"The Arkham things is not canon, no. But with all the context, the idea isn't so much of a leap as a tripping over one's shoelaces to get there."
No, it's a huge leap regardless of context. Tim in canon has absolutely no reason to believe Dick wants to send him to Arkham. That's something that's never even implied by the text of any comic, much less something that Tim needs to mentally refute in-universe to himself. IRL, thinking that Dick wanted to send Tim to Arkham requires you to blatantly ignore several years of comic canon and more specificially the entirety of how Dick and Tim's relationship was portrayed from Infinite Crisis through the Reborn era.
Even starting at the basic foundations of the idea, you can see how ridiculous it is. Arkham Asylum's full name is the "Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane." Tim is not a criminal nor is he insane. Neither Dick nor Tim in-universe have any reason to think that Tim being there is an option that's even in the same room as the several other alternatives that exist, much less on the table!
Jean Loring gets sent to Arkham before Red Robin, so Tim has no reason to think people from the hero-sphere are exempt if they do something egregious enough. Jason Todd has already been to Blackgate once (and I think is sent to Arkham later?) so he knows former Bats / Wayne family members being imprisoned is on the table.
Jean ended up in Arkham because she killed Sue Dibny and covered it up by faking her own attempted murder. Her fate had nothing to do with the Batfamily's personal views on Arkham and should not be taken as such. Jason ended up in Arkham because he attempted to kill the Batfam on multiple occasions and then decided to go on a murder spree of petty criminals while broadcasting their deaths on social media. The circumstances behind Jason ending up in Arkham (which were largely out of Dick's power to control, as I pointed out here) are dramatically different from anything related to Tim's grief over Bruce's supposed death.
Pretending like "Dick wanted to send Tim to Arkham" has any sort of understandable textual support also flat-out ignores that Dick himself had just been trapped and tortured in Arkham by the Black Glove less than a month (in-universe) before Bruce died, during Batman R.I.P. Which Tim knows about because he was there, trying to track down an MIA Bruce and deal with Steph coming back from the grave. It was a big deal and we got a whole arc about Dick cleaning up corruption within Arkham and fighting Jeremiah Arkham during his time as Batman out of it!
If I also recall correctly, no one suggested Tim get any kind of counseling when Janet, Jack, or numerous friends were killed....But no one says "hey kiddo, let's get you a therapist" after Janet's murder. or Jack's.
Bruce, Dick, and Tim took a year-long vacation from normal vigilantism after those events and went globetrotting in an attempt to retrace Bruce's original training journey during his youth and "find themselves." That was the entire plot of them being absent from Gotham during 52/One Year Later, which was used to introduce Kate Kane as Batwoman and kickstart the Evil Cass arc. Bruce went off to go meditate in a cave in Nanda Parbat for two months and Dick and Tim spent that time healing and taking down Intergang and other various criminal enterprises in Europe. We know that Dick and Tim talked a lot about Tim's losses during that year off, because it's why Dick is so shocked that Tim is doing so poorly in Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul:
“Tim doesn’t say anything. And I realize…he doesn’t care. He’s been so hurt this last year and a half…lost so much…I thought we’d gotten past it…or started to deal with it…were Bruce and I just believing what we wanted to?”
Dick's suggestion that Tim see a therapist in Metropolis needs to be viewed not in the context of Dick "breaking an earlier pattern" but in the context of Dick thinking that Tim was starting to heal from all of his losses and then being violently reminded that Tim is not, in fact, doing fine. We know what's different this time: Dick watched Tim have a breakdown beside a Lazarus Pit less than three months prior and then saw him go through yet another loss, seemingly go into denial over it, and then push away all attempts of his family and friends to reach out to him in the aftermath. From Dick's perspective, Tim broke down in his arms three months ago and is now a) pushing everyone in his life away after the death of yet another loved one and b) denying Bruce is dead. That's why Dick reacts differently. And it's a perfectly understandable and reasonable reaction that doesn't really require any further thought than that, to be honest.
Thinking that there's any support for the Arkham suggestion also requires ignoring Dick's canonical response to Tim's denial of Bruce's death, the fact that Tim was pushing everyone away in the aftermath of Bruce's death and refusing to explain anything he was thinking, and that Dick and Tim were shown to still have a very strong bedrock of love and trust in each other even at the rockiest point in their relationship. It's not just missing a single line in a single comic issue; it's refusing to engage with the entirety of Dick and Tim's canon relationship before, during, and after Bruce's death.
Frankly, I think you're attempting to justify an inherently unreasonable fanon concept to yourself by desperately grasping at tiny snippets of canon that 99.9% of people who work with the concept don't even know about.
People who engage with "Dick wanted to put Tim in Arkham" are not doing so based on the knowledge that Jean Loring got sent to Arkham after Identity Crisis or that Tim's stepmom was institutionalized after Jack's murder; they largely don't even know that Tim has a stepmom. They don't actually know enough canon to make an informed assessment on the topic at all. They just made it up for extra angst points because it's a fun little way in their minds to make Tim even more of a poor little meow meow character, and then it fell victim to the fandom telephone problem! It's just a ridiculous assertion that requires some heavy character assassination and a blatant refusal to actually engage with canon on any level, and it needs to be viewed in that context.
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