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Show Confidentiality Is An Important Aspect Of The Mental Health Center One extremely important i f Fpur Corners j i Mental Health : I "A HUMAN SERVICES CENTER" J j By ! J Roger D. Chrlstenen, M.S.W. Psychiatric Social Worker j One extremely important factor in the operation of a mental health center is patient confidentiality. Mental Health personnel are responsible both in an ethical and legal sense to protect the confidentiality of patients, and cautious steps are taken to carry out this responsibility. For example, any information a patient provides to the therapist is treated with utmost confidentiality. confiden-tiality. Records containing written material regarding a patient are kept in locked files, accessible only to the mental health professional. A therapist cannot under any circumstances reveal information in-formation he may have about a particular patient to anyone without the patient's written permission. This includes the patient's family members, clergyman, or his personal physician. Should the occasion occas-ion arise when the mental health professional feels that revealing specific patient information in-formation to another person or agency might assist in successful succes-sful treatment, the patient's written permission is always secured beforehand, and the therapist's .rationale for wanting want-ing to provide information is carefully explained to the patient. Generally, such information is given to another person or agency when the therapist and patient agree that it would be in the patient's best interest to do so. Why all the concern about patient confidentiality and why do we have so many safeguards safe-guards to insure confidentiality? confidential-ity? There are both obvious and not so obvious reasons. From the legal point of view, revealing any information about ab-out a patient, even the fact that he is in treatment, may be libel. Libel in this context means revealing information that is damaging or potentially damaging to a person's reputation. While in an enlightened society it should not harm anyone's reputation to have it known that he or she has the good sense to seek professional help for personal problems, this information, if revealed can sometimes be damaging to the patient. For example, an employer might fail to promote a person to a responsible position if he learned the employee was in therapy. In many states, Utah included, includ-ed, information given to the psychiatrist by the patient falls under the legal category of privileged communication. That is. the psychiatrist cannot be required to answer questions quest-ions about a patient in a court of law unless the patient gives the psychiatrist permission to do so, thus providing another legal safeguard for patient confidentiality. Aside from the legal aspect, there is another vitally important impor-tant reason for patient confidentiality. confid-entiality. Oftentimes, successful success-ful treatment depends upon the patient's candor. The patient can be candid in revealing information about himself to the therapist only if he can be sure that it is confidential. An important element of the therapeutic relationship between bet-ween the therapist and patient is trust. A trusting relationship relation-ship can hardly be developed if the patient feels that there is even a remote possibility that confidentiality will be breached. |