- #Confidential client text messaging pro
- #Confidential client text messaging professional
- #Confidential client text messaging download
Clients can send messages to social workers at any hour of the day or night and receive a response within hours. In addition, distance social work services may be much more convenient for some clients than traditional face-to-face services. For some, apparently, this is a "safer" way to get help. Also, some clients report that they are more candid and open with social workers when they communicate with them digitally. They acknowledge that distance and digital services can provide assistance to people who might not otherwise get help, perhaps because they live far from mental health service providers, are seriously disabled, or are well known in their local communities and prefer the privacy protections afforded by distance and remote services. Increasing numbers of licensing and regulatory bodies are adopting regulations that require providers of distance and digital services to be licensed in the client's home jurisdiction, regardless of where the practitioner practices.īut even the most ardent critics and skeptics recognize there may be some advantages to distance counseling. Once social workers send messages, which may contain sensitive information, to clients, the social workers may not be able to control whether clients forward these messages to a third party without the social workers' knowledge or consent.įurther, social workers who provide digital services that cross jurisdictional lines may not realize that the jurisdiction in which the client resides may require the social worker to be licensed in that jurisdiction. It is also possible, even if not likely, that text message therapy would compromise clients' and social workers' privacy and confidentiality. All of us, I suspect, have discovered on occasion that after we tap "send" on our smartphones, our text message contains misspelled words or expressions that can lead to confusion, especially when we dictate our messages for conversion to text. Text messages are also susceptible to misunderstanding and miscommunication. Clinicians who are located far from the client's community may have difficulty in directing clients to emergency services, beyond encouraging them to call 911. Also, clients who depend entirely on text messaging for mental health services may be at risk when they encounter crises and emergencies. Clients would also not have access to their social worker's visual cues, which may also be important.Ĭlients with very serious mental health challenges and risks may not get the in-depth and sustained help they need, which would be more available in the context of more traditional face-to-face clinical relationships. Without visual contact, many say, a clinical social worker would not be able to see and respond to a client's clinically relevant facial expressions and body language, including smiles, winces, tears, and squirms. Most critics comment on likely problems when clinician and client are not in each other's physical presence. To date, the vast majority of the social workers I query-most of whom are clinicians-have shared their skepticism about the ability of this kind of text-based service to substitute for traditional, face-to-face social work counseling.
#Confidential client text messaging pro
Typically, I ask audiences to share their thoughts about this therapy-by-text service I try my best not to "lead" the audiences one way or the other, pro or con. I share this website option as an example of the ways in which digital technology is changing the nature of social work practice and ethical standards.
#Confidential client text messaging professional
Since that interview, I have shared information about this novel clinical service with various groups of social workers at a number of professional conferences throughout the United States and abroad. Users are linked with licensed clinicians who agree to respond to their messages once daily.
#Confidential client text messaging download
I explored the new service's website and, lo and behold, the service offers unlimited text message counseling via an app that users download on their smartphones.
"Do you mean e-mail exchanges and online chat between clinicians and clients?" "No," the reporter said. Several months ago I received a call from a reporter for a national publication who asked me what I thought about what she described as a new therapeutic service whereby therapists and clients communicate solely by text messaging. Eye on Ethics: How R U Doing 2day? Social Work in a Digital Era
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