I was a lecturer at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia for almost 10 years. The best of the best from all areas of forensics has been bundled in the behavioral science department Deep Underground on Sublevel 2.
I learned a lot from my colleagues in those years, but the most memorable thing I heard during my stay was this: "Agents will get a lot more trouble with their pens than with their weapons."
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Written documents are eternal and poorly written documents can cost you your work. Most agents never have to take their guns out of their holsters during most careers, but each of them will write hundreds of pages of reports over the course of 25 or 30 years. It is a very long paper track and offers many opportunities to do something wrong.
The consulting profession is similar. I like to think that most of us will never get into trouble because of tremendous ethical violations – that's an illegal shootout by law enforcement. But we'll all, like my FBI friends, write hundreds of pages of reports throughout our careers.
We will submit insurance documents, create case notes, develop treatment plans and possibly write apology notes to employers, teachers, universities and other important people in our customers' lives. Some of us will provide written statements to the court, child protection services, and other government agencies.
Most of our documents are only seen by us, our employees, and possibly employees of insurance companies. But sometimes others will see our written work.
When I consulted with a company once, the employee assistance program employee had asked an employee to do a mental health check to ensure that the employee was not a risk to themselves or others on the site. The psychologist's written report was more than two pages long and full of opinions and subjective comments on the client. However, the worst was the first sentence: "I declare that the employee is healthy."
Reason is a legal term, not a term for mental health. If the case involving this employee had gone to court and the psychologist at the booth had been interviewed, the first thing a lawyer would have done was to put the mental health diagnosis and statistics manual on the bank and that Ask psychologist to turn around The page that shows "sane". It's not there. The psychologist would have looked at least incompetent.
In order to declare someone “healthy”, one has to be ethically trained and competent to be able to assess competencies. Since this psychologist apparently did not know the meaning of the word, she probably did not have the necessary training. A single word on a more than two-page letter could have caused this psychologist major problems with the ethics committee of her approval committee.
Probably this psychologist has never written such a letter before and did not think of leading it from a colleague before sending it off. It was risky. Another (I can assume) outstanding career could have been thrown off the track by the pen.
With this in mind, I propose five simple rules for advising professionals:
Rule 1: If you don't have to write it down, don't do it. The psychologist's letter could easily have been limited to one sentence: "I don't consider this client a risk to myself or to others." That was the order and everything the company wanted to know.
Rule 2: Be objective. What do you see or hear that is unique to the case and that another therapist sitting in the room would also see? Avoid adjectives and modifiers. The psychologist wanted to help her client, but her personal feelings towards the client were irrelevant in this situation. Another therapist in the room might have had different feelings.
Rule 3: Use professional and clinical language carefully. "Healthy"? "Really?" For example, if you have not been diagnosed with depression, do not say that a client is "depressed".
Rule 4: Suppose someone else – a judge, a jury, a member of the license committee, an attorney – could one day see what you wrote. Do not write anything that would make you ashamed or embarrassing someone else.
Rule 5: If you don't have one yet, find a mentor who can help you improve the literary part of your career.
I was trained as a person-centered consultant and therefore kept very few case notes. When I look back, I feel ashamed of what I was producing when I started learning the art of writing things like progress notes. It looks different these days, and I hope that word of caution will get you there faster than I do.
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