What Professionals Need to Learn from Those They Try to Help

While mental health professionals usually want to help, good intentions are unfortunately not enough to insure that attempts to help will truly be effective, and will avoid harm.

The truth is that mental health issues can be very tricky, and attempts to help often backfire, compounding existing problems. This applies both to attempts by people to help themselves, and to attempts by professionals to help their clients.

But professionals often think too highly of their own expertise, and fail to notice when their well intended interventions are aggravating existing problems. Instead, they assume the difficulties caused by their own mistakes are just part of the client’s “mental disorder” and then often just double down on what isn’t working.

Fortunately, there are communities of people with lived experience of mental health problems who have been observing all this, and who have been developing ideas about how treatment might be provided in ways that reduce harmful interactions and harmful directions.

On Tuesday, 4/15/25, a webinar with Caroline Mazel-Carlton titled “The Hope of Harm Reduction: Exploring New Dialogue Models Developed by Non-Clinical Support Communities” explored this subject.

Event Description:

Frequently, clinical models of mental health support involve telling people their thoughts, feelings, and experiences are “wrong” or “pathological”—and then telling them what to do to “fix” it. Unfortunately, this often creates conditions for iatrogenic harm, extreme power differentials, and coercion.

So what else is out there? Join the conversation about how approaches developed in peer-run communities, mutual aid groups, drug user’s unions, and so on can be applied with integrity in a wide variety of settings (including in our own families).

In this webinar, presenter Caroline Mazel-Carlton from the Wildflower Alliance explores alternative harm reduction dialogue philosophies and how to use them in real-life, whether we are supporting someone who uses drugs, hears voices, is thinking of suicide, etc. We discuss how to avoid common dialogue pitfalls that rupture connections and cause further pain. We also talk about how to build authenticity back into conversations and let go of unhelpful agendas and jargon.

About the Presenter:

Caroline Mazel-Carlton is a psychiatric survivor and former IV drug user who has supported the development of alternative dialogue models that are now taught worldwide. She serves on the Board of Hearing Voices Network-USA and is the Director of Learning Opportunities for the Wildflower Alliance. She has contributed to multiple academic publications on the topic of suicide and one book on her experience skating on a roller derby team as #18 “Mazel Tov Cocktail.”

Check out this video and let me know what you think in the comment section!