Dont Let Them Think You Aren't Safe — Because If They Do, You Won’t Be
- Dick Gariepy
- 2 days ago
- 13 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Dick Gariepy| | Big Thinky Ouchey
To speak too clearly is to be reclassified. To name the harm is to invite its enforcers.
The Ritual of the Check‑In
The pivot always arrives on cue. I mention that there’s no food in the fridge, the bank is circling, the human‑rights complaints are piling up, and the operator’s voice drops into that well‑practiced hush:
“I just need to check in and make sure you’re safe right now.”
Safe. The way they use it, the word no longer means out of danger; it means out of their jurisdiction. It’s a biometric toggle, alive or embarrassingly dead, nothing in between. If my heart will still be beating after we hang up, the box is ticked, the call is cleared, and my life resumes its free‑fall off‑screen.
I tried, once again, to push that frame. In February the Distress Centre volunteer gave me the stock empathy line, “Wow, the system has really failed you”, and I told them flatly that repeating my pain back at me wasn’t comfort, it was salt on the wound. Their reply? “Have you heard of 211?”
Round and round: 211 punts me to the Distress Centre, the Distress Centre punts me to 211, and every loop is stamped “for your safety.” When I named the cycle as manufactured ignorance, a fog of referrals that spares every agency the burden of actually acting, the volunteer offered a final flourish of “support”:
“I can see that this conversation is not helpful for your mental health, so I will be ending this chat now.”
Translation: You’re no longer safe for us. My refusal to accept scripted solace had made me administratively hazardous. The moment I invoked the Alberta Human Rights Act and asked for a disability accommodation, direct engagement instead of deflection, the focus snapped back to the only safety metric they truly track: whether I might die loudly enough to tarnish a quarterly report. When I insisted on a straight answer, Are you denying my request?, they switched off the lifeline mid‑sentence and handed me a complaint number. Safety achieved.
That’s the ritual in full. “Safety” is spoken like a blessing, but it functions as a trapdoor. Admit you’re unsafe and you trigger containment: wellness checks, psych holds, four officers with sidearms in your living‑room. Swear you’re fine and they vanish, satisfied that the liability has been transferred to tomorrow’s operator. Either way, the suffering that can’t be solved within a thirty‑minute script remains untouched. The call ends, the spreadsheet updates, and I am left precisely where I began, alive enough to ignore, dying enough to need to call again.
What They Mean vs. What I Hear
The phone line is barely warm when the second translation job begins. On their side of the headset, “Are you safe?” means one narrow thing: Will this caller die on my shift?
On my end, the same words crack open like a riddle: Am I housed? Fed? Protected from the next institutional ambush? “Safety,” for me, is the full architecture of existence. For them, it is a pulse and a legal firewall. Will this meat mecha maintain homeostasis long enough for it to no longer be my problem?
You can hear the gulf in the follow‑up. After I explain that the suffering isn’t abstract, it’s a foreclosure notice and a human‑rights deadline, the volunteer replies, “I’m here to listen in this safe space for you.” Translation: the room is padded, not furnished. If I’m still breathing, the checklist is satisfied.
That clinical subtext isn’t accidental; it’s doctrine. Psychiatric literature calls it the risk‑management paradigm: “Safety is maintained as the predominant value, and risk management is the cornerstone of care” (Muir‑Cochrane, 2007). In other words, the metric isn’t relief or dignity, it’s whether the paperwork shows I survived the encounter.
So when I answer, No, I’m not safe, I’m not being dramatic. I’m giving an honest systems report: no food supply, no legal redress, no institutional shield. The fact that the threat to my safety acts slowly over time does not make it any more safe; the end result is the same. And if the question “are you safe?” were truly about my survival and well-being, then my “no” would trigger the same urgency as someone actively bleeding out. But it doesn’t. As soon as I explain that the danger is chronic, violence administered bureaucratically, through deprivation, abandonment, and procedural indifference, my answer gets translated, recorded. The operator implicitly decides: this is not the kind of danger that permits intervention. My words are re-authored to suit institutional protocols, not my lived reality. The question “are you safe?” turns out not to be about safety at all, it’s about liability, risk containment, and operational thresholds. My authorship of my condition is overwritten, erased in favor of language the system can metabolize. Honesty triggers alarms the script can’t accommodate. My refusal to lie gets mis‑filed as volatility. The call veers toward containment, wellness check, psych hold, armed escort, precisely because I told the truth too plainly.
