That might be relevant if anyone is ever interested in writing an article about Scott’s psychiatric practice, or if his psychiatric practice was widely publicly known. It seems less analogous to the actual situation.
To put it differently: you raise a hypothetical situation where someone has two prominent identities as a public figure. Scott only has one. Is his psychiatrist identity supposed to be Sheen or Estevéz, here?
Estevéz. If I recall this correctly, Scott thought that potential or actual patients could be influenced in their therapy by knowing his public writings. (But I may mistemember that.)
In that case, “journalists writing about the famous Estevéz method of therapy” would be analogous to journalists writing about Scott’s “famous” psychiatric practice.
If a journalist is interested in Scott’s psychiatric practice, and learns about his blog in the process of writing that article, I agree that they would probably be right to mention it in the article. But that has never happened because Scott is not famous as a psychiatrist.
I said Estevéz because he is the less famous aspect of the person, not because I super-finetuned the analogy.
Updating the trust into your therapist seems to be a legitimate interest even if he is not famous for his psychiatric theory or practice. Suppose for example that an influential and controversial (e.g. White-supremacist) politician spent half his week being a psychiatrist and the other half doing politics, but somehow doing the former anymously. I think patients might legitimately want to know that their psychiatrist is this person. This might even be true if the psychiatrist is only locally active, like the head of a KKK chapter. And journalists might then find it inappropriate to treat the two identities as completely separate.
I assume there are reasons for publishing the name and reasons against. It is not clear that being a psychiatrist is always an argument against.
Part of the reason is, possibly, that patients often cannot directly judge the quality of therapy. Therapy is a credence good and therapists may influence you in ways that are independent of your depression or anorexia. So having more information about your psychiatrist may be helpful. At the same time, psychiatrists try to keep their private life out of the therapy, for very good reasons. It is not completely obvious to me where journalists should draw the line.
That’s a reasonable argument but doesn’t have much to do with the Charlie Sheen analogy.
The key difference, which I think breaks the analogy completely, is that (hypothetical therapist) Estevéz is still famous enough as a therapist for journalists to want to write about his therapy method. I think that’s a big enough difference to make the analogy useless.
If Charlie Sheen had a side gig as an obscure local therapist, would journalists be justified in publicizing this fact for the sake of his patients? Maybe? It seems much less obvious than if the therapy was why they were interested!
That might be relevant if anyone is ever interested in writing an article about Scott’s psychiatric practice, or if his psychiatric practice was widely publicly known. It seems less analogous to the actual situation.
To put it differently: you raise a hypothetical situation where someone has two prominent identities as a public figure. Scott only has one. Is his psychiatrist identity supposed to be Sheen or Estevéz, here?
Estevéz. If I recall this correctly, Scott thought that potential or actual patients could be influenced in their therapy by knowing his public writings. (But I may mistemember that.)
In that case, “journalists writing about the famous Estevéz method of therapy” would be analogous to journalists writing about Scott’s “famous” psychiatric practice.
If a journalist is interested in Scott’s psychiatric practice, and learns about his blog in the process of writing that article, I agree that they would probably be right to mention it in the article. But that has never happened because Scott is not famous as a psychiatrist.
I said Estevéz because he is the less famous aspect of the person, not because I super-finetuned the analogy.
Updating the trust into your therapist seems to be a legitimate interest even if he is not famous for his psychiatric theory or practice. Suppose for example that an influential and controversial (e.g. White-supremacist) politician spent half his week being a psychiatrist and the other half doing politics, but somehow doing the former anymously. I think patients might legitimately want to know that their psychiatrist is this person. This might even be true if the psychiatrist is only locally active, like the head of a KKK chapter. And journalists might then find it inappropriate to treat the two identities as completely separate.
I assume there are reasons for publishing the name and reasons against. It is not clear that being a psychiatrist is always an argument against.
Part of the reason is, possibly, that patients often cannot directly judge the quality of therapy. Therapy is a credence good and therapists may influence you in ways that are independent of your depression or anorexia. So having more information about your psychiatrist may be helpful. At the same time, psychiatrists try to keep their private life out of the therapy, for very good reasons. It is not completely obvious to me where journalists should draw the line.
That’s a reasonable argument but doesn’t have much to do with the Charlie Sheen analogy.
The key difference, which I think breaks the analogy completely, is that (hypothetical therapist) Estevéz is still famous enough as a therapist for journalists to want to write about his therapy method. I think that’s a big enough difference to make the analogy useless.
If Charlie Sheen had a side gig as an obscure local therapist, would journalists be justified in publicizing this fact for the sake of his patients? Maybe? It seems much less obvious than if the therapy was why they were interested!