Radical Transparency

It's well known that there are a lot of notes made about people within the mental health profession. Equally, there is also a lack of transparency around different mental health professions. Often, professions such as Psychiatry and Psychology are the reserve of educated people who have studied extensively to achieve their professional status. This firmly puts them in the role of 'expert'. My belief is that these roles should be about guardianship instead. The expert should be the person who is having the mental health experience. The stigma of 'stupid' plays into this as what we call a patient/expert relationship infers that the patient is less 'knowing' than the person helping them. For anyone to heal successfully, they need to have a 'sovereign' sense of self. They need to be in a position where they can say with confidence and assurance, 'I am the expert of me.' Only then do people truly heal. It's time to flip the script in mental health provision and encourage health care professionals to take on a role of guide or guardianship instead of the expert professional. How do we do this? We rest in our humanity, we are equals, we are one as humans. We use radical transparency in mental health processes, we take mental health processes and open them up to involvement from the person having the mental health experience from the outset. We ask them, do you think what we are assuming about you is correct, how can you enhance what we think about you? In terms of note-making, radical transparency means we consider that the person being spoken about is in the room with us. Would they be happy with what we are saying? We use positive interactions using an 80/20 method, talking about their positive steps 80% of the time. Not over-analyzing someone's every move but celebrating their successes.