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care). None of these approaches is right or wrong. However, the emphasis here is for those of

us who want to keep as much control of our stories as we can.

Here are some systemic issues that might impact on your experience of telling your story:

‘Observation’: clinicians are taught to observe and sometimes do not listen very well,

especially in acute psychiatric settings. It’s also worth bearing in mind that we can observe
too! Some mental health clinicians will be thinking about other things and may not be

listening to us when we tell them our stories (beyond getting an initial ‘history’).

‘Venting’: this is a term used, usually in acute settings, to dismissively describe our actions

when we talk about important aspects of our story which might not seem relevant (to a
strictly medical interpretation of our circumstances). Some of us just put this in the box of

thoughtless language and try not to take it too personally, and make sure we don’t use it
ourselves. Others feel angry about the disrespect it implies.

‘Compassion fatigue’: Remember that many people working in the psychiatric system, no
matter what their qualifications and roles, spend their days working with many consumers.

This can be hard emotional work. Some of the very best clinicians acknowledge their
responsibility to understand and deal with their own ‘compassion fatigue.’ This may mean

they need to take breaks from listening, which many of us find hurtful. If this is your

experience, you’re not being odd! It’s the strange nature of clinical relationships – they are
lop-sided and artificial in many ways, even though they may feel very important to us.

‘Safety’: Despite community assumptions that psychiatric services, therapy and other clinical

interventions are there to ‘help people,’ they are sometimes unsafe places. Be careful about
how and where to reveal parts of your story that are particularly traumatic or private (e.g.

abuse histories) – especially if you haven’t revealed this information before. The busyness in

acute units and the crisis-driven, in-and-out admissions of public psychiatric hospitals make
disclosure to crisis team members or contact nurses, for example, sometimes hazardous.

Some respond well but others don’t have the skills or the time to be helpful and this can be
psychologically dangerous. It is OK to withhold any parts of your story you want with any

clinician. No mental health worker is a priest and they have no right to demand a confession!

There are clinicians and then there are clinicians!

Different clinicians have different skills. Obviously, there are big differences between

individual clinicians and it is not uncommon for ‘good’ clinicians to be chastised by senior

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