Long hours, High drama, High hopes, Great rewards is how I would sum up my experience as a therapist in the Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol field. Mental Health is a challenge in of itself. Add addiction to the mix and we have an explosion or implosion ready to happen at any given moment. Work with an inpatient population and one immediately recognizes it is far more challenging than an outpatient or private practice setting.
A normal day can consist of a Paranoid Schizophrenic with a Crack addiction running after you with sheer panic upon their face, because there is a bee in the bathroom. It does not matter if the Borderline Heroin addict is laying on the floor screaming for comfort meds or the Treatment Team meeting one was suppose to be in attendance fifteen minutes ago with the boss texting, "where are you" is in progress. The bee has to be removed from the bathroom Right Now! This can be one's first two hours at their job place.
Inpatient means girls fighting over hair brushes, color pencils and telephone time. It can mean men fighting over the music station or the famous, "he looked at me with an attitude". Yeah, this stuff is better than any movie flick. The job is never boring, can crush your last remaining nerve, exhaust you and it all has to be done with an empathic compassionate approach, because we are the professionals and there is no time to be human. You leave "human" at the curb when you arrive for work and pick it up on the way to your car before you drive home for the night that is probably in ten or so hours. I wonder what a normal eight hour workday would look like? I will let you know when I have experienced it. I can tell you one thing we all have in common. That dreaded fear when it is ten minutes before you are ready to leave for the evening on a Friday, and one of your patients decides to leave AMA or needs to be stepped up. Monday morning when you cross your fingers and hope 20 new patients did not get admitted over the weekend when two counselors are out.
Lunch while in a meeting getting updates about patients, presenting new patients and discussing the events from the night before, which can range from the person out on the fire escape, to the person who cheeked their meds, to the person who had a seizure, to the person who would not get up for vital signs, to the person who snores too loud.
We hear all sorts of things in one on one sessions from the horrific to the bazar to the "are you kidding me" all with that professional straight face only a person in this field can manage.
Groups are fun. So are the family sessions. No. We cannot fix so and so. Yes. Family Counseling or a support group is encouraged, then there are the insurance companies.
Outpatient therapy means the person goes home. Inpatient therapy means you are met at the car, followed to the time clock, and all the way to the nurse's station, back to the chart room, and all the while you are being told how urgent it is to have laundry detergent.
It means you carry three heavy charts with your lunch bag, water bottle and oversized handbag across a parking lot to another building, climb three flights of stairs, manage to get the key out to unlock your office without dropping any of the above, walk into the office, place your lunch bag on the shelf where all your books sit, place the handbag in your desk draw, click on the computer, look for a spoon to eat your yogurt, while reading your email, assigning new patients to counselors, looking at your online calendar to see who needs an assessment, a treatment plan, a PCPC, discharge planning, a call to their probation/parole officer, who needs a court date continued, and discover you have no spoon to eat that yogurt, and debate whether you walk down three flights of stairs to get one, or settle with the plastic fork instead.
What an amazing field I am in and I would not change one single minute.
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