Lecture
Let us specifically single out and examine the concept of "psychological safety." At present there is no unified interpretation of this phenomenon or its definition. Academic explanatory dictionaries of Russian, English, French, and German provide the concept of "personal security" (security personal), which is linked to a person's state, feelings, and experiences relating to their position in the present and future.
The problem of ensuring the psychological safety of a person and of the living environment that influences human formation and development is only just emerging as an independent field of research, although it is a priority task of social practice. Neither the individual, nor the state, nor society can be considered or be safe outside of an environment, and psychological safety and psychological support may pertain not only to the individual but also to the conditions under which life activity is carried out.
The contemporary researcher in the field of life safety V. F. Pilipenko defines the security of the individual as "the formation of a set of legal and moral norms, public institutions and organizations that allow a person to develop and realize socially significant abilities and needs without encountering opposition from the state and society" .
In the scholarly literature, the most commonly examined concept is the informational-psychological safety of the individual as a state of protection of one's psyche from the effects of diverse informational factors that hinder or impede the formation and functioning of an adequate informational-orientational basis for social behavior, as well as an adequate system of a person's relations to the surrounding world and to themselves. According to psychologist T. S. Kabachenko, a person not only "consumes" messages from a wide variety of sources but also reflects the conditions and circumstances of their own life and activity, as well as events directly concerning society, based on direct experience. She proposes to understand psychological safety as "such a state of the informational environment and living conditions of a specific person, group, or society as a whole, that does not contribute to the disruption of the integrity, adaptive functioning, and development of the subjects (an individual person, groups, society as a whole)" .
In psychology, the problem most often examined is that of psychological defense (A. I. Eremeeva, R. A. Zachepitsky, T. I. Kolesnikova).
T. I. Kolesnikova understands the psychological safety of the individual as a certain protection of consciousness from influences capable of changing mental states, psychological characteristics, and behavior against one's will and desire, which can fundamentally affect a person, up to and including a change in their life path" . This definition addresses the safety of a person's psyche from manipulation of their consciousness. Manipulation, in most cases, is understood as a mental influence that affects a person's consciousness against their will. The simplest example of this is advertising.
The author of the concept of psychological safety in education, N. A. Baeva, examines the structure of safety psychology in two aspects: the psychological safety of the environment and the psychological safety of the individual.
The psychological safety of the environment, in its social aspect, is defined as a state of the environment free from manifestations of psychological violence in people's interactions, one that facilitates the satisfaction of basic needs for trusting interpersonal communication, creates the referential significance of the environment, and, as a consequence, ensures the psychological security of its participants .
The psychological safety of the individual manifests itself in their ability to maintain stability in an environment with certain parameters and psychotraumatic influences, and in their resistance to destructive internal and external influences. The psychological safety of the individual is reflected in their experiences of security/insecurity in a specific life situation.
In this connection, it is relevant to reveal the meaning of the phenomenon of psychological safety in the context of the individual-typological and personal characteristics of the subject, the development of the motivational processes of their activity, their readiness for risk, as well as for professional activity under modern conditions. We propose the following definition of the psychological safety of the individual.
Psychological safety of the individual is a complexly structured system of mental processes that ensures the realization of their socially significant needs.
The process of forming and developing psychological safety involves a person's reflection of external conditions in the form of a certain subjective model, which serves as the basis for the preliminary psychological programming of actions and for their regulation in any given activity. At the same time, different subjects in one and the same environment may experience varying degrees of safety.
The psychological safety of the individual is determined by the particularities of the individual's comprehension of reality in the entire totality of its social processes, events, and relationships. The most important factors shaping the psychological situation in society include: the nature of labor (duration, intensity, monotony, harmfulness, etc.), housing conditions, conditions of daily commuting (to and from work), nutrition, medical care, propaganda, the distribution of rights and obligations in society, and others.
Psychological dangers include: stress, mass psychoses (panic), mental illness, destruction of the personality, and so on. At the same time, the level of stress-inducing factors in a large metropolis increases significantly and even becomes the norm of life.
At present, a substantial network of institutions ensuring psychological safety has taken shape: psychological assistance services, psychiatric institutions (hospitals, dispensaries), the censorship service, state propaganda institutions, and the psychological safety directorate within the state security service.
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