Social Media Policy
Social Media is a fantastic tool that helps people get informed and engaged. We use social media for this purpose, and as such, our governing bodies require us to have a Social Media Policy. This document outlines our policies related to use of social media. Please read it to understand how we conduct ourselves on the Internet as professionals and how you can expect us to respond to various interactions that may occur between us on the Internet.
If you have any questions about our policy, please be sure to bring them up when you meet with your therapist and you can talk more about it. Alternatively you can contact us by email. Social media is also something that is constantly changing and there may be times when we need to update this policy. If this happens, we will post the revised policy on our website and inform you of the changes in your session.
Let’s talk about confidentiality for a moment. You are the person that can decide what you want to keep confidential with regards to your sessions with me. We have a responsibility to keep your relationship with your therapist completely confidential except in cases of where you might harm yourself or others (see our Informed Consent for details). Thus, if you post on any of our social media pages, you are opening up the possibility of people inferring about your relationship or asking you about your connection to us. You get to decide what you tell people. You have a choice as to what you reveal about yourself online, however we will not reveal our connection to you.
This is how we handle different social media options:
FRIENDING
We do not accept friend or contact requests from current or former clients on any social networking site (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). We believe that adding clients as friends or contacts on these sites can compromise your confidentiality and our respective privacy. It may also blur the boundaries of our therapeutic relationship. We also do not interact with clients on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. If you need to contact us between sessions, the best way to do so is by phone, or by email.
FOLLOWING
We have no expectation that you as a client will want to follow our blog, business Facebook feed, Pinterest Boards, or Instagram. In fact, our Ethics Codes prohibit our soliciting testimonials from clients. As such we make a practice of deleting any comments regarding our services from current or former clients on these platforms.
You are welcome to use your own discretion in choosing whether to follow us. Please note that we will not follow you back. We mainly follow other health professionals and local businesses on social media and do not follow current or former clients on Facebook, Pinterest, blogs or Instagram. Our reasoning is that we believe casual viewing of clients’ online content outside of the therapy hour can create confusion in regard to whether it’s being done as a part of your treatment or to satisfy our personal curiosity. In addition, viewing your online activities without your consent and without our explicit arrangement towards a specific purpose could potentially have a negative influence on our working relationship. If there are things from your online life that you wish to share with your therapist, please bring them into your sessions where you can view and explore them together, during the therapy hour.
INTERACTING
Please do not use messaging on Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to contact us. Also, please do not use wall postings, @replies, or other means of engaging with me in public online if we have an already established client/therapist relationship. These sites are not secure and your therapist may not read these messages in a timely fashion. Also, if there were an emergency, your therapist would not be able to respond in a timely manner as we may not check these accounts regularly. The best way to interact with us is by email or phone. If you post on our wall it may also create the possibility that these exchanges become a part of your legal medical record and will need to be documented and archived in your chart. We will delete any requests regarding your sessions that appear on any of our social media platforms.
USE OF SEARCH ENGINES
You may have a Facebook page, Instagram account or Twitter account. We do not “google” our clients or look up information on them for any reason. It is important to us that we know you as you are in our office. If we do come across your information online, you can be assured that your therapist will move on and avoid reading content.
Extremely rare exceptions may be made during times of crisis. If your therapist has a reason to suspect that you are in danger and you have not been in touch with them via your usual means (coming to appointments, phone, or email) there might be an instance in which using a search engine (to find you, find someone close to you, or to check on your recent status updates) becomes necessary as part of ensuring your welfare. These are very unusual situations and if your therapist ever resorts to such means, they will fully document it and discuss it with you when you next meet.
BUSINESS REVIEW SITES
You may find our group practice on sites such as Yelp, Google, Yahoo Local, Bing, or other places which list businesses. Some of these sites include forums in which users rate their providers and add reviews. Many of these sites comb search engines for business listings and automatically add listings regardless of whether the business has added itself to the site. If you should find our listing on any of these sites, please know that our listing is NOT a request for a testimonial, rating, or endorsement from you as our client.
The British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors (BCACC) Standard for Promoting and Advertising Services states, “an RCC should never solicit testimonials, expressly or by implication, from clients or other persons who, because of their particular circumstances, may be vulnerable to undue influence” (BCACC Code of Ethical Conduct and Standards of Clinical Practice and Guidelines for Registered Clinical Counsellors, 2011).
You have a right to express yourself on any site you wish. However, due to confidentiality, your therapist cannot respond to any review on any of these sites whether it is positive or negative. We urge you to take your own privacy as seriously as we take our commitment of confidentiality to you. You should also be aware that if you are using these sites to communicate indirectly with your therapist about your feelings about our work, there is a good possibility that they may never see it.
If you are working together with your therapist, our hope is that you will bring your feelings and reactions to our work directly into the therapy process. This can be an important part of therapy, even if you decide that your therapist is not a good fit. None of this is meant to keep you from sharing that you are in therapy wherever and with whomever you like. Confidentiality means that your therapist cannot tell people that you are their client and our Ethics Codes prohibit us from requesting testimonials. But you are more than welcome to tell anyone you wish who your therapist is or how you feel about the treatment provided to you, in any forum of your choosing.
If you do choose to write something on a business review site, we hope you will keep in mind that you may be sharing personally revealing information in a public forum. We urge you to create a pseudonym that is not linked to your regular email address or friend networks for your own privacy and protection.
If you feel your therapist has done something harmful or unethical and you do not feel comfortable discussing it with them, you can always contact the agencies which we are registered with, and they will review the services your therapist has provided.
BC Association of Clinical Counsellors
#14 - 2544 Dunlevy Street
Victoria, British Columbia V8R 5Z2
Telephone: (250) 595-4448
Toll free in Canada: 1-800-909-6303
www.bc-counsellors.org/regulation/complaints
Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association
#114-223 Colonnade Rd S
Ottawa, ON K2E 7K3
Telephone: (613) 237-1099
Toll free in Canada: 1-877-765-5565
LOCATION-BASED SERVICES
If you use location-based services on your mobile phone, you may wish to be aware of the privacy issues related to using these services. We do not place our group practice as a check-in location on various sites such as Foursquare, Facebook, etc. However, if you have GPS tracking enabled on your device, it is possible that others may surmise that you are a therapy client due to your location.
CONCLUSION
Thank you for taking the time to review our Social Media Policy. If you have questions or concerns about any of these policies and procedures or regarding our potential interactions on the Internet, do bring them to your therapist’s attention so that they can discuss it with you.