The 14 Worst Fictional Therapists in Television History

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.