Fear in Healthcare Triage

In our experience of providing mental health services and facilating human healing, we frequently encounter individuals that are driven day-to-day by their fears. We even see that fear can dominate the practice of helping professionals as they go about their interaction and service with patients. It is not uncommon for healthcare professionals to have biased perceptions, fear-driven hypotheses and fear-distorted assessments of situations that result in ideas that “something horrible could happen if”. Fear as the basis for living, for any human being, is self-destructive in nature and generally brings much suffering and misery to a person’s life.

In a quote by Edmund Burke, he says, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

Clearly there are emergency medical and mental health situations where legitimate safety concerns exist and a responsive intervention can be life-saving. “Emergency” situations do tend to heighten the emotions, trigger our suppressed fears and can result in a fight or flight-type decision-making process. We are all human beings and our experiences have an effect on our being. Keep your cool, keep your head, calm down, take a deep breath, count to 10, stop and think, relax are all phrases that serve to promote objective, rational thought process followed, hopefully, by a reasonable and appropriate intervention. For individuals working in healthcare situations were emergencies can and do exist, it is important that professionals exercise self-examination; regularly reviewing their own fears, their own stress levels and how they see themselves handling “emergency” situations that call on their use of rational thinking and technical skills.

Behavioral Healthcare for the helping professional is one of our areas of expertise. We recognize the value of taking care of ourselves in order to most effectively help others. Contact us directly for more information.