Appointments with the Enemy

Let's just say that you haven't lost faith in psychiatry entirely as a helping profession, and you decide to go and see a psychiatrist (or psychologist or whatever) to seek help with dealing with the aftermath of your misdiagnoses/incarceration/over-medication/assault. Naturally, this raises a few delicate issues: how do you know that (a) you're not simply going to cop a second helping of Haldol, (b) that the psychiatrist won't defensively interpret your story as paranoia, and (c) assuming that you choose a psychiatrist from the analytic end of the spectrum (i.e. one that believes in 'talking therapy'), they won't institute their usual flat ban on talking about psychiatry in the abstract?

Talking about psychiatry in the abstract is an obvious way of 'testing the waters', enabling you to see where the psychiatrist stands on various issues before you launch into a potentially distressing re-telling of your story. However, analytic-oriented therapy has a long tradition of instructing patients not to think too hard about the analytic process from a professional point of view and even not to read books on the subject, as this can somehow contaminate the analytic process. Thus, talking about psychiatry in the abstract, even its non-analytic aspects, can easily be construed by the therapist as inappropriate use of the 'therapeutic space.' So what to do?