> Also, my patients couldn't Google my name and find me immediately, which I was increasingly realizing the psychiatric community considered important.
Could somebody tell the Swedes? When I looked up the name of a local therapist here, expecting to get a website of their practice, I found their Swedish personal number, private phone number and address as the first search result. Out of curiosity, I then tried looking up the names of the other therapists in her practice. Same issue. Apparently the government freely shares this kind of personal information unless you explicitly opt out! I emailed the them (through the practice website) that this surprised me and would never fly in my home country. Obviously, those therapists did not want me after that.
Because they were apparently incapable of distinguishing the messenger who reminded them that there are potentially scary patients out there from said actual potentially scary patients.
It's not that the government freely shares that information (they do some) but that they actually sell information to companies that then create searchable products on that data.
And of course you can't generally opt out of the government selling you data (a friend litigated this and lost).
Well, not-so-long ago there was a widely available index of almost-everyone's private addresses and phone numbers - you could opt out, but most people didn't. It was called a telephone book.
Yes, I know. In fact, I know because my parents are retired doctors, and they (and all of their colleagues) were among the people who would opt out. On top of that, when I got my first mobile phone as a teenager I learned that I had to opt out as well, because patients would mistakenly think I was my father and randomly call me and tell me shit I really didn't want to know.
(This is why I was quite confident when I emailed them that this would not happen in my home country, but I'll concede that I maybe should have mentioned this in the top comment)
The therapists obviously knew about it, and it is considered perfectly normal (and a good thing) by the general population. It's not possible to opt-out anyways.
The principle that all (non-classified) official records should be public is more than 250 years old, and is a very fundamental part of the Swedish (and Scandinavian) society. I find it to be one of the best things about living here.
This is how things are in Scandinavia. In Norway a lot of what other countries regard as confidential is regarded as uncontroversial public information here. For instance I can log in to the tax authority website and see how much tax someone paid or put a registration number into the roads authority website and find out who owns the vehicle.
Could somebody tell the Swedes? When I looked up the name of a local therapist here, expecting to get a website of their practice, I found their Swedish personal number, private phone number and address as the first search result. Out of curiosity, I then tried looking up the names of the other therapists in her practice. Same issue. Apparently the government freely shares this kind of personal information unless you explicitly opt out! I emailed the them (through the practice website) that this surprised me and would never fly in my home country. Obviously, those therapists did not want me after that.