And if I capitulate, Fine, yes, I’m safe, I’m instantly recoded as non‑acute, a client who “no longer requires our service.” The operator exhales; the liability meter resets; the line goes dead. Either way, the conversation proves Jennifer Smith‑Merry’s diagnosis that “safety talk is everywhere in mental health, but it does not occur in a way where the system gets any safer for the key actors involved” (Smith‑Merry, 2013).
That is the violence of the misunderstanding. My reality is rendered unprintable, not because it’s incoherent, but because it widens the definition of harm beyond their actuarial horizon. They don’t hear the answer because admitting its truth would shatter the question. Safety, in their ledger, is a binary switch. In mine, it’s the difference between living and merely not dying.
Until the language changes, we are two radios on different frequencies, one tuned to vital signs, the other to human ones. And every time they ask if I am safe, what I hear is this: Are you manageable enough for us to leave you like this?
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Safety Is Not the Absence of Death
“Safe” is supposed to be a sanctuary word, something that tells one ‘you can relax’ ‘no harm will come if you let your guard down’. But in practice, it has been stripped down to a forensic utility: are you still breathing? Yes? Then you are safe, ignoring the fact that I can continue breathing and be in active danger at the same time. This definition is grim as hell, yet it is the standard that guides every modern crisis script. If I describe weeks of malnutrition, “canned beans, freezer-burnt vegetables, nothing fresh since my last rejected income-support appeal”, the operator nods sympathetically but reminds me that at least I’m still here….
The perverse arithmetic goes like this: alive = safe; everything else is a lifestyle problem or a feature of internal dysfunction. Recall Muir-Cochrane's claim “risk management is the cornerstone of care, legitimising practices that are ineffectual and unethical” ( 2007, p. 368). Under this way of thinking, the only harm worth preventing is the final one. Hunger is seen as sad. Suicide is seen as risky. As long as I’m not about to die, no one feels responsible for addressing my hunger, despite the risk it poses to my safety. But survival and safety are not synonyms; they are often antagonists.
One particularly devastating welfare check I survived while attending the University of Toronto Mississauga: four patrol officers busted down my door while I was taking a nap in between classes in my student residence apartment. I went from dreaming of test anxiety and group presentation nightmares, waking to an even more terrifying reality of four armed men manhandling me, tackling me to the ground to handcuff me. In my slumber stupor, not fully understanding what was happening, I remember thinking: Thank God I'm a loser who doesn't fight to defend himself because they would have killed me. Livingston’s review of police encounters with mental-health crises makes the stakes plain: people like me are sixteen times more likely to be killed by police than the general population when “wellness” is enforced at gunpoint (Livingston, 2014). Staying alive sometimes means pretending I’m not in pain, that I'm not in distress, that I trust these strangers with guns despite having every reason not to trust them. Naming the pain invites a brand-new danger in a Kevlar vest.
Even supposedly benign clinical interventions can deepen harm. Seclusion rooms, forced medication, constant observation—each is defended as a “safety measure,” yet empirical reviews show they “inflict trauma and degradation while failing to reduce self-harm” (Cutcliffe & Riahi, 2013, p. 171). After my arrest in Mississauga, I was taken to the hospital and placed in a concrete room with a heavy steel door that could only be opened from the outside. My clothes and belongings were taken. I was left in a hospital gown, alone on a narrow cot. I don’t know how long I was there. I just remember staring at the ceiling, calculating everything I was losing with each passing second—every moment not studying for midterms, not writing essays, not doing the work I needed to stay afloat.
These weren’t just any courses. They were upper-year philosophy classes with few, heavily weighted assessments. One missed midterm or essay would drag my grade from an A- to a B-, and that slip could kill my shot at grad school. I had sacrificed so much just to be there, clawing my way back from disability and poverty. I was finally on a path that might lead somewhere, and now I was locked in a room that jeopardized all of it. And it wasn’t the first time that week. That arrest in my student residence was my second involuntary psychiatric admission in 48 hours.
