Boundary crossings and violations: Time for child psychiatry to catch up

摘要

A patient spontaneously hugs her therapist at the end of a session and the therapist does not stop her; another asks his psychiatrist to come see his performance in a play and the psychiatrist accepts. As clinicians we would think very differently about these incidents and how the respective clinicians should handle them if we had learned that the patients were children instead of adults. Boundary violations are behaviors that harm or exploit the patient, such as sexual acts between therapist and patient.