Random Worst Fictional Therapists in Television History (14 items)

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  (#1) Ben Harmon

  • American Horror Story

  Is Ben the worst fictional therapist ever? He just might be. At the very least, you have to hope that your therapist is extra-intuitive, but Ben doesn’t even pick up on the fact that most of his clients are actual ghosts. He treats ghosts for a while before it is finally made clear to him that he’s been talking to dead people, which means you can't count on him to pick up on some of your deeper issues. He also cheats on his wife with a student, has his wife institutionalized when she says she was raped and he reveals personal information to clients without a second thought. Ethics aren’t high on his list of priorities.  
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  (#2) Isaac Roa (How to Get Away with Murder)

  Roa is tasked with preventing Annalise from falling off the wagon after she gets sober. A pretty straightforward job, one would think. And yet, their relationship becomes problematic in a matter of a couple of episodes. Viewers find out that Annalise is actually a trigger for Roa, who is dealing with severe mental health issues of his own. Instead of referring her to another therapist, he becomes way too invested in the lawyer’s life. He pushes her too hard to reveal information she’s not ready to share, even when she points this out. And he even stalks another client, Bonnie, at work after she quits therapy.

   

  We’re not experts or anything, but we feel we should make a public service announcement for our less experienced readers here: if your therapist is full-blown stalking someone— even if that someone is also a client— you are dealing with a bad therapist.
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  (#3) Kevin Venkataraghavan (How I Met Your Mother)

  On How I Met Your Mother, Kevin is a court-ordered therapist Robin visits to deal with her anger issues after she assaults a woman. After a few sessions, he stops being her therapist, claiming he’s moving to Alaska. But when she accidentally bumps into him later, he reveals he stopped their sessions because he was attracted to her.

   

  This is sort of “half ethical.” On the one hand, it’s responsible of him to realize that it would be inappropriate to continue treating a client he was attracted to. On the other hand, this realization comes after Robin was extremely vulnerable with him when they first met and revealed a lot of personal information. And on the gripping hand, ignore everything we said about the first hand because he ended up dating her anyway because it turns out he has no ethics whatsoever. Therapists should not date their patients, full stop.

   

  Need more proof? By the end of How I Met Your Mother’s run, we learn that his relationship with Robin wasn’t an isolated incident; he eventually gets assigned to be the therapist for Jeanette (another troubled HIMYM character), and he also falls in love with and dates her. This is a pattern. This flawed therapist has a type.
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  (#4) Arnold Wayne (Mad Men)

  Wayne is Betty Draper’s psychiatrist and he was pretty terrible even by awful 1960s standards. When Betty is having trouble, Don sends her to a psychiatrist to address her feelings which would be really good and helpful, except Dr. Wayne is all too eager to tell Don everything that he and Betty talk about. Don calls Dr. Wayne after all of his sessions with Betty and asks him some version of “So, what’s wrong with my silly, trash wife?” Dr. Wayne has no problem violating doctor/patient confidentiality and filling Don in on everything he learns. Therapy and psychiatry require a tremendous amount of trust, and that gets thrown out the window if your doctor is ready to hop on the phone with your husband to basically say “Yeah, you’re wife’s just annoying and crazy. Women, am I right?”
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  (#5) Faith Wolper

   

  This is one of our favorite, hilariously bad therapists. As Christian’s therapist, Faith is nothing but professional. She pushes him to wonder whether he’s in love with his partner, Sean, basically causing him to have an existential crisis. She also sleeps with Christian and becomes obsessed with him, to the point where she gets a “Property of Christian Troy” tattoo. She also eventually tells Sean about Christian’s insecurities, information that should have stayed confidential. If there’s a Bingo card for bad therapist behavior, Faith is filling. It. Up.

   
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  (#6) Jennifer Melfi

  • The Sopranos

  As a character on the show, Melfi is great. She allows the audience to gain insight into Tony Soprano and showcase his more vulnerable side. The problem is that she as a therapist is as excited about the dramatic goings on of a crime family as we are as audience members. In fact, Melfi puts her safety at risk due to her morbid curiosity about the inner workings of a mobster, even after he physically threatens her. It’s pretty obvious that Tony will never have the epiphanies she probably longs for, but she pushes him nonetheless because despite her moralizing, she still thinks it’s really cool to be dealing with a famous mobster. She’s faced with countless ethical problems (including knowing that Tony has killed and will probably kill again), but she doesn’t back out, proving once again that crossing ethical boundaries makes for riveting television.
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  (#7) Andrea Bayden (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt)

  Kimmy Schmidt is a wonderful person who unfortunately had a terrible mother and even more unfortunately was kidnapped at a young age and trapped in an underground bunker for years. In short, she deserves a really, really good therapist.

