Dr. Nadine K Lindner, MD

If you are considering making an appointment with Nadine Lindner, you need to close your laptop and break out in a full sprint in the opposite direction. I have some pretty severe treatment trauma from working with Lindner over several years. She yawned along as I made trauma-based, self-destructive choices. She offered me cloying platitudes and never once encouraged me to dig deep or understand myself. :: What I know today is that I had serious complex PTSD from an abusive childhood and from being the scapegoat of the most toxic family in Albany County; I was brainwashed, though, so I wasn't able to lead with "I was groomed to hate myself and I was groomed into a codependent relationship with my narcissist mother." Lindner never once encouraged to me to explore whether my raging anxiety, self-loathing, or substance abuse was rooted in trauma. She never once encouraged me to explore my environment or explore where I had agency. I don't think we ever talked about my childhood or… my family of origin. :: I made a decision that fills me with shame when I was her patient-- I have twice woken up in the middle of the night exploding with shame over the (legal) thing I did a few years ago. When I told Lindner I planned to do this unspeakably bad thing, instead of encouraging me to explore my attachment style or why I had no conflict resolution skills, her advice was, "It's fine, as long as you don't get caught!" :: I ultimately decided to stop working with her after a session where I was being pressured by my female parent into a big life choice that would have been terrible for me. I sounded out how I could survive the consequences of doing this thing I didn't want to do, and Lindner just responded, "Okay, sounds good." I realized in that moment, this woman is going to nod along as I destroy my life. :: Today, I realize that I am a survivor of narcissistic abuse and family scapegoat abuse; going no contact with my biological family and naming that I was terribly abused growing up was the portal to healing and my portal to leaving the for-profit mental health system in favor of peer support and actual healing. :: Additionally, while Lindner thankfully didn't coerce me into an unwanted hospitalization, when I was considering higher levels of care at one point at the encouragement of my wildly unscrupulous ex- psychiatrist, she seemed very comfortable with the idea of authority imbalances in mental health treatment. I had hesitations around the idea of losing all my autonomy and my legal right to participate in my mental health treatment. She couldn't understand why I was so concerned about retaining my dignity and agency. I'm so glad I didn't go inpatient, because I'm very involved in the psychiatric survivors movement now and I know of the human rights abuses that occur in inpatient environments (cavity searches, strip searches, forced drugging, restraints and seclusion at the first sign of noncompliance, etc). I wonder if her background in working at the Albany VA Hospital informs her sense that psychiatric patients are supposed to be inmates. Knowing what I know now, I'm very uncomfortable that I trusted someone who had been an authority figure in a carceral "treatment" environment. :: At one point, I wrote Dr. Lindner a four page letter explaining how violated I felt by our work together. When I read the letter, I realized, "Oh, this woman is too far gone." Personally, I have no idea what people are talking about when they say therapy was helpful or that a therapist helped them understand themselves better. I have only ever been assigned personality responsibility and DSM labels for manifesting the consequences of trauma. The mental health industrial complex never helped me, but peer support saved my life.