The supreme court was preparing to extend the evidentiary doctor-patient privilege to social workers practicing psychotherapy, and Justice Antonin Scalia was, as usual, dissenting. "Ask the average citizen: would your mental health be more significantly impaired by preventing you from seeing a psychotherapist, or by preventing you from getting advice from your mom," he wrote. "I have little doubt what the answer would be. Yet there is no mother-child privilege." And there, in that last sentence, lies a tale of public ignorance, judicial conservatism and legislative stalemate, a tale that would do well to end where we just began: in the halls of the country's highest court.
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