Mistresses, Part 2: Mental Health Professional Analysis and Scorecard

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains information from Season 1, Episodes 1-13 of Mistresses (US).
TRIGGER WARNING: This post briefly describes mild sexual violence, and references rape culture. 

Sorry for the hiatus, folks! I'm back, and am jumping back in to pop culture analysis and deconstruction with  Mistresses' portrayal of psychiatrist Dr. Karen Kim, (played by Yunjin Kim).

First, some background. As discussed in the Mental Health Profession 101 post, a psychiatrist is someone with a medical degree [such as a D.O. (doctor of osteopathy) or M.D. (medical doctor)] who has completed post-doc training in assessing and treating psychological distress (things like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, trauma, etc.). Most psychiatrists prescribe psychotropic medicine, and some also provide psychotherapy. Mistresses Dr. Kim is one of the latter. In the show, she is co-partner at a psychiatric private practice with former medical school colleague Jacob Pollack (played by Matthew del Negro).

There are a fair number of pros, and unfortunately, even more cons in Mistresses' portrayal of Dr. Kim. Let's start with the pros, shall we?

Mistresses, Part 1: Meet the Cast

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains information from Season 1, Episodes 1-11 of Mistresses (US), as well as some information from Mistresses (UK). 

Let's begin our social justice and mental health-informed exploration of pop culture with the US television series Mistresses. Based upon a UK series of the same name,  US Mistresses was created by K.J. Steinberg, and stars Alyssa Milano, Jes Macallan, Rochelle Aytes, and Yunjin Kim as four friends who wittingly or unwittingly become "mistresses" in some sense of the term.

Before we go any further, let's unpack some of the impact and connotations of the series' unfortunate name. The word "mistress" can have one of several meanings, ranging from:

Defining the Wires: 15 Gender-Related Terms You May Be Using Incorrectly

I promise I'll start talking about pop culture soon. Really, I will. Aaaaand, I'd like to do so from a social justice informed perspective, and make sure we've got vaguely similar ideas of what that means. So now that you've mastered sociopolitical realities 101, here are 15 gender-related terms you may not be as familiar with as you think.

First up, is  

Gender:

• Which refers to the rules, norms, customs, and practices through which biologically associated differences (e.g. primary sex characteristics-note: link NSFW, secondary sex characteristics-note: link NSFW, chromosomal sex-note: link SFW, etc.) between people are translated into socially constructed differences between men and women, and boys and girls. These socially constructed differences award unequal value, opportunities and life chances to people based upon their gender.
• Despite the fact that history and anthropology suggest that human conceptualization of gender has not always been binary, many modern cultures understand gender as either/or, female or male. Socialization in the culture of this binary understanding starts quite early: