10:41pm April 29, 2015

How (un)ethical is it for a 35 year old psychologist and musician to use his teenage child patient’s poetry as song lyrics for his professional band?

One of my shrinks was a professional musician.  And he was always interested in my poetry.  Most of it, he said, was crap, but occasionally I’d come out with something amazing.  This pretty much agreed with my self-assessment.

But then he found this one poem he really liked.  I was still a minor when all this happened, but he wanted to use it for lyrics in his band.  So he had me sign some rights over to him.

But it just occurred to me, isn’t there some huge ethical boundary being crossed when you’re a roughly 35-year-old psychotherapist and musician, using material from your teenage child patient?

I mean, at the time I was a little flattered.  “Wow, a professional musician thinks my writing’s good enough to use in his band.  That means my writing is actually good, someone besides my parents like it (since parents mostly like anything their child does, because it’s not about skill it’s about connecting with their child).“

But now I’m kind of squicked. Is what he did even legal? I was a minor. Yuck.

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