To My High School Psychologist:
By: Bailey C. Elis
Tags: Trauma, LGBTQ, Psychology, High School, Depression

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CW: talk of depression, self-harm, and suicide (attempts, ideation, loss)

Dear Doctor,

I saw recently that you retired. Isn’t that great? You probably get some sort of benefits and can live the rest of your days in comfort. Wouldn’t it have been nice if you could say the same for your students?

You likely don’t remember me, and I don’t expect you to. It’s been over seven years since I saw you, and a lot about me has changed- different face, different name, different pronouns. Then again, I doubt even my deadname would stick out to you in a sea of thousands of struggling teenagers. But your name sure sticks out to me on that local retiree list.

I was never a well-liked person. I was bullied a lot for the vast majority of my life, and it was often over stupid stuff. By high school, my depression and anxiety had fully set in. I was constantly wallowing in a seemingly-endless pit of despair and self-loathing, seeing no way out but a bottle of pills. My parents refused to take me seriously when I said I needed help. My friends distanced themselves from me. I had no one. So I came to you with a list of all the different possibilities of what I thought I could be going through, depression being the main thing. You just rolled your eyes and pretended to listen. You pretended to care. But I kept coming to you; I had no other choice. It was you or no one.

Do you remember when I came to you and showed you the bandage on my wrist? That was junior year. I’d already been struggling with self-harm for a little over a year by then. You laughed at me. You laughed as you spoke to me, as if I were a small child saying something in a game of pretend. How many other kids have you laughed at? How many cuts and scars have you seen?

Do remember when we lost a classmate to suicide? That was freshman year. We were all about fourteen. You shooed everyone out of your office and locked the door. The counselor from the middle school, the only good public school mental health professional I’ve ever met, came to sit with us and try to get us through that horrific time. You just pretended it never happened. How many kids have you known who one day didn’t show up to school and never returned? Have you ever cared about any of them?

Well, maybe you did care when a student was a serious threat to their own safety, and ignoring it could reflect badly on you. I came to you when my best friend at the time confided in me that she had attempted to overdose the night before. You demanded to know her name and called her to your office- no, to the social worker’s office down the hall- to make sure she wasn’t going to do it again. Do you only care when you could’ve been in big trouble for not acting on a tip like that? That could’ve been me. If I hadn’t been so damn stubborn, it would’ve been me. You didn’t care. As long as the pills stayed in the bottle, why should you concern yourself with why I’m thinking about opening it?

Seeing an article about that trans girl who posted a video of her school counselor yelling at her about a week before she took her own life, it makes me disgusted, and it makes me think about how you would’ve reacted to my coming out. Would you have yelled at me too? Would you have laughed at me? Would you have shooed me away? Maybe all three.

You may be retired now, but you should know, you are now and have always been a fraud. You can hang whatever degree on the wall near your lopsided file cabinet, but you have never been a real doctor. You made worse for me an already painful time, and from what I saw, you were no good to anyone else. A real doctor helps. You only hurt. I will forever hear you laughing at my bandaged wrist. I will forever see my classmates coming out of your office in mournful tears before you shut the door behind them. I will forever be relieved I was able to find real help by myself.

I guess the one good thing you did do right was teach me the lesson that even those supposed to help you sometimes will be as useless as a dead battery. No, no, not a dead battery; dead batteries were once useful.

I am also forever relieved you are retired and can’t hurt any students anymore.

Good riddance.