#Client Advocacy

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[kaurwreck]

One of my law professor once said, "You're a lawyer defending your case. There's gotta be blood. It has to be bloody because you're not nice. You shouldn't be nice. You're a lawyer. And you're here to win your case." and although im aware that he said it mostly as a joke—before he said that he pointed one of my classmate to tell him how they'd defend their company in the face of lawsuit and got a little disappointed with how tame my classmate answer was—i can't help but be curious of your thought on that as someone who's working in the field

We are ethically obligated to be zealous advocates for our clients. However, it is immensely difficult to advocate for your client effectively if you've managed to make everyone else involved, including the judge and opposing counsel, angry.

To provide an example, when I was a paralegal at a plaintiff-side workers' compensation firm, opposing counsel once forced our horrifically injured client to travel an hour to our office for a settlement conference, despite not having the authorization to settle for anything close to an amount he should have recognized as reasonable. My attorney, rightfully and righteously furious, laid into him in the middle of our office, humiliating him in front of the parties and our firm. Four days later, my attorney realized we needed a deadline extension, for which we'd have to request opposing counsel's permission. Opposing counsel was gracious enough to agree to the extension, but he very well could have said no after how we spoke to him, and that would have damaged our client's case.

More recently, as a transactional attorney, I was tasked with drafting a disengagement letter addressed to a manufacturer who had failed to design the product my nonprofit client ordered to my client's specifications, which had, for lack of a better term, fucked my client re: my client's other obligations. The law and facts were on our side; if the matter went before a court, we very likely would have won, and easily at that. (For frame of reference, my client serves disadvantaged children. Even the optics were on our side.) But, my client is a nonprofit, and every penny spent on litigation would have been a penny taken from my client's mission. Thus, to zealously advocate for my client, I couldn't go balls to the wall such that the other party became incensed and filed suit or protracted our disengagement process.

You don't have to be nice, but you have to be professional, thoughtful, and strategic. You don't win lawsuits and negotiations from drawing blood. You do so by achieving the outcome that your client asked you to achieve.

[carriesthewind]

Gonna have a little treat tonight, on the grounds that I completely bled through and over my (first) large pad within 5 hours of getting to work today. :(

[savage-rhi]

Magenta 🤬

[fatalelity]

in a world with so much medical gaslighting, doctors who don't listen to patients and dismiss their concerns .... yeah we need more docs like addie and izzie.... we need more people who will not only LISTEN to us but also advocate for us even when we feel like giving up

izzie might notve been suitable for being a surgeon or just the residency process and that's fine but izzie is by no means a bad doctor at the beginning. she only worsened when her only viable mentor away —— as in addie was discouraged from harnessing her compassion and instead leaving her to be ridiculed

fuuuuuck we need more compassionate doctors and izzie couldve been a really fucking amazing one on the show if the narrative wasn't so pressed on punishing people who cared about patients tbh

[powpowhammer]

It's the advocate system they have in several other countries!

[tonyglowheart]

not 2 be a "bad" "feminist" but like. okay I know the guy who plays Nate is problematic and etc, but like. like I tried to like Leverage Redemption, but it just. is too flanderized and doesn't quite manage to like both write real-feeling characters nor grasp the charm that made Leverage "work" for me, so like. watching Leverage Redemption mostly has me wincing, and like. does not hold the same place in my heart that Leverage does....

[ammarahot3]

"Reflect on how you have been a health advocate"

I used to think advocacy was something senior professionals did - people in boardrooms or people with decades of experience. But it turns out, even a student in a dusty clinic room with limited resources can be an advocate, or, in my case, learn what happens when you miss the chance. But walking the journey of becoming an occupational therapist has drastically reshaped my understanding. Advocacy isn’t just legal jargon, it’s a lifeline, a call to action, and one of our most powerful tools as OTs.

Until recently, I didn’t fully grasp the responsibility and privilege we have to advocate for our clients. I knew about holistic care and client-centered practice, but it was during a single, deeply emotional session with the mother of a 5-year-old autistic boy that I truly understood what it meant to advocate, or, more accurately, what it feels like to miss the opportunity to do so in the moment.

This was my second session with the child, and unlike the previous multidisciplinary session, I was alone this time. His mother appeared tired and anxious. During casual conversation, she mentioned how her son still wasn’t in school and had been sitting on a waiting list. When I heard that she had only applied to one school, KZNCH, my initial assumption was that perhaps she hadn’t put in enough effort to apply elsewhere. I gently encouraged her to keep trying and to consider applying to other schools as well. She nodded with a reluctant smile, and I moved on to continue the session.

