Informed Consent: Foundations of Trust
Informed consent is an important cornerstone to providing care. Consent lays the foundation for trust to begin in a therapeutic practice. It ensures you know that sessions always remain confidential and private, with some exceptions:
- If the therapist reasonably believes there in imminent risk of harm to self or others
- If the therapist reasonably believes a child has been harmed by another adult, that has not previously been reported or that the child is in imminent danger.
- If the therapist learned someone has been harmed by another professional from within a regulated profession.
- If the therapist or any part of the client file is subpoenaed into court.
Your therapist is unfortunately bound by law with these exceptions but they will always discuss with you how and why they need to break confidentiality before doing so. Each of the times a therapist is required break confidence the primary concern is for safety: of the client, of the family and of the community. The Art Therapist will never disclose information that is not relevant to keeping people safe.
It is important that the conversation of your consent remains open and ongoing between the therapist and the client; it is the responsibility of the therapist to ensure the client understands their rights and responsibilities within therapy and to update the information as needed, or at the very minimum every year.
The reason this is so important is so that you, the client has a sense of power and control while in therapy. Often times clients are disclosing very sensitive, private information that they would never tell another person. The therapist is the keeper of all these stories, therefore you need to be confident the therapist respects your story and privacy, to that you can be free to process emotions, events or histories without fear of it getting out to someone else.
Circle of Care
Most people don’t exist in isolation, a person is made up of self, family, community and spirit. In order for healing to be effective the whole person must be considered. This is usually what we mean when we talk about Wholistic care.
However, one person usually cannot treat the whole person; this is why we have specialists. We call this circle of care and that circle needs your permission to talk to one another about your care plan.
Sometimes it’s more beneficial to have your care team communicate. One reason is effectiveness, it makes more sense for you to inform a team one time rather than several times to avoid your feeling frustrated that you keep talking about the same things over and over again.
Another is consistency, to ensure that your helping team has all the same information to better meet your needs. In these instances, you may be asked to consent to professionals sharing your information. Often called a Consent to Release Information (ROI); this document provides multiple people with permission to approach your care as a team. The ROI is usually only good for one year and you can set as many limits and boundaries on the shared information as you want.
FYI
Consent and especially ROI’s can be revoked by you at any time. Usually therapists will ask for you to present this us in writing, again this is for your safety: to ensure there is a documented trail you have taken back the privilege to communicate about you.
Therapy is hard and it takes a lot of bravery to talk to a virtual stranger about your life, you must feel safe and be confident your therapist has your best interests in mind. Informed consent provides the foundation for care and trust to be established.
