Sociopaths On Private Practice

I am like, the biggest Addison Forbes Montgomery/Kate Walsh fan around. So, naturally, when Addison/Kate left Seattle Grace to join her best friend’s private practice in Los Angeles, I packed my bags, too.

Well, not literally. Not really even figuratively, because hey – who can really leave Mark Sloan?

My point is, I watch Private Practice. I’m not a huge fan; I tough it out because of Addison/Kate, and I won’t be surprised when if Shonda ultimately has Addison rush up to Seattle for one of those once-in-a-lifetime-surgeries-that-no-other-doctor-in-the-world-other-than-Addison-is-qualified-to-do, and then has her stay, but until then, I continue to watch Private Practice.

You may be wondering, then, why it’s a picture of Violet Turner/Amy Brenneman that graces this post, and not Addison/Kate (or even Cooper Freedman/Paul Adelstein – I miss you so much, Kellerman!)

Well, that’s simple. Amy Brenneman’s character on Private Practice, Violet Turner, made me so happy Wednesday night when she refused to diagnosis a teenager as a “sociopath” after one test,  and without really getting the boy to talk to her.

She didn’t immediately jump to any conclusions when the boy’s mother told her he killed his dog, she didn’t hurry up and scratch out a prescription for either the mother or the boy, and she didn’t flip out when he came at her in the parking lot. She talked with him and found out he wasn’t a sociopath as his mother believed; he was a devastated child who, after being left “man of the house” when his father died, felt he had to kill the family dog because it had cancer and his mother didn’t have the money to treat it.

It was heartbreaking, really, but also refreshing to see it handled so well. (Quite unlike Grey’s Anatomy’s BIID sub-storyline last year…)

I’ll probably be talking a lot more about TV shows in the future, as I’m seeing a lot of mental health and brain health issues cropping up this season. Let’s see how the small screen writers handle them.

Image: PicApp