‘You Just Treat me like a Human Being’: Using Lived Experience to (Re)imagine Boundary Practices in mental health settings

Abstract

The personal/professional dichotomy, present within dominant notions of professional boundaries, is an ongoing source of tension within social work. Peer workers, given their positioning as both service users and workers, are uniquely placed to contribute to pre-existing efforts in unsettling this dichotomy. Our analysis, informed by dialogic sharing and theorising with fifteen peer support workers, alongside post-humanist and critical mental health approaches, considers the oppressive effects of enacting a personal/professional dichotomy within mental health settings, and conversely, the emancipatory potential of unsettling the dichotomy. Rather than conceptualising such events as boundary ‘crossings’, ‘incursions’ or ‘transgressions’, we suggest (re)imagining professional boundaries as multiple, enacted through ever-shifting socio-material relations. Our analysis supports pre-existing calls for a relational ethic of social work and highlights how lived experience and post-humanism can support the discipline’s commitment to anti-oppressive practices. We recommend further research, informed by lived experience, to explore the complex relations that constitute boundary practices and their effects for both social workers and service users.

Intervening Role of Emotional Exhaustion and Perceived Organizational Support between Customer Mistreatment and Employee Turnover Intention in Star-Rated Hotels

“…Employees who are inattentive and have difficulty accurately assessing the emotions of others are victimized. Employees with low perceived organizational support can experience a lack of self-confidence, self-esteem (Maulidya, 2023), or motivation that reflects these limitations (Clarke et al, 2023), and employees tend to be more concerned with the negativity they feel when they are treated by a customer than with their job and become physically and mentally disconnected (Sinclair et al, 2023), leading to poor performance and a high willingness to leave the job. Low perceived organizational support may be a key factor in keeping employees engaged and understanding the emotional reasons for the decision to leave (Giao et al, 2020) Therefore, perceived organizational support is one of the important predictors of employees' perceived organizational commitment (Qi et al, 2023;Song et al, 2023).…”

Inclusion as Assimilation, Integration, or Co-optation? A Post-Structural Analysis of Inclusion as Produced Through Mental Health Research on Peer Support

“…Ethics approval was provided by Curtin University ethics office (HRE2019-0152) as part of a larger project exploring the politics of PS inclusion within mental health systems ( Sinclair et al, in press ; Sinclair et al, 2023 ).…”