The last few months have been some of the hardest I’ve been through, not really because the relationship with my psychologist of three years ended, but because of what happened after.

The clinic has tried to stonewall me. Every request I have made for real accountability has received the same treatment: pull up the drawbridge, wait me out. I’ve made my peace with the fact that accountability is never going to come from them directly. What I couldn’t make peace with was being worn down into silence. There were days I couldn’t get out of bed, days I had to talk myself into just putting one foot in front of the other. That’s living in survival mode, and for a while it was all I had. I’ve decided I’m not letting it be the whole story because I have a husband and kids who need me, and a PDA sense of justice that doesn’t switch off just because I’m tired.

I’ve written before about the document the clinic handed me instead of my actual clinical file, and about how wrong I think it is. I wasn’t going to let a demonstrably inaccurate account of me sit on record as fact. Most people don’t know this right exists – I didn’t, until I needed it – but under Australian Privacy Principle 13 of the Privacy Act 1988, you can formally request that an organisation correct your personal information if it’s inaccurate, incomplete or misleading, health records included. I put it in writing: this is wrong, here’s the evidence, here’s what needs to be corrected or marked as disputed.

I expected them to refuse and attach my statement of dispute, because that’s what they’d done with everything else. What came back instead was an amended document that argues my case better than I could have written it myself.

They’d originally claimed, in writing, that ‘appropriate clinical boundaries were reviewed and maintained’ across three years. I asked them to substantiate it. They didn’t. They deleted the sentence. What’s left is a document that still spends pages accusing me of breaching boundaries, with the line saying the clinic maintained them quietly removed and replaced with something closer to the truth, that the difficulties sat between both of us. Side note: boundary maintenance still sits squarely with the practitioner, never the client. You can’t accuse a client of breaching a boundary while your own record no longer claims you maintained one. In my view, that single deletion concedes the collapse was shared, not something I did to them.

Then there’s the eight pages. Eight pages that were never about my care at all. They documented the clinician’s internal risk management, her supervision conversations, her indemnity insurer and legal advice. I pointed out that a legal self-preservation file isn’t a clinical summary, nor could a document of this nature feasibly be used for continuity of care without being a poisoned chalice. They didn’t argue. They rewrote the ‘Reason for Report’ section to say, for the first time, that the document existed ‘in lieu of providing the complete clinical record,’ for ‘organisational and clinician risk management.’ That is, in essence, them saying in their own words that what I’d been handed as my care record was their insurance paperwork.

Then there’s the email thing. This is the one that gets me. Their original conclusion was a ‘pattern of one-sided over-contact,’ and it turns out no audit of the emails had been done before writing that down. The author of this document was also the author of the emails to me, so I’m not sure how that one got missed. They confirmed it to me in writing, when I challenged them that no audit had been conducted. The amended version now says ‘email communication occurred between both’ of us. They fixed the sentence. They left the clinical conclusions built on top of it standing.

None of this came from a regulator forcing their hand. It came from me reading the Privacy Act, writing a letter, and asking them to defend what they’d written. They didn’t. The best part is that they only touched the exact lines I challenged, so the rest of the document is still sitting there contradicting the parts they changed.

They closed it out with: ‘As the report has now been reviewed and amended… we consider it appropriate for correspondence regarding the content of this report to now come to a close.’ Of course they want it closed. Patching the leaks just showed everyone where the boat was taking on water.

I’ve sent the amended version straight to the regulators. They don’t have to take my word for any of it. The clinic did the work themselves: deleted their own claim of maintaining boundaries, acknowledged that what I’d been handed in lieu of my clinical record was risk-management material, and confirmed no audit had been done before drawing conclusions about my emailing, but left the rest unchanged so it contradicts itself. It’s a masterclass in what happens when you write a document to cover your own arse, rather than to record what actually happened. I wonder whether they’re sitting there contemplating whether handing over my clinical record may have been the more sensible choice? Unlikely.

I doubt I’m the first person to be handed a document like this instead of their file, and I don’t think I’ll be the last. That’s where my focus is now – using what I noticed, what I kept, and what I’m willing to say out loud, so the next person doesn’t have to work this out alone. I can only hope it’s a masterclass for the clinic in exactly who they were dealing with.