RELATIONAL SAFETY VS MANDATED REPORTING IN MENTAL HEALTH CONTEXTS

Interesting take on the false god of safety, which is used to metaphorically club people in "developed" economies into submission and compliance - and which can and is also used in a mental health context to drive what I cannot tolerate in you underground.


Of course the supposedly "progressive" and "radical" "perspectives" (note the scorn in my quotation marks) of this blog simply substitute for the false god of safety the false god of "the person" of "personal existence." The person is seen as a supremely valuable thing, and as possessing some fundamental reality. I am more drawn to the experience of the transience of the person, and the movement from person to presence as the only pathway to unlimited redemption and liberation from suffering. "Freedom is never of the person, but from the person." (Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That)

So I don't agree with the university speak about power, power relationships and all that fabricated Focault mind stuff, but I do think the description of the dynamic played out in mental health settings is quite accurate and useful:


"A Deeper Look at 'Safety'


When I was a patient in the mental health system, I heard the language of safety a lot! Was I safe, was I going to be safe, would I contract for safety, etc. etc...? Through these questions, safety came to mean that I was simply agreeing not to do anything to hurt myself or someone else.
But what did that leave me with?



Frankly, the more safety questions I got, the less I felt reliant on my own abilities to take care of myself. So instead of feeling safe in the world, I felt like a time bomb that could go off at any time.
It also left my clinical relationships with a huge power discrepancy: If I told the truth -- "I feel like hurting myself" -- the practitioner would feel obliged to take precautions. Perhaps they were legitimately concerned I would follow through. Or, maybe they acted more from a need to protect their job, their license or their organization. Either way, once the magic words got spoken, they mostly had the power and I mostly didn't.


Option two was to lie. If I denied my true experience, I could keep my power. But denying my reality - and keeping secrets in important relationships - also have their costs.
This was abundantly true for me. I felt miserably alone at the most vulnerable times of my life. I came away feeling like there was no one on the planet who I could really trust. I was out of my league and I knew it. I desperately wanted human support and counsel. I desperately wanted to get to the root of my true feelings and to be able to uncover any options I had. Yet, here I was trying to make a good decision - perhaps the most important decision of my life - without knowing a single soul I could trust to be truly honest with.


In retrospect, I don't think there is much that is LESS SAFE for me as a human being in that frame of mind. In fact, I can only think of one thing that's less safe from my perspective:
EVEN MORE UNSAFE = to feel coerced or pressured by others who don't understand my unbearable suffering into making a bad decision makes it even worse.
Unfortunately, that was often where I found myself in times like these, given the mainstream practice of reporting, detaining and drugging those of us who acknowledge the depth of our distress and despair.


Re-Thinking Safety


The painful contradictions noted above have led to a lot of reflecting on what safety actually means to me. Here are two bottom lines I've come to:


1.Real safety doesn’t mean talking to someone with a reporting obligation.
2.Real safety doesn't mean making a safety contracts or promises to stay out of harms way.


Reflection questions


•What happens when you are with someone you trust and feel safe with?
•How does actually feeling safe change things? (Can you do things when you feel safe that you can't do when you don't?)
•How does being with someone you feel safe with change things? (Have you ever noticed yourself being able to do something with a person you trust that you couldn't do without them...?)


This is what we call building relational safety. As you can see, it is very different from the liability management practices that are oriented toward legal safety. It requires both of us to take risks and be vulnerable, instead of just one of us unilaterally protecting our interests. This is what we call shared risk.

How safe the relationship is for both of us depends on... both of us. It only works if both of us are willing to learn to share our power and take responsibility to do our part. This is what we call mutual responsibility.



Extracted from https://peerlyhuman.blogspot.com/2018/06/suicide-and-safety-this-week-in.htmlhttps://peerlyhuman.blogspot.com/2018/06/suicide-and-safety-this-week-in.html