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 this question? I was apprehensive of losing our rapport, the engagement in therapy, and progress in …