With the none-too-surprising allegations against Dr. Keith Albow coming out in the news, Dr. Ablow reminds us of two facts:
1) Those with disabilities, such as mental illnesses, are more likely to be victims of sexual and non-sexual abuse than the general population is.
2) There are people whom either:
a) go into the mental-health field and become ableists & abusers of those with mental illnesses
or
b) went into the mental-health field to exploit people with mental illnesses in the first place
The "Boston Globe", meanwhile, harbors that same kind of ableism against especially women with mental illnesses, as their the headline is misleading & should be something like, "‘I own you’: Prominent psychiatrist accused of raping patients and sexually exploiting other patients in other ways".
As for Andrea Celenza, she is among those whom also harbor those sentiments. Even though she clearly does not care to admit that, her statement obviously has those glaring sentiments in it:
"Andrea Celenza, a Lexington psychoanalyst who interviewed the women and reviewed their medical records as an expert witness hired by the plaintiffs, said in a letter filed with the lawsuits that Ablow’s behavior in the case of the New York woman “was sadomasochistic, anti-therapeutic, and constitutes a perverse use of his status and power.” The former patient said that, during their seven-year sexual relationship, Ablow persuaded her to get his initials tattooed on her arm."
Also:
"Celenza, in her letter to the women’s attorney, said Ablow’s alleged sexual misconduct with the Minnesota woman amounted to “the most egregious violation” of the American Psychiatric Association’s ethical code. “These behaviors are grossly unprofessional and unethical,” she said, adding that they “represent the worst and most damaging kind of abuse” in a therapeutic setting.
If she did not actually agree with Dr. Ablow and the "Boston Globe" themselves, each of letters would contain unequivocal statements that Dr. Ablow's behavior was unethical as well as immoral, illegal, and unfaithful to the Hippocratic Oath, sadistic (not "sadomasochistic"), abusive in general (not just "anti-theraputic"), and general as well as specifically-ableist sexual abuse and non-sexual abuse (not "
constitutes a perverse use of his status and power", as "constitutes a perverse use of his status and power" implies that his victim had some amount of complicity in what he did as well as that it "[only] constitutes" and isn't wholly a categorical abuse of status and power).
As for society in general, it needs to ask itself how and why it enables, outright encourages, and outright engages in—as NAMI calls ableism for what it is—ableist "discrimination, not stigma". After all, society affects and effects ableism to increasingly prevalent and severe as it, for example:
- Tries every damned way to get around the ADA and HIPPA
- Uses people with disabilities in of themselves as targets of "jokes" and other thinly-disguised abuse
- Making light of disabilities by coining terms such as "libtard" as well as classifying evils such as sociopathy and narcissism as mental illnesses—which, by the way, sociopaths and narcisstics love, as it enables them to abuse especially people with real mental illnesses by affecting them to not be taken seriously when they seek mental-health treatment.
- Ultimately affecting and effecting the creation of ableists from people such as Dr. Ablow all the way to the typical man (usually man, though sometimes woman) whom has a child with a disability and thus ableistically abandons and/or otherwise abuses his (or her) family (and yes, abandoning your family because you don't want a child with a disability is abuse).
.gif)
