TV Characters We Love & HateAfter spending so very many hours watching a TV show, we form strong attachments - and revulsions - to certain characters. Let's rank 'em.
Vote up the TV therapists who prove therapy licenses are being handed out on street corners in TV Land.
[Necessary Disclosure: We want to be clear up front. There’s nothing wrong with going to therapy and if you feel like you need to talk to someone, there are a lot of real-life, trained therapists who are capable and ready to help you. We’re about to drag a bunch of fictional therapists for being straight up TRASH, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that therapy can’t be helpful, because it can be.]
Sending a fictional character to therapy makes for some excellent television. It’s a quick and dynamic way for the audience to get a better understanding of a character’s personality and motivations in a way that is more subtle than Tony Soprano turning direct to camera and saying “I have depression as a result of my mother and my crimes!”
Too bad not all TV therapists are known for giving out solid advice. For every realistic portrayal of how a therapist should behave, there are a dozen examples of TV shrinks with boundary issues or even severe mental problems of their own. While this can be forgiven if the bad shrink appears in a sitcom, it becomes really problematic when therapists on television who give bad advice pop up in a serious drama where the audience is meant to take them seriously. On that note, here are some truly horrible therapists from TV shows. Vote up the worst offenders.
Is Ben the worst fictional therapist ever? He just might be. At the very least, you have to hope that your therapist is extra-intuitive, but Ben doesn’t even pick up on the fact that most of his clients are actual ghosts. He treats ghosts for a while before it is finally made clear to him that he’s been talking to dead people, which means you can't count on him to pick up on some of your deeper issues. He also cheats on his wife with a student, has his wife institutionalized when she says she was raped and he reveals personal information to clients without a second thought. Ethics aren’t high on his list of priorities.
Roa is tasked with preventing Annalise from falling off the wagon after she gets sober. A pretty straightforward job, one would think. And yet, their relationship becomes problematic in a matter of a couple of episodes. Viewers find out that Annalise is actually a trigger for Roa, who is dealing with severe mental health issues of his own. Instead of referring her to another therapist, he becomes way too invested in the lawyer’s life. He pushes her too hard to reveal information she’s not ready to share, even when she points this out. And he even stalks another client, Bonnie, at work after she quits therapy.
We’re not experts or anything, but we feel we should make a public service announcement for our less experienced readers here: if your therapist is full-blown stalking someone— even if that someone is also a client— you are dealing with a bad therapist.
On How I Met Your Mother, Kevin is a court-ordered therapist Robin visits to deal with her anger issues after she assaults a woman. After a few sessions, he stops being her therapist, claiming he’s moving to Alaska. But when she accidentally bumps into him later, he reveals he stopped their sessions because he was attracted to her.
This is sort of “half ethical.” On the one hand, it’s responsible of him to realize that it would be inappropriate to continue treating a client he was attracted to. On the other hand, this realization comes after Robin was extremely vulnerable with him when they first met and revealed a lot of personal information. And on the gripping hand, ignore everything we said about the first hand because he ended up dating her anyway because it turns out he has no ethics whatsoever. Therapists should not date their patients, full stop.
Need more proof? By the end of How I Met Your Mother’s run, we learn that his relationship with Robin wasn’t an isolated incident; he eventually gets assigned to be the therapist for Jeanette (another troubled HIMYM character), and he also falls in love with and dates her. This is a pattern. This flawed therapist has a type.
This is one of our favorite, hilariously bad therapists. As Christian’s therapist, Faith is nothing but professional. She pushes him to wonder whether he’s in love with his partner, Sean, basically causing him to have an existential crisis. She also sleeps with Christian and becomes obsessed with him, to the point where she gets a “Property of Christian Troy” tattoo. She also eventually tells Sean about Christian’s insecurities, information that should have stayed confidential. If there’s a Bingo card for bad therapist behavior, Faith is filling. It. Up.
Wayne is Betty Draper’s psychiatrist and he was pretty terrible even by awful 1960s standards. When Betty is having trouble, Don sends her to a psychiatrist to address her feelings which would be really good and helpful, except Dr. Wayne is all too eager to tell Don everything that he and Betty talk about. Don calls Dr. Wayne after all of his sessions with Betty and asks him some version of “So, what’s wrong with my silly, trash wife?” Dr. Wayne has no problem violating doctor/patient confidentiality and filling Don in on everything he learns. Therapy and psychiatry require a tremendous amount of trust, and that gets thrown out the window if your doctor is ready to hop on the phone with your husband to basically say “Yeah, you’re wife’s just annoying and crazy. Women, am I right?”
Even the premise of this Netflix show hinted at Holloway being not so great at her job. After all, the series follows a psychotherapist who secretly infiltrates the private lives of her patients. How involved is she, exactly? Well, she starts searching out patients’ exes and family members and other people they discuss in therapy in real life, under an alias. Not only that, but she also slips multiple times, mentioning things about her clients’ friends and relatives in therapy that she couldn’t possibly know. Oh, and did we mention she (potentially) coaxed a former patient to burn a house down? Since the show was canceled, we’ll probably never know if this is true. Still, she’s as shady as bad TV therapists get.