But towards the end, as though she couldn’t hold it in anymore, the mother blurted out her concern again, more desperately this time. She looked at me and asked, “Do you know of any other school that I could possibly apply to for my son? I need to have more options.”

In that moment, I had a realization that changed everything, including my earlier assumption. Her limited applications weren’t due to a lack of effort, concern or procrastination. They were due to a lack of information, knowledge and access. She simply didn’t know what other options were out there. It wasn’t apathy, it reflected systemic gaps in support and communication.

I felt helpless, I didn’t know which schools to suggest. I hadn’t researched the surrounding facilities or special schools near the clinic. I wish I had the answers she needed and most of all, I wished I had recognized earlier that her plea for help was far more than frustration, it was a desperate call for guidance.

While I tried my best to reassure her and made it a priority to find and provide a list of schools at the next session, I left the room with a sinking feeling. I had missed the moment where I could have been the advocate she and her child needed, right then and there. I documented it carefully in my SOAP notes and flagged it for any future therapist, but I still didn’t feel like I had done enough, the truth? I had the power to help right then and there, and I didn’t. Not because I didn’t care, but because I wasn’t prepared.

Later, while still grappling with my own disappointment, I approached my supervisor to discuss the situation. Instead of criticism, I was met with compassion and guidance. She shared a departmental link to school resources and even showed me a printed list that was stored in the clinic. A list that had been accessible to me the entire time. That hit me hard. I had the tools; I just didn’t know where to look.

That same evening, I went home and committed myself to researching nearby schools, resources, therapeutic support services and facilities for children with special needs around the area. I compiled my own list of school names, contact numbers, and application tips and saved it, not just for this family, but for every future client who might need it, in hope that I would never be caught off guard again. I realized that being an effective therapist means being prepared not just for intervention, but for advocacy and that preparation starts well before the session begins.

According to the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), advocacy in OT involves “promoting occupational justice and empowering clients to gain access to resources and opportunities” (AOTA, 2020). I had unintentionally overlooked this duty. But this moment taught me something no lecture could: being client-centered means being resource-ready.

From a professional perspective, this incident reshaped how I prepared for sessions. Advocacy is not always grand or legal, sometimes it’s a printed list in a file cabinet, a WhatsApp message to a supervisor, or the courage to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

Personally, it taught me empathy in action. It taught me that while my intentions were good, intent alone isn’t enough without preparation and knowledge. The mother of that child didn’t just want comfort, she wanted action, and next time, I want to be the OT who can provide it. Moving forward, I’ve decided that whenever I begin a new placement, I will spend the first day researching local resources: schools, clinics, NGOs, support groups, and shelters. I’ll speak to staff about existing resource sheets and update them if needed. By doing this, I’ll be ready to advocate confidently and effectively, not just reactively, but proactively.

As OTs, we are not just therapists. We are bridges between our clients and the systems they need to thrive. This blog post is my reminder that advocacy isn’t something that happens one day. It’s something we prepare for every day.

References

American Occupational Therapy Association. (2020). Advocacy & policy. https://www.aota.org/advocacy OT Dude. (2021). Advocacy in OT. https://www.otdude.com/advocacy-in-ot/

[liangdraws]

Láadan, I get why she thought it'd be easy - picking the easiest consonants and vowels to say for the base form - but she fully expected the speakers to just do that without thinking about it. Admirable goal, creating a language you can't gaslight someone in - but that onus is on the speaker. (I'd say the billion ablauts of every verb saying how happy you are about it, that was more intimidating to its users than a particle would have been.)

This is why conlangers shouldn't study Navajo. It is by far an outlier in terms of how much complexity is in the grammar alone, and studying it will make it sound like the native speakers use all this grammar. Which they don't, when it's implicit, which the textbook can't tell you (since nominalized verbs usually need more structural support than unambiguous nouns, it varies highly).

The biggest conlang I had inspired by Navajo, Hlūf, I had to make a billion features optional, because of the story:

"Apisawekumumehaeskelelewihē" is how the textbook will tell you to write "Alright (concessive), let's suppose she causes you to be hurt over and over again." This is how you'll speak if you're giving a speech in parliament.

"Api, asa kumumehaᴉhwē aoe 'kelel?" is how a native speaker would assemble the sentence using a local system of mutations, and thinking through the sentence as it's being said.

