastating news like "your child has autism" to parents with the child in the room, which in my experience has not been done and which frankly seems really lacking in compassion for the family receiving the news.

when I got the news that my son has NVLD I went through a reality shift that included shock and heart-break before the knowledge brought relief that he could now get some useful support instead of being treated like a 10 year old criminal. I think it would have been very unprofessional for his mental health staff to explain all of that to me in front of my son, because my son doesn't need the added emotional burden of seeing me struggling to adjust to reality.

I think it makes a lot of sense to have the client in the same room while giving out test results, actually. How were you supposed to know anything about yourself if you weren't told what the tests said?

On the other hand, "immature emotional development" isn't even a diagnosis. You were in the sixth grade--presumably eleven or twelve. What in the world was she expecting? I would've been curious about what she was writing too, and while it made sense that your knowing what she wrote during the test might skew the results, it wouldn't be at all out of the ordinary to be annoyed that you couldn't know what she was writing.

What did she tell your parents that made them so upset? I'm "emotionally immature" myself, and I don't think it's all that horrible a problem. Sure, when I was twelve, I had the emotional maturity of a three year old; but now that I'm 26 I've caught up to the twelve-year-olds and I expect that when I'm fifty I'll be functioning at a fully adult level in that area... I don't see why being told you were behind in emotional maturity would make your parents cry. If, that is, you were behind at all; I am not too sanguine about the qualifications of a psychologist who still uses the Rorschach test.

OK. I guess I see what the others are getting at. I thought you meant you thought it was weird you were told about the test results, rather than the fact you were told at the same time as your parents...

This would be the expectations that a typical person would have of someone in that situation. But how are you as an Aspie child supposed to "read" those expectations? Nobody ever told them what they were "supposed" to do! With enough practice, sure. If told what to do, yes. But the first time, as a kid... no. Not really.

I did the test in 1995, just one year after Asperger's was officially recognized, and the shrin I saw probably didn't know about it yet. I didn't even know how to feel about her findings. If anything, I thought she skewed the results, by setting things up a certain way, then recording my anxious behavior and "wrong" answers as "immature emotional development" (like with the "what to do if there's a fire" question.) Here's what really made me upset: (1) She made me anxious and uncomfortable, and it doesn't matter if it was inadvertent, (2) she refused to accept the answers I thought were correct, (3) she diagnosed my discomfort with the situation and the answers she forced me into giving as "immature emotional development", and (4) she truly didn't give a damn that a 13-year-old had to watch his parents cry.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 15 Jul 2009, 3:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have had too many psych evals to count in my life. In my experience, when I was a child, the psychologists would generally go over the results with just my parents. In fact, I was never myself invited to a session to discuss test results. My parents were givent he report, and if they felt like it (from about age 11 on), they shared it with me.

The not sharing notes is also normal. It is indeed true that your seeing the psychologist's notes could influence your test performance. For example, if you got a lot of wrong answers on a particular type of intelligence/academic achievement test, and you'd see the psychologist's notes, you might get disappointed and lose motivation to try your best. And on the personality/emotional/behavior inventories, of course they always tell you that there are no right and wrong answers, but in reality there are, in that a certain pattern of answers might get you diagnosed with some disorder. If you saw the notes during testing, you might start lying to get the result you wanted or felt you needed to achieve.

As for the diagnosis of "emotional immaturity", I was given that same diagnosis during an eval in 6th grade, along with poor frustration tolerance, lack of understanding of social situations and emotions and anumber of other things. These are all correct in my case and are of course possible AS signs, and the psychologist doing my most recent eval (at age 21), who made the AS dx, did comment on them. But psychologists who don't know about autism, will not make this connection and just diagnose "emotional immaturity", because that's what the tests say. I don't know when this eval took place, but mine (in which I was given that label) was in 1998, by a psychologist who specialized in blindness and hence didn't know about autism/AS. Not surprising she didn't look beyond the test result, because that wasn't her expertise.

I was a kid when I was going to all those guys, so I think it was different. But it seems like she should have paid more attention to the effect her actions were having on you. That seems like it's kind of her JOB. If you go to a psychologist again, I'd go to a different one and tell them about how she acted so they can use that information to act better than that towards you.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around why parents would cry over their child having AS/HFA. I mean, I'd be the first person to argue for the notion that it is a lifelong handicap and deserves to be treated as a qualifying disability, but there are worse things that could happen. I put HFA/AS above things like dyslexia on the 'makes life more difficult' scale, but you could have a congenital heart defect, or no legs, or Downs Syndrome, or even be a very low functioning autistic - all far more tear-worthy.

