Q: I am a schoolteacher. A teenager told me about her thoughts of suicide. I told her that I had contemplated suicide decades ago and survived with the support of friends and doctors. She told her therapist about this – fine with me – who told our school social worker, who criticized my conduct to our principal, perhaps endangering my job. I’m not the therapist’s patient, but was it ethical of her to discuss me?
– Name Withheld, Conn.
A: There is plenty of blame to go around: Everyone acted imperfectly.
Although the therapist had no professional duty to you -you are not her patient – she erred when she chatted about you to the school social worker, passing along secondhand information that could be damaging.
The therapist also ill-served her patient by talking about her out of school (albeit in school). Howard Owens, a forensic psychiatrist, explains: “It is a clinical error to report on the teacher &. How is the teenager likely to react when she finds out that she has gotten her teacher in trouble? Depressed people don’t usually profit from being made to feel more guilty.”
The social worker transgressed by running to the principal with this thirdhand story. The principal can be faulted if she allows this information to influence professional decisions about you. You, too, could be chided, at least for your naiveté. You should have anticipated that a young person might repeat such an emotionally fraught story about a teacher. Also questionable was your attempt to engage in a quasi-therapeutic relationship with a student in so fragile an emotional state.
The mitigating factor here: Everyone seems to have had benign motives. The adults were concerned with the student’s well-being, and the student herself meant no harm.
…
Q: Last summer, I visited friends at their chateau in France – good company, excellent food, but a lumpy mattress full of bedbugs. Badly bitten, I said nothing, but I know I’ll be invited back. How can I politely tell them about their infestation?
– Joan Shore, Fla.
A: You’re waiting until now to tell them that their house is infested? What would you do if the chateau were on fire, mention it demurely in a few months? Because other people are at risk, you must speak up. Here’s how you tell them: – openly, honestly, calmly. I hope they will value your candor.
Send questions and comments for Randy Cohen to Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111, or ethicist@nytimes.com.
