What makes mental health professionals cringe? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Every therapist is likely to find different things cringe-worthy based on their own experiences, temperament, and preferences. That being said, here are a few things I have encountered as a psychotherapist that have made me cringe:

* People who use diagnosis terminology inappropriately to describe people in their life. For example: saying someone is “bipolar” to describe a girlfriend simply because they seem moody or has extreme reactions that they have deemed “crazy”.

* People who are not clients, and who I meet in a personal setting when I am not working, (at a party, at my daughter's school etc.), who when they find out I am a therapist want to delve into their deepest, most personal stories and who are seeking a therapeutic response from me even though it is inappropriate to the setting, and they are not a client of mine.

* When people make condescending and/or cruel comments about people who are mentally ill.

* When someone makes the same painful mistakes over and over again, and continues to blame everyone else in their for anything negative that happens to them, while refuting any evidence to the contrary.

* When clients who push to get a reduced therapy fee, go on to talk about how much money they are spending on their expensive vacations, clothing, dining, etc., but who pushed aggressively to get a reduced therapy rate, because they said that they “could not afford it.”

* Clients who treat therapy as a place to only complain about their life, and who do not actually want to do the work to improve any of the areas that bother them.

The point is…

Every therapist is likely to cringe at different things, but these are some common experiences that often make me cringe.

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