Psychosocial Harm as Enactive Risk – Free Workshops
If you want to learn more about psychosocial harm as enactive risk, then you can register for the free online workshops with Dr Long, conducted on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time and you can register here: admin@spor.com.au
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Depression is NOT a hazard, anxiety is NOT a hazard, distress is NOT a hazard, mental health disorders are NOT hazards. Only Safety could construct such nonsense language as a standard on Psychosocial ‘hazards’.
The moment we talk about anything psychosocial, we are no longer discussing anything material. Hazards are objects, psychosocial risk is about subjects, persons. Unless you have some expertise in an ethic of personhood then, whatever you are doing with objects, is irrelevant.
If we are looking at the objects around humans that might cause harm, you can call them ‘hazards’, but they don’t in themselves create risk. A condition or a context within itself is only one factor in any cause of harm. The HOP slogan: ‘context drives behaviour’ is false.
Two people can be in the exact same place, context and conditions and yet one can be harmed psychosocially and the other not. This is because psychosocial harm is conditional on a host of factors including: the persons social history, faith, belief, kinaesthetics and culture.
Two people can be exposed to the same hazard yet, the risk for each can be different, depending on things like: experience, education, learning, history, body-type, diet, health and the condition of their bodily systems (nervous, endocrine, respiratory, integumentary (skin), muscular, digestive, cardiovascular, reproductive, cellular, urinary, feeling/emotional and skeletal systems).
Enactive harm arises within the body of the person in their uniqueness and, their interactions with the environment. We find enactive harm through understanding inter-connectivity, inter-corporeality and inter-affectivity. This is the foundation of enactivism (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00345/full).
The worst belief in safety is the idea that one size fits all, just as the belief in ‘common sense’. This is the kind of simplistic belief generated by safety slogans is exemplified by HOP.
The problem with slogans (that hide principles) is that they try to reduce human complexity down to one factor. This is what Safety also does by entering into the space of psychosocial risk. More so, the safety sector has no expertise in this field. Yet, we see hosts of safety people coming out as gurus in psychosocial ‘hazards’.
In the end such epistemic trespass is dangerous (https://safetyrisk.net/epistemic-trespassing-and-safety/).
No safety qualification or experience in safety scratches the surface of complexity associated with psychosocial and mental health risk.
Psychosocial risk is an enactive wicked problem. Psychosocial risk is an ethical problem. Psychosocial risk is a moral problem. How is Safety qualified to enter this territory? What, by counting injury rates? How does Safety know how to analyse or diagnose psychosocial harm? What, by creating a hazard register?
If you want to watch a discussion between Dr Craig Ashhurst, Greg Smith and DR Rob Long on psychosocial harm, you can watch here: https://safetyrisk.net/what-is-psychosocial-safety/
If you want to learn more about psychosocial harm as enactive risk, then you can register for the free online workshops with Dr Long, conducted on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time and you can register here: admin@spor.com.au
Prof. Robert Long
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