What is Patient-Provider Communication

While effective patient-provider relationships can provide vast practical benefits to health outcomes in patients, the fragile therapeutic alliance existing between mental health practitioners and patients has been made ever-contentious due to a lengthy history of neglect, abuse, stigmatization, and misunderstanding. In turn, psychiatric and psychological institutions such as behavioral health centers struggle to address not only increasing rates of mental illness and suicide, but also the emotional labor exhaustion and social taint experienced by their employees. In turn, this piece explores the dialectic tensions between mental health providers and patients through considerations of the ever-present materiality of mental illness stigma, psychiatric “dirty work,” and social taint as they occur in total mental health institutions and conceptualizes the lived experience of mental health practitioners and patients through the establishment of a phenomenological imperative in mental health discourse.