You've been helping for awhile.
Depending on the system you work in, you find yourself calling the
people who receive your services clients, consumers, patients,
veterans, residents, or some other label that means, essentially,
'receiver of services'.
Nifty. Good for you. It's useful to
have a label to hang on the people we help that distinguishes them
from, well, us. When I started this blog, I consciously
decided not to use any of these labels. It led to some interesting
(and clunky) wording choices as I had to constantly use a phrase
('people we help' or some variation) where more typical usage is a
word.
In my view, and in the view of many
helping professionals, each of the common words we use to describe
the people who use the services we offer have a couple of common
flaws: They carry an (implicit) assumption that the people we help
are passive users of services, and as an outgrowth of that
assumption, they assume a hierarchy of power with the person being
helped firmly placed at the bottom.
'Patient' comes from the medical world
and is the oldest version of these. Patients are inherently less able
to help themselves than the professionals that 'cure' them in the
medical model.
'Client' comes from the legal world. A
lawyer's client sits back and the lawyer does all the work with the
client as a passive recipient of services.
'Consumer' (or customer) comes from the business
world. Again, while a producer creates something, a consumer is a
passive 'chooser' of services.
'Resident' is a special situation, used
when the services offered a person include (voluntary or involuntary)
housing. It is more existential from the rest, but just as passive.
All a resident has to do is exist to meet the definition.
And 'people who receive services' is
clunky and long and also passive, even
though it has the advantage of putting people first.
Do
words matter, really? Absolutely they do. The labels we place on
others and on ourselves matter both to us and to the people we hang
them on. When I call myself a homeowner, rather than a resident, I am
saying something very different about my relationship to the house I
live in. When I call myself a woman, and not a lady, I say very
different things about my expectations of the impact of my gender.
So if
all those labels we've been using all these years (decades) simply
won't do, what should we use instead, and why?
Try on
the label 'participant' for size. Let's look at it from a couple of
different angles. The word is an active one. A participant actively
does something. How
does that subtly change our expectations of the person we are working
with?
The
word 'participant' applies equally to the person helping and the
person receiving help, and doesn't assume a 'top-down' perspective.
This leaves open some amazing possibilities. Could we, in our
participation in helping, learn something and gain something from the
other participant? Could this be a truly dynamic, at times
reciprocal relationship with no clearly defined hierarchy? Wow!
Try it
on for size. Take a week and consciously change the labels you use in
your conversations, your notes, your meetings, and your helping
interactions. At the end of the week ask yourself how it felt? How
did it change your interactions, your thoughts about people, your
documentation? Is it easier to see a 'participant' as a member of the treatment team than a 'consumer'?
Let me
know how it went for you, and if you like the way it went, spread the
word. The world needs a whole lot more participants and a lot less
passive people, don't you think?
To find more ways to help, return to Just Helping People
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