"Appi assa wıᴉ kūhru *gestures of repeated punching* moha, meha meha owë?" is how my protagonists will say it.

That's supposed to be a native English speaker in a foreign land, making a clumsy pidgin out of the dictionary terms - isolating lemmas, using extra pronouns, and second-language-errors like mixing up "kumu" with "kūhru," meaning "to make" like crafting an object, not like causing an emotion.

So there was a justified artlangy excuse to make the language "complicated" - the story requires non-linguist readers to tell the fluent from the clumsy speakers at a glance. Over the course of the story, the reader should hopefully remember a couple words, and the isolating pidgin will make it so eventually they can recognize a suspicious keyword. Even spoken aloud, this wouldn't work. But you can pick up the pattern when reading comic speech balloons "fluent speakers use long words and choppy speakers use short ones." They may not know what verb conjunct slots or oligosynthesis are, and neither did I when I was a kid, that's okay!

Making a language "complicated" can have many reasons!

Valyrian is impressively complicated and difficult to learn, is it so complicated on purpose or did it surprise you with how complicated it turned out?

When it comes to complexity and language, any complexity you add to the morphology is complexity you take away from the syntax, and vice-versa. For example, when you learn all the noun cases of Finnish, it buys you having to remember fewer constructions with adpositions—or fewer verb augmentations, if the language went that way.

Syntactically, Valyrian is usually (MODIFIER) NOMINATIVE-NOUN (MODIFIER) OTHER-CASE-NOUN* (ADVERB) VERB. It's quite simple. There's not a lot you have to remember, and things can move around a little bit, if it feels right. You don't have to remember a ton of auxiliaries with different applications and slightly different usages. For the most part the heavy hitters (the nouns and verbs themselves) take care of things rather nicely. This is what complexity within the words themselves buys you: simplicity elsewhere.

The reason you get this is because all languages are doing the same thing: describing human experience. And humans are the same language to language. The other small tidbit is that when creating a naturalistic language—and it doesn't matter what method you use—you are, unconsciously or not, aiming for the lowest common denominator in terms of grammatical complexity. You don't have to do that, but generally if you're trying to create a language for humans with no other goals, you do. With a language like Ithkuil, John was intentionally pushing away from what is standard in human languages, and so there are needless levels of complexity that push beyond the boundaries of ordinary human language.

Now, when I say "needless", this is what I mean.

In Turkish, if you want to say "The girl is reading a book", you say:

Kız kitap okuyor.

Turkish is a language with noun cases, but you only see the nominative here. Why? Because the girl is reading A book. When the object is indefinite in Turksih you don't need to use the accusative case—in fact, you shouldn't. If you wanted to say "The girl is reading the book", that's when the accusative case pops up:

Kız kitabı okuyor.

Okay, with this in mind, you've introduced—just in the nouns—four possibilities:

Nominative + indefinite

Nominative + definite

Accusative + indefinite

Accusative + definite

In a maximally complex language, all of this would be marked. In Turkish, only one of these is marked. (Well, maybe two, if you were to say Bir kız for nominative + indefinite. Turkish has an indefinite article that pops up sometimes.) Certainly there are languages where all of these have some sort of marking, but then those very same languages will have other situations where maximal marking is possible but not present.

Human languages all have this in common. There are areas in the language where more categories could be marked but are not. It doesn't matter what the language is. This is because humans have limits for how much junk they'll tolerate in the language they're using. It isn't long before something that could be inferred from context is inferred from context. It collapses every so often (i.e. too little is marked and so marking pops up), but the unconscious goal is for the language to have a balance between morphological and syntactic complexity and also explicitness and implicitness.

A language doesn't have to do this, though, and so conlangs can be more or less explicit/implicit. Can they work? Certainly, but they may be more than humans will comfortably tolerate, and so humans may not want to use them.

Take Láadan, for example. Had Láadan been created later it might have had a better shot at being used, but this was 1982 before conlangers had started getting together. Láadan primary flaw is that it's trying to be a deep philosophical experiment while also trying to be a language a lot of people speak. That was never going to work. Suzette Haden Elgin lamented that maybe women didn't want a language of their own to use, and so the experiment was doomed from the start. A simpler explanation is she saw an ocean and built a train to cross it.

