It May Be Art, but It’s Not Right : Ethics: ‘Prince of Tides’ is misleading; doctor-patient sex is not allowed.

Is it ever ethical for a psychotherapist to sleep with a patient? The answer is no. The mental-health profession knows this. And, after a decade of articles and news segments on the topic, so does much of the public. The 1980s were, after all, a time when we began to look at the issue of sexual exploitation in its many forms. But, it seems, some people in Hollywood dozed through the decade.

Take, for instance, the acclaimed movie, “Prince of Tides.” If Barbra Streisand were a real psychiatrist who behaved as she did in this movie, she’d be likely to find herself without a license to practice.

In recent years, the mental health professions have been trying to make changes to protect patients from sexual exploitation by unethical therapists. But when Hollywood makes a well-acted, high-exposure movie like “Prince of Tides” that glorifies a psychiatrist who victimizes her patients, the whole process is set back.

Ethical therapists don’t party with their patients. They don’t take them home to meet the kids They don’t allow their patients’ lives to become topics of conversation at their dinner parties. And, first and foremost, they don’t sleep with them. It doesn’t make any difference whether the patient is paying or, like Tom Wingo, Nick Nolte’s character, being treated for free.

When a psychotherapist has sex with a patient or members of a patient’s family, the usual real-life outcome is that the patient ends up feeling depressed and confused. When a therapist has sex with a patient, it is a betrayal of trust in a way similar to the betrayal that occurs when a parent molests a child.

In a movie that retained a consultant to make sure the shrimp-boat scenes were authentic, a little effort could have been put into researching the ethics of the story’s main plot. Both the American Psychiatric Assn. and the American Psychological Assn. offer free media services to provide accurate information about both fields.

If the doctor were a man sleeping with a female patient, it is likely that “Prince of Tides” would not have survived public scrutiny. But perhaps our consciousness regarding exploitation and victims has not been raised to the point where we can easily identify a perpetrator when she is a woman and the victim is a man.