Masking

It's pretty clear what the law requires. The law, and ethics, and common sense are not the same things, though. I, for one, don't know ANY therapists who, today, are practicing in-person and masked, as a general rule. In my universe, without speaking for any individual, just summarizing general practice, most people either have not been comfortable returning to in-person practice or they have returned, and have done so without masks in session.

This makes good sense to me. Notwithstanding legal guidelines, I think of therapy sessions as the kind of interaction that many/most of us now are doing comfortably in the rest of our lives without masks.

All of this, to me, touches most importantly on the question of just what roles we play for our patients, just what it is we want to model. I don't pretend this is an easy or straightforward question, but for me, "thought" is a much more important behavior to model than is "compliance." Which is not to say that masking is not consistent with thought - it may well be.

Rather, it's to say that I don't stop thinking at the answer to the question "what does the law require?"

As one example of another sphere in which I recently applied this practice, and in which most of us did: The law is pretty clear that telehealth across most state lines remained illegal (or at least, a violation of rules) for those of us not licensed where our patients were throughout the pandemic. That didn't stop us from seeing patients who relocated. We made a decision to do what was right, what made the most sense, for us, for our patients, in spite of the law. Which we all knew, intuitively, was simply wrong.

I'm all for people wearing masks, if that's what they're most comfortable with. And I'm fine with legislators legislating. But the question of what I should do? That feels quite different to me....