Patient-Targeted Googling by New Zealand Mental Health Professionals: A New Field of Ethical Consideration in the Internet Age

Abstract

New Zealand psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists are engaging in PTG with limited education and professional guidance. Further discussion and research are required, and so, PTG is undertaken in a manner that is safe and useful for patients and health practitioners.

Secret powers: Acts of Googling in the therapeutic relationship

“…While The Guardian recently asked the general public the question “Should you Google your Therapist?,” there is little discussion within or outside of the field on whether therapists should Google their patients (Chunn, 2017), and what does exist often stops short of exploring the clinical nuances at play when therapists do engage in searching. The findings from this study support that therapists are, in fact, Googling without patient awareness or consent, and is consistent with studies that are just beginning to ask this question, particularly among licensed, practicing clinicians (Eichenberg & Sawyer, 2016; Thabrew et al, 2018).…”

“…When being Googled, therapists in this study acknowledged their discomfort with having their privacy invaded, which supports previous findings that more than half of clinicians are uncomfortable with the notion of patients searching for personal information about them (Thabrew et al, 2018). When the shoe was on the other foot, however, therapists did not imagine their patients’ possible discomfort with the invasion of privacy, and instead gave themselves permission.…”

“…Differences among orientations in the nature of the therapeutic relationship and the degree of abstinence in self‐disclosure are likely to impact online searching. Previous research has established some evidence that orientation impacts the likelihood of patient‐targeted searches, which suggest that psychoanalytic/psychodynamic and systems therapists are both less likely to engage in searches (Thabrew et al, 2018) and more likely to view online searching as inappropriate (Eichenberg & Herzberg, 2016), than CBT and behavioral therapists. In the current study, the meanings therapists derived from instances of searching were informed by psychoanalytic theory and practice.…”

“…The therapist is not the only one whose privacy is compromised in the digital age. A range of statistics have been presented when it comes to the prevalence of psychologists and psychologists‐in‐training who have searched online for their patients, from a quarter (Lehavot et al, 2010) to a third (Tunick et al, 2011) to 40% (Eichenberg & Herzberg, 2016) to half (Thabrew et al, 2018) to 98% (DiLillo & Gale, 2011). These rates, especially the highest ones, over‐represent graduate student trainees, who comprised all, or a large portion of, the sample in all but one of these studies.…”

Collisions and collusions with new norms: Renegotiating time and space in a pre-pandemic digital era.

“…This underscores the challenge that clinicians may face in fully processing the potential for their personal lives to interfere with their professional work. This manifests itself in other ways as well—for example, studies find that the vast majority of clinicians-in training and those early in their careers have used the Internet to search for information about their patients without their consent (DiLillo & Gale, 2011; Harris & Robinson, 2014), despite the boundary violation that this represents (Lannin & Scott, 2013; Thabrew et al, 2018; Trub & Magaldi, 2021).…”