But that said, I completely get why seeing that would disturb you. I'm many years older than you, only DX'd a year ago and Last Christmas season Hallmark ran a based-on-a-true-yada-yada movie about a guy with Tourretes Syndrome. During a scene where the young man is confronting his estranged father, the father makes a remark to the effect that he feels guilty for having 'given' his son this condition (as if not being born would have been a better option), I actually saw my ex-military Dad tear up. It made me feel awful - and I'm 50, he's in his 70s. I had no idea what I could possibly do or say that would have made any positive difference, and the whole thing bothered me on two levels:

1) That my dad should feel responsible for my AS, which I consider just a series of hiccups in the genome that can't (so far) be predicted and aren't the very worst thing that could happen in any case, and

2) That he apparently feels that it is a terrible thing, which just brought back all the self-loathing I'd ever experienced before diagnosis, when I thought for my whole life that I was just defective as an individual human being. As if I am after all defective as a person and that diagnosis somehow just transferred responsibility for my freakishness onto him.

So yes, any mental health professional who would thoughtlessly create a situation like that - especially involving a kid - should be sued for malpractice. That kind of trauma can cause damage that lasts a lifetime.

Health professionals have a way of framing things in the worst possible light. It's part of their "don't give people false hope, we don't want denial" policy. I say this as the mom who cried in the office while my husband sat slumped with his head in his hands, just like the OP's parents. Luckily our daughter did not have to witness this. Falling into a two week depression seems an almost inevitable reaction for children having to witness this. Parents don't want to fall apart in front of their kids, but it's the WAY these people say things which really does make it seem like the end of the world.

The realization that it's really not so bad as all that and the child will just need some accomodations and help and life will go on just fine and he will find his way in the world is a realization that happens to the parents well after they've left the office and had a chance to talk to each other as a couple. This is why the Big Reveal should not happen with the child and the parents all together. The parents need time to compose themselves and talk to each other and have the conversation that ends with "this isn't the end of the world even if the psych made it seem that way, Junior will need some accomodations and extra help and we need to read up on this but it's not like he has cancer". But that conversation doesn't happen until after the parents leave the office and get away from The Voice of Doom psych and regain their rationality. None of this should be witnessed by the child because watching your parents react like that just leads to...2 weeks of depression or something similar.

I got a note from my mom on day in high school chemistry class, and because we were using bunsen burners, I burned the note. I was sent to the psychologist for an interview. I had no idea about Aspergers at the time, and didn't think anything was wrong. There were a few things wrong, but it had nothing to do with my burning the note. I had no idea my symptoms were anything special, I thought they were personal faults. I explained that to the councellor, and she seemed to think it was all a misunderstanding. While I was talking to her, though, I felt very uncomfortable, I started to get tunnel vision and thought I would pass out. This was 1986 or so. So I can understand if such a session would be uncomfortable.

Actually, it didn't seem like my parents made much of an effort to not to fall apart in front of me. Maybe because the idiot shrink told them "it's OK to cry", and worse still, encouraged them to talk about their feelings (ignoring the fact that I was in the room!). Ironically, I didn't feel like crying at all, and my dad probably didn't either. If anything, he was probably angry at the situation, like me, but was afraid to speak up at the risk of making things worse. What added insult to the injury is that the psychologist talked in that sickeningly sweet, overly sympathetic tone (if you don't know how it sounds, be glad), and I'm sure that's what made my mom cry. I wouldn't be surprised if the shrink thought to herself: "wow, I'm so glad it's not me."

What made it even worse is that I had no ways to make myself feel better after such an ordeal. My mom could meet her friend at an ice cream place and have a heart-to-heart talk. My dad could go watch a football game with his friend to take his mind off things. But what ways did I have? I had no friends at the time, I wasn't going to tell people that I watched my parents cry, and I certainly couldn't drink alcohol. In other words, I was sh*t out of luck. So I think this is what made my depression a lot worse that it would have been otherwise.

What an incompetent shrink! She SHOULD NOT have prompted your parents (actually, your Mom, since it's the moms who usually cry) to cry and talk about feelings. I am very familiar with that sickly sweet overly sympathetic voice. That voice is part of what makes things worse. It's the same tone of voice people sometimes use at funerals to comfort the bereaved. It sends a message to your parents that they should be in mourning for some lost part of you. And it puts you in the awful position if being like a ghost watching your own parents in mourning for you. Yuck! Competent shrinks don't force the kids to watch this. They make an appointment for when the kid is in school. But even the ones who do that still use that "it's ok to mourn and grieve" tone of voice which sets the moms off into crying.

I am appalled at this shrink. It's a shame you had nothing but video games to run to after this experience. Everybody needs something to help cope. It's too bad Wrong Planet didn't exist back then.

It's sad but true, in my experience, most of the people who are working with autistic people have had no education into what autism is (I was told in my training that we don't really know or understand anything about autism), and do not change their bedside manner at all when dealing with an autistic person.