In Láadan, every sentence begins with one of six speech act particles (copied from Wikipedia):

Bíi: Indicates a declarative sentence (usually optional)

Báa: ndicates a question

Bó: Indicates a command; very rare, except to small children

Bóo: Indicates a request; this is the usual imperative/"command" form

Bé: Indicates a promise

Bée: Indicates a warning

And then in addition to that, every sentence ends with one of the following (also copied from Wikipedia):

wa: Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally

wi: Known to speaker because self-evident

we: Perceived by speaker in a dream

wáa: Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source

waá: Assumed false by speaker because speaker distrusts source; if evil intent by the source is also assumed, the form is waálh

wo: Imagined or invented by speaker, hypothetical

wóo: Used to indicate that the speaker states a total lack of knowledge as to the validity of the matter

This is too much! Evidential systems in language exist, but they are so much smaller than this, and usually the markers pull double duty—and there's often a null marker.

Again, though, it's about the goals! This is fine for a philosophical language. And if it was simply a philosophical language, then how many people "speak" it is irrelevant. For example, John Quijada doesn't lament that after twenty years there isn't a community of Ithkuil speakers—indeed, he's baffled whenever he hears of someone who wants to try to "speak" Ithkuil. It's not designed for that, and so the metric isn't a fair one. Based on the structure of Láadan, I'd argue the same: the number of speakers/users isn't a fair metric, and shouldn't have been a design goal. Because while a language like High Valyrian looks more complex, with its declension classes and conjugations, Láadan is more complex in that it exceeds the expectations of explicitness a human user expects from a language.

Long answer to the question, but no, High Valyrian ended up as complex as I intended, and I don't think it's more complex than one would expect from either a natural or naturalistic language.

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[drdemonprince]

'The Telepathy Tapes' is Dangerous, Unscientific Nonsense that Promotes a Widely Discredited "Communication Method" Used to Abuse Autistic Kids

Facilitated Communication is bunk, with many facilitators having used it to put words in the mouths of children. This massively popular podcast is just the latest instance of abuse involving FC.

I have been getting a lot of questions lately about the incredibly popular podcast The Telepathy Tapes, which briefly unseated The Joe Rogan experience as the most listened-to show on the Spotify charts this past fall, and has been occupying a comfortable position in the top five most popular podcasts ever since. The Telepathy Tapes has an enviable 4.6 star rating on Apple Music and a 4.8 on Spotify, with nearly 5,000 reviews on each platform apiece, and the show’s been covered everywhere from Variety and The Atlantic to the Rogan-esque Jay Shetty show.

For the uninitiated, it’s show about how nonverbal Autistics have psychic powers. Yeah, I’m distressed at how well it’s caught on, too.

Per Spotify, “The Telepathy Tapes dares to explore the profound abilities of non-speakers with autism - individuals who have long been misunderstood and underestimated. These silent communicators possess gifts that defy conventional understanding, from telepathy to otherworldly perceptions, challenging the limits of what we believe to be real…Through emotional stories and undeniable evidence, The Telepathy Tapes offers a fresh perspective on the profound connections that exist beyond words.”

Much of the ‘undeniable evidence’ that The Telepathy Tapes relies upon comes from the practice of facilitated communication (FC), a widely discredited interpretation method in which an abled facilitator supposedly draws words out of a nonverbal Autistic client by taking hold of the client’s arm or hand and “assisting” them in typing out meaningful messages.

Facilitated communication (also known as assisted typing, supported typing, or the rapid prompting method) was introduced by a variety of different practitioners and support staff throughout the 1960s and 1970s — it seems many care providers who worked with Autistic kids each independently had the idea of being a disabled child’s “voice” by helping them type.

The facilitated communication method was dismissed as unscientific by practitioners in Denmark in the 1970s. Then, FC reemerged in popularity throughout the 1980s and 1990s largely thanks to the advocacy of an Australian special educator named Rosemary Crossley. News articles throughout the period celebrated FC as a revolutionary new method that could help bring notoriously hard-to-reach Autistics outside of themselves. Gruesome accusations of child sexual abuse were collected by teachers and specialists using FC on their nonverbal students, leading to incarcerations even when there wasn’t any other evidence.

Facilitated communication was experiencing a major boom. And then, over 40 peer-reviewed studies came out showing no evidence that facilitation communication actually worked — virtually all of it suggesting that facilitators were ‘interfering’ with nonverbal clients’ reports. Throughout the 1990s, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication all issued strong statements against the use of facilitated communication, all of which it stands by to this day.

To quote from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association’s current guidelines on the subject:

FC is a discredited technique that should not be used. There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC, and there is extensive scientific evidence—produced over several decades and across several countries—that messages are authored by the "facilitator" rather than the person with a disability. Furthermore, there is extensive evidence of harms related to the use of FC. Information obtained through the use of FC should not be considered as the communication of the person with a disability.

