3:15pm November 8, 2014

Phrases I hate: “Splitting Staff”

So the term splitting staff seemed to be universally known and used by all staff and teachers in the psychiatric and special ed systems. The meaning of it basically goes…

A disabled person complains to one staff that another staff person is doing something harmful or destructive or even abusive towards them.

Instead of listening, or being sympathetic, or looking into the matter, the first words out of the staff person’s mouth are guaranteed to be something like, “You need to stop splitting staff, it’s manipulative.”

If you complain too often about one staff person to other staff people (and “too often”, as usual, can be “once”) then you can gain a reputation as “that patient who splits staff and manipulates all the time”.

As far as I can tell, what splitting staff is supposed to mean, is that the reason the disabled person is doing this is to deliberately pit staff against each other as a form of manipulation.

Why it is that staff are so obsessed with patients being ~manipulative~ is beyond me. Other than the fact that staff themselves are generally so much more manipulative than patients could ever be, so they just assume everyone is like that?

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