A couple of questions for Dr. Lucas, Gideon, Eva, Corinne, Magdalene, Christopher & Marriage

[GiGi]

 

GiGi,

 

That is horrible the way you were treated for doing your job. I stand and applaude your conviction to stand by your ethics. It had to be heartbreaking to not get the support you needed from you co-workers.

 

I may be slightly defensive on this subject because when I was nine a girl a couple of years younger than myself was taken out of her parents home for being physically abuse - beatings with hangers and wires and locking her in the closet all came out later. But, after only six months of the mother going to classes - not the father - who was just as responsible for abusing the little girl, she was placed back into the home. Several weeks later they found her dead in the basement and the parents nowhere to be found. It wasn't until some 15 years later they caught the mother, the father had od' on Meth. I didn't fullly understand the scope of this until years later and when I hear about children being abused it puts me on edge - I guess even fictional children. But, I'm good now. And, I'm sorry you went through what you did, but happy that you kicked their arse in court!

 

Now, who wants to talk about how pathetic Magdalene is (on the female side) vs Trey (on the male side)?

Hi Mrsmajessick,

I want to thank you for telling me about your experience. Your telling of that little girl’s story was profoundly sad. You just gave that little girl a voice; a voice that had been brutally and violently taken away from her. I am glad that you told her story! You remembered her. She is no longer a statistic. She was a little girl who was taken away too soon.

I think the discussions that have happened here are for a greater good. If we think about it, 95% of us see this forum as a; fun way to discuss books we enjoy, characters that we love (and hate-wink) and generally pass the time until the next brilliant installment. But maybe for those few individuals who might suspect a child is being abused or know for a fact that a child is being abused and thus far haven’t done anything about it, this forum and these discussions might give them the courage to make a phone call and reach out to get someone else some help (they can do it anonymously of course). God/Universe willing, maybe another child won’t become a tragic statistic and that would be amazing! :)

[Skydive617]

It was brought up in another forum I've been to that the person was curious as to whether or not the doctoral candidate that abused Gideon was the therapist Eva had out in California. Think about it, most of the time therapists have only PhDs and are psychologists, where as shrinks are psychiatrists with medical degrees. More than likely though, I am WAY off. Usually are in these posts.

[GiGi]

Hi everyone,

I just had a thought…yes another thought. For those of you who have gone to graduate school or university; does it strike you as odd that the PhD Candidate accepted the offer to work with Gideon? No grad student, regardless of their area of study can counsel, conduct experiments, perform clinical examinations or offer clinical counseling sessions to a “patient†(in this case Gideon) without the expressed consent of the University’s Ethics Department firstly. Any graduate student wanting to conduct any kind of study or offer any kind of help to a patient has to apply for permission from the University’s Ethics Department. When graduate students are finished writing their thesis, they then have to apply to their department of study to argue their thesis. Any kind of counseling work would be offered on the University Campus through a specific clinic (ie. Elizabeth Vidal would have brought Gideon to said location for his counseling sessions). All university campus clinics have complete accident/malpractice insurance because they have students working with the general public. All students are considered a potential risk to the public so it is very important to establish stringent parameters from which students can work and learn from.

It is also important to remember that the grad student hadn’t graduated from his University program yet and hence wasn’t licensed. Therefore he would still have had to have a “Faculty Advisor†to guide him and make sure that he wasn’t making any mistakes and that he was following the appropriate course of treatment for his patient. PhD Candidate or not, this man was still a student. So again that leads me back to why Elizabeth Vidal would leave her son in the care of a student?!

So where did the psychiatrist find the grad student? Was he a student of hers? Did she teach him at the University? Why didn’t she follow protocol established by the university that she taught at? Surely she would know that she could lose her job over pulling a stunt like this? These are technical questions I know, but I think that they need to be considered. What does everyone else think?