  Unfortunately, she ended up with Andrea Bayden, a therapist by day and thirsty alcoholic by night (and also, often, by day as well). Andrea genuinely wants to help Kimmy and encourages her to stand up for herself, but she’s a full-blown alcoholic, and alcohol and therapy do not mix. Andrea provides a few very helpful insights for Kimmy, but by the end of their “sessions,” the relationship is more about Kimmy helping Andrea than the other way around.

   
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  (#8) Violet Turner

  • Private Practice

  While Violet’s intentions are generally good, she proves time and time again that she’s way too self-involved to actually help her patients. She has a special talent of ignoring their problems to focus on her own. And while a lot of horrible things happen to her over the course of the series, that’s no excuse for sucking at her job. She even gets her license suspended due to using details of patients in a book. That’s as self-involved as one gets.

   
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  (#9) Fiona Wallace (Web Therapy)

  Solving clients’ problems in in three-minute web sessions doesn’t sound like a good strategy, does it? And yet, Fiona perseveres. During the show’s run, Fiona often gives terrible directions to her patients. She also has her sessions hacked and released by the NSA. Ethical violations are nothing to fuss over for Fiona, but at least they make for a good laugh.
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  (#10) Jean Holloway (Gypsy)

  Even the premise of this Netflix show hinted at Holloway being not so great at her job. After all, the series follows a psychotherapist who secretly infiltrates the private lives of her patients. How involved is she, exactly? Well, she starts searching out patients’ exes and family members and other people they discuss in therapy in real life, under an alias. Not only that, but she also slips multiple times, mentioning things about her clients’ friends and relatives in therapy that she couldn’t possibly know. Oh, and did we mention she (potentially) coaxed a former patient to burn a house down? Since the show was canceled, we’ll probably never know if this is true. Still, she’s as shady as bad TV therapists get.
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  (#11) Paul Weston

  • In Treatment

  While In Treatment is great TV, the main character is a terrible therapist on more than one occasion, mostly when it comes to boundaries. While Weston does help some of his clients, the relationships he develops with others are less than ideal. Over the course of the series, he contemplates an affair with a patient, develops a co-dependent relationship with his own former therapist, and becomes way too involved in the personal lives of clients. So while his transgressions kept the drama engaging, they would have definitely affected his career in real life. Stay away from Paul Weston and, while we’re at it, Gabriel Byrne.
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  (#12) Sister Peter Marie Reimondo (Oz)

  Sister Peter has all the marks of a good therapist. She cares about the inmates at Oswald State Correctional Facility and can stay calm in a crisis. And yet, despite knowing better, she falls for a convicted multiple murderer and sociopath. Moreover, she is devoted to her signature therapeutic innovation, the victim/offender confrontation program, which forces in-prison victims of assault to directly address their assaulters. There’s not really a successful, agreed upon precedent for this form of therapy in modern mental health. She basically encourages enemies to explore their feelings together, which could be devastating for victims of serious crimes. And in the show, it literally never leads to a breakthrough for anyone. Over the course of Oz’s run, the prison gets overrun by a riot and eventually blown up by bombs, the warden gets murdered and everyone just ends up killing each other. Great therapy work, Doc!

   
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  (#13) Tracey Clark (Ally McBeal)

  Clark’s methods are clearly unorthodox, from calling Ally nuts to advising her to come up with a theme song for her life. An advocate for smile therapy (a nonsense thing), Ally’s therapist tried to help her client with some tough love. It may have made for hilarious television, but we bet you wouldn’t like to be treated by someone as kooky as Clark in real life.
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  (#14) Linda Martin (Lucifer)

  Counseling the Devil is no easy job, we’ll give her that. Still, Linda and Lucifer started off their relationship by exchanging therapy for sex, a clear ethics violation. Hell, a clear everything violation. Linda also sees Lucifer outside their therapy sessions, blurring the lines between friend and counselor. Furthermore, when Lucifer eventually reveals his true, demonic face to Linda, she reacts like no therapist should. Shock, silence, and terror. Not that there’s a rule book out there for dealing with the ruler of Hell, but still. A bit more self-control would have been advised.

   

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