BMJ  2006;333:709 (30 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7570.709

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Personal view

"Did you ever suffer from any mental illness?"

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

At one of my psychotherapy sessions the first thing my client asked me, after the usual greetings and smiles, was, "Did you ever suffer from any mental illness?" I had been engaged in therapy with this particular client for a few weeks. We had a good rapport, and in terms of the therapy I felt we were making better than average progress. But nothing in the previous sessions had prepared me for this question. I had never had the opportunity to discuss the nature and degree of self disclosure that would be appropriate to a particular context. I had always and only understood self disclosure as a personal matter: no rules, no guidelines, only discretion. I have not had any diagnosable mental illness; but now, faced with this opening question and put on the spot, I felt a salvo of thoughts shooting through my mind. How should I answer . . . [Full text of this article]

psychiatry, South Staffordshire NHS Trust ac97dmc@yahoo.co.uk

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