GRACE: Collaborate with MH Safe – Mental Health Safe

MH Safe strives to collaborate with the organizations we contact about potentially problematic content and guidance they may be associated with. We use the GRACE model to provide organizations the chance to engage with us and partner in how we do outreach. If we don’t hear from them, we move on to conducting awareness independently.

The first step of GRACE is we Give Information (G). If you were linked to this page, you should have received a message from us outlining the issue we’re looking to address and the addendum content we’ve created to supplement your normal materials.

We would like to Receive a Response (R) from you and Ask (A) you to decide if you would like to collaborate or not. So please fill out this form to tell us!

Why wait just one week?

When MH Safe contacts an organization about a potential problem in the content they are publishing, in their policies, or in their practices, we have received feedback that sometimes the parties involved feel embarrassed at the problem and do not appreciate feeling time pressure to address it. The reason for the time pressure is not to fuel this kind of distress, but rather it is because there are people living with mental health problems who are affected by this problem right now and every second we wait to get them information is a moment where they may be suffering unnecessarily.

They may be:

-Scared to be screened out due to stigmas of their mental illnesses

-Facing inappropriate inquiries or examinations and feeling helpless within a culture that makes them worried they will be exposed or outed

-Experiencing tangible disparities including avoidance or briefer communication from their peers, amongst other forms of social exclusion or disfavoritism

According to the NIMH, one in five people live with a mental health problem each year and close to half of us will have one at some point in our lives. That means, within your organization, we can assume that half of the people there may be affected by the problem MH Safe pointed out – more if you factor in that anyone can be a victim of mental illness discrimination even if they do not have a mental health problem, because the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) makes “regarded as” discrimination illegal too.

This is why MH Safe waits just one week before moving forward, in the spirit of prioritizing this problem with the urgency it deserves given that people really are hurt every day from stigmatizing and discriminatory policies and practices. We have seen the power of addressing these issues, and we have also heard from many with how they suffered in silence, so we act expeditiously to do our outreach.

Why is the GRACE model focused just on collaborating on outreach, and not on content?

The MH Safe model is to contact organizations with a fully-realized “addendum” campaign and to offer them the chance to collaborate in distributing these materials and to let people know any changes they want to make. This was not always our model. Originally, MH Safe tried to work with organizations as partners in helping them explore other options – such as editing, updating, removing, or disclaiming problematic content. Though we had some success doing this, there were problems including:

1. Delays and Logistical Burdens
Organizations have a lot of moving parts and the delays in getting changes made could take over a year, necessitating our doing an addendum campaign in the meantime anyway. This was the case with the book Difficult Conversations, whose authors agreed to update it right away but the process has been long.

2. Attacks
An organization accused MH Safe of invoicing and extorting them by threatening to embarrass them, even though all MH Safe activities are free. We realized that opening ourselves up to conversations with organizations about the content may fuel more of these inappropriate, stressful, and inaccurate accusations so we decided to approach organizations with fully-realized addendum campaigns instead. This way there is no confusion as to what MH Safe does.

3. Success Stories
We have seen major success stories from some organizations. For instance, in 2021 the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) removed a document suggesting screening some people with mental illness as violent on the spot. ACR also supported our efforts to address replications of the guidance, spoke about the changes at a conference, and participated in hosting our workshop on overcoming avoidance. We realized we should be aiming for more successes like that via the one-week timeline than normalizing slower processes.

Our Model
Via GRACE, we give information (G) in the form of sharing the addendum campaign and we hope to receive a reply (R). We ask (A) the organization for a decision about whether they want to collaborate with us on outreach or not. They also have the chance to correct any factual errors they see in our materials because we are always open to that kind of feedback. Then we make space to celebrate any change (C) the organization tells us they plan to make while also moving forward to educating the affected communities (E). When MH Safe contacts an organization about a potential problem in the content they are publishing, in their policies, or in their practices, we have received feedback that sometimes the parties involved feel embarrassed at the problem and do not appreciate feeling time pressure to address it. The reason for the time pressure is not to fuel this kind of distress, but rather it is because there are people living with mental health problems who are affected by this problem right now and every second we wait to get them information is a moment where they may be suffering unnecessarily.

Learn More About MH Safe’s Methodology

Visit www.mhsafe.org/methodology to learn more about our process.