'Cuz i have had something to prove as long as i know something that needs improving...

I've been meaning to explain a little about what I do for work on this blog for a while now. I haven't before for a few reasons. 1) I thought it would be boring for non-social workers 2) Strict confidentiality laws that protect my clients 3) I'm busy working.
I am currently employed by Region 10 Community Service Board at their Wellness Recovery Center as a Mental Health Specialist. It is a 9 bed crisis stabilization center for adults experiencing mental health crises. Clients stay at our program for up to 15 days.

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I conduct individual counseling sessions, group conseling sessions, community resource linkage, and lots of documentation and paperwork. I have also been trained as a Medication Technician (so I can administer medication to the clients) and as a Certified Auricular Acupuncture/Acudetox Administrator (doing my clinical hours and trained through NADA). I hope to talk more about that some other post.
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I honestly should be finishing up one of my discharge summaries right now, but I don't feel like it. I don't technically have to because I'm not at work, so... I'll waste some time here.
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I learned several years ago that I had to be careful about how much I tell people about what happens at work... or what has happened to the people I work with. When I first started in the social service field, I was shocked by the horror stories. But then working nights 60 hours a week at a women's shelter started making it feel a lot more common place.
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Sometimes I would mention something about work to a friend and family member, though, and I'd find them in shock, close to tears, and/or with a jaw hanging wide open in response to my comment.
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For example, I'd say: "I'm working on getting my client to contract for safety so that she commits to not stubbing her cigarettes out on her forearm while she's staying at our Center. She says she's trying to make the outside of her as ugly as her insides feel."
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So I've composed a few vignettes from classic work situations; they're about recent and not-so-recent clients. Some are from the Provo Abused Women's shelter I used to work at. Some are from the foster children I interned with in Harlem. Some are from the Child Protective Services in Utah where I interned, and some are from my work at the Wellness Recovery Center that I work at now. (I, of course, have not used any real names!)

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Here's a conversation I tried to have over the breakfast table with one of my rommates in college, who I never really told any details about my work after this comment b/c of how shocked she was from it:

One of the 11 yr old boys at work got suspended from school yesterday for pulling a knife on another kid. His mom keeps saying she doesn't understand why he would be acting out this way, but seriously? How could she not know.

Before she came into the shelter, her boyfriend was beating her up, and so she ran into her 11 yr old's room where he was sleeping because she thought that her BF wouldn't beat her up in front of her son.

Apparently, the BF didn't care and picked up the vacuum tube on the ground and continued to beat her with it right in front of the son while he kept screaming for him to stop. How could this kid not be learning to act in violence?

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One of our clients last week had tried to hang himself with his belt the week before. He has Asperger's and his family doesn't want him living around them anymore. He's begged his grandmother to let him live with her now.

His self-soothing techniques for when he gets really overwhelmed involve hitting his head against his mattress (an improvement from the wall), and so he has an ever-present blackish bruise on one side of his forehead. His grandmother just got put into the hospital for health reasons and now he has no one.

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One of my caseload as an intern was a 16 yr old girl who's been in the foster care system since she was about