Attachments: "I Want a Gay Doctor": The Role of Therapeutic Self-disclosure in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

A simple, yet pointed question from my teen patients on the inpatient child psychiatry unit made my biggest professional anxiety come true. As a queer psychiatrist-in-training, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I present. Although in my personal life I am more comfortable presenting as queer and pushing the limits of the gender binary, in professional settings, I often mask my authentic self to have passing privilege based on my choice of clothing, tone of voice, and mannerisms. I choose to do this because, in most of medical and psychiatric training, we are taught to rarely-if ever-self-disclose, and, at the most conservative interpretations of the therapeutic framework, self-disclosure can be viewed as disruptive or even damaging to the therapeutic relationship.