Two nights earlier, after receiving an incomprehensible letter from the Alberta Information and Privacy Commissioner, I began to doubt my grip on reality, not because I felt unstable, but because the logic of their decision was so incoherent that I genuinely believed I must be broken for not understanding it. I walked into the hospital on my own. I was compliant. Calm. Not immediately suicidal. Still, they locked me in.
I talked my way out. I went home. I slept. I filed a formal complaint with patient relations about the inappropriate admission. I spoke with patient relations representative Kelly Crowdy and explained, clearly and precisely, how their decision had harmed me.
Ms. Crowdy did not respond with accountability. She responded with force. During the follow-up call, I made it clear I wasn’t going to accept their excuses or deflections, their claim that they "had no choice" but to harm me. When Ms. Crowdy again attempted to gaslight me, I ended the call. I had told her plainly what would end that conversation. She did it anyway. She was unconcerned about the impact of dismissing my testimony, unconcerned about my safety.
She didn’t escalate because I was unstable. She escalated because I was clear. I named the harm. I named her role in it. I did it confidently, too loudly, too plainly. So she called the police.
She knew I had just been cleared. She knew I had just explained why the first hold was wrong. She had me arrested anyway.
Two holds. Two days. No crisis. Just critique.
That was the real threat to my safety: not self-harm, but the institutional actions that risked dismantling the only future I had left. Once that was gone, there would be no 72-hour hold that could make me want to survive. Safety, weaponized as containment, becomes its own vector of injury. The body remains intact. The life inside it is treated as expendable.
Which brings us to the real paradox: keeping me alive without addressing why I want to die is not safety; it is deferred devastation. Again reinforcing the claim by Jennifer Smith-Merry (2013), “safety talk is everywhere… but the system does not become any safer for the key actors involved” (p. 203). I endure precisely the conditions that made me unsafe, poverty, procedural cruelty, institutional silence, only now with the added burden of compulsory gratitude because I was “kept safe.”
So when a volunteer congratulates me for “choosing life,” I don’t feel rescued. Because I didn't choose life, that was chosen for me without my input. What I feel is archived. My pulse, not my personhood, has met the key-performance indicator. Safety, as they count it, is merely the absence of my obituary. Yet genuine safety would mean waking up without calculating how many beans are left, without strategizing how to avoid police while begging for medical care, without rehearsing my trauma in bureaucratic loops that insist on my compliance but deny my existence.
Until the definition expands, until safety includes dignity, stability, and the absence of state-sanctioned terror, every declaration that I am “safe” lands like a cosmic joke: the kind of punchline that leaves a bruise.
Linguistic Gaslighting: The Weaponization of “Safety”
“Safety” should be the most uncontroversial word in the language. Instead, it has become a trigger for quiet violence, a velvet‑lined muzzle that silences anything too raw, too political, too inconvenient to record in the margins of a call log.
The first sleight of hand is grammatical. Safe arrives as an adjective but behaves like a verb: it acts on me, trimming my testimony down to whatever won’t spike the liability meter. Once the operator pronounces the call a “safe space,” every sentence I speak is weighed not for truth but for volatility. If my story risks indicting the system, starvation, foreclosure, the fact that a wellness check once left me pinned to my own floor under a tactical boot, the spigot of empathy narrows to a drip. In effect, “safe” is code for “speak softly or be reclassified.”
When I remind the Distress Centre that last year’s so-called “welfare” visit ended with four armed officers rifling through my kitchen looking for sharp objects, and that when I finally returned home, I found myself locked out of my own apartment by Residence Services, told I wouldn’t be allowed back in until I met with the ‘Don on Duty’ and signed a safety contract, the volunteer’s tone shifts. It turns clinical. “It sounds like you’re feeling unsafe because of past trauma.”
“No,” I clarify. “I am unsafe because your protocol has the power to summon that trauma back into my living room at any hour.”
At that moment, I was no longer a caller. I am a risk event.
Even without police, the lexicon can handcuff me. Take the ubiquitous “no‑harm contract.” On paper, it looks therapeutic, Promise you won’t hurt yourself. In practice, it is, as Jobes (2006) admits, about clinician safety more than the client’s. Refuse to sign and you are uncooperative; sign and any future crisis can be chalked up to your failure to comply. Either way, the document absolves the institution.