I wrote all about the history of Facilitated Communication and The Telepathy Tapes. You can read the full thing for free (or have it narrated to you by the Substack app) here.

[anyataylorjoys]

Now her management agencies WME and Sugar23 are looking to pull the plug on her for starting a fundraiser for the UNRWA which is providing aid to Gaza after funding was pulled when Israel claimed they are in cahoots with Hamas. God forbid she raise money so people don't starve to death and can have access to sanitation products. This world is evil.

Fundraiser link in her bio:

[fantastic-nonsense]

I know it's cold comfort to everyone protesting and watching the protests against US funding of Israel right now, but the needle on Palestine has already moved further than I would have ever thought possible in so short a time.

For nearly 75 years, the conversation around sending money and weapons to Israel has remained staunchly ingrained in the American public imagination as something that is both good and uncontroversial. 2014 (the first time Israel's brutality against Palestinians truly went worldwide on social media) was the first time I believed that public sentiment change was possible. But that was a cracked door of genuine sympathy. Israel's behavior this time has blown the door wide open. I've seen more movement on the issue of American military aid and political support to Israel in the past 6 months than I have in the past 10 years.

When I did my graduate thesis on how to advocate for more effective international arms control against state actors who violated human rights, I was explicitly told by my client to stay away from Israel for the case study portion. They were an exception to every law and rule we had, so it was useless to talk about them. Fast forward two years, and we are having genuine conversations about Israel's ongoing, routine human rights violations and the need to condition their military aid that I would have considered impossible last year.

I never thought I would see AIPAC talked about in Democratic circles like they talked about the NRA. I never thought I would see people who work in the political sphere and aren't explicitly doing human rights advocacy talk about the Leahy Laws and the human rights conditions of the Foreign Assistance Act in relation to Israel. I never thought I would see federal politicians repeatedly call out Israel's brutality on the floor of Congress. I never thought I would see "normies" talking about the state-level anti-BDS laws that the pro-Israel lobby has advocated for and helped pass over the past decade. Hoped and wished it would happen, sure. But thought it actually would? No. But it's finally happening!

And if there's a silver lining in this whole awful mess, it's that it's clear Israel has lost the long-term war of public opinion. Every single poll of under 30s (and to a certain extent, under 40s) is pretty clear on that.

Regardless of what happens here in this moment, Israel's unique relationship with the United States is done the second the current crop of legislators retires or is pushed out of office. We're starting to see politicians who are willing to have that conversation already, thanks to everyone who has gotten involved in state and federal elections and helped support candidates who value human dignity and sympathize with Palestine. Within ten years at most—and more reasonably within the next five depending on how 2028 shakes out—the funding conversation will look VERY different (as long as you all keep voting, anyway). Progress is slow, but it IS happening.

[jewish-vents]

A note from the mods about mental health

This is a difficult time for all of us, and has had particular impacts on those of us who struggle with our mental health. Worse, issues of antisemitism from mental health professionals create significant barriers to receiving the help we need. Many organizations which serve the Jewish community do offer mental health services, and it is worth asking your rabbi if they know of any such groups.

Additionally, the Association of Jewish Psychologists, while primarily focused on advocacy and education, offers free and virtual support groups for the Jewish Community.

If you are looking for individual therapy, Relief Help is an international network of Jewish mental health professionals, and offer a free referral service to help clients find professionals who can meet their individual needs.

Remember that you matter, and your wellbeing matters. Take care of yourselves, and let your community take care of you.

Am Yisrael Chai-🐞

[lilliaace]

It is exhausting but needs to be said

There's a lot of people who genuinely think the trans flag (🏳️‍⚧️) is a "child predator flag". I have been in work spaces where we had a transgender flag somewhere around reception to show our support for the Lgbtq community, and the amount of clients and customers who legit asked and were STUNNED of what it meant (we described it as "transgender people are just people who don't feel comfortable with what's considered being a traditional boy or traditional girl" to keep it as neutral as possible) and not "lol it's a flag for people who want to creep on kids", was staggering.

Yes, Google exists. But being neutral and respectful (kind, compassion, empathy, those basic traits that they teach you in preschool and kindergarten) when people are genuinely asking "hey, what does this mean?" Will get you further then "LOL HANG YOURSELF YOU BIGOT" for in real life encounters.

Part of advocacy is knowing how to actually talk to people.