Suicide‑intervention manuals go further, instructing staff to keep callers distracted while secretly phoning emergency services if they won’t commit to “staying safe for now” (LivingWorks Education, 2015). The official term is active rescue; the lived experience is covert betrayal, help that arrives disguised as handcuffs.
Here is the moral inversion: by defining harm solely as self‑inflicted death, the system licenses external harm in the name of prevention. Locking me in a psych ward against my will? Permissible. Denying me food vouchers because funds are for “medical emergencies” only? Regrettable but permissible. Every coercion is alchemized into care so long as my pulse remains measurable. Safety, narrowed to pure cardiology, legitimizes interventions that leave the rest of my life in ruins.
The final rule is simple: you may suffer, but you must not disrupt. A crying teenager in a classroom triggers a “safety protocol” that ends with police escort and an involuntary hospital trip, all justified as “ensuring student safety” (Advocates for Children of New York, 2021). My midnight despair triggers a checklist that can land me on a 72‑hour hold, then discharge me back into the exact conditions that sparked the call. Nothing changes, except the liability institutions have should you die. Cut to Smith‑Merry (2013) repeating her now painfully self-evident claim “safety talk is everywhere in mental health, but it does not occur in a way where the system gets any safer for the key actors involved.”
So when a volunteer asks, “Are you safe?” I hear the real subtext: Will you stay quiet, or must we intervene? Answer with a clean, simple “yes” or “no” and the script continues. Break the script, insist that safety includes grocery money, legal aid, or a promise that no one will kick down my door, and the call ends. Safety achieved.
Dont Let Them Think You Aren't Safe
So I’ve learned the choreography.
Speak calmly. Use passive verbs. Soften the sharp edges of truth until they resemble “distress” rather than danger. Never say the word die. Never mention plans. Refer to poverty as “a tough time.” Refer to betrayal as “feeling unsupported.” Never, under any circumstances, say I am not safe.
Because if they believe you, they will harm you.
They will send the wellness check. They will summon containment. They will strap your honesty to a gurney and call it care. Not because you were violent, but because you were legible as a liability. You spoke too clearly, and they don’t know how to process unsanctioned truth.
And so the real rule reveals itself: Don’t let them think you aren’t safe. Don’t let them think you are in danger.
Because if they think that...
You will be.
This is the quiet contract embedded in every crisis call, every intake form, every scripted expression of concern: You may hurt, but you must not show it. You may bleed, but only internally. You may collapse, but silently, without implicating the system in your fall.
Say you're safe. Even if you're starving. Even if you're breaking. Even if the protocols designed to “protect” you are the very forces endangering your life.
Say you’re safe. Because the moment they suspect otherwise, they will act, not to protect you, but to protect themselves from you.
And once that threshold is crossed, it doesn’t matter what’s true. You’ve already been reclassified. You’re no longer a person in need. You’re a situation to be managed. A hazard to be neutralized.
That’s the cost of honesty under a safety-first regime. The more clearly you describe the danger, the more dangerous you become.
So when they ask, “Are you safe?”
Remember, 'safe' does not actually mean safe. It means 'a liability'.
Don’t let them think you aren’t safe.
Because once they do, you stop being a person.
You start being a problem.
Dont Let Them Think You Aren't Safe
Big Thought Thumper Of The Week--> "Stay Safe"
Works Cited
Advocates for Children of New York. (2021). Police interventions for students in emotional crisis: A call for reform. https://www.advocatesforchildren.org/sites/default/files/library/police_in_crisis_report.pdf
Cutcliffe, J. R., & Riahi, S. K. (2013). Systemic violence in mental health settings: A review of the literature. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 22(2), 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12028
Jobes, D. A. (2006). Managing suicidal risk: A collaborative approach. Guilford Press.
Livingston, J. D. (2016). Contact between police and people with mental disorders: A review of rates. Psychiatric Services, 67(8), 850–857. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201500312
LivingWorks Education. (2015). Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) participant manual (11th ed.). Author.
Muir-Cochrane, E. (2007). The rhetoric of safety and the reality of patient harm in psychiatric inpatient care. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 16(6), 362–370. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1447-0349.2007.00498.x
Smith-Merry, J. (2013). Unproductive safety talk and mental health systems. Health Sociology Review, 22(2), 199–210. https://doi.org/10.5172/hesr.2013.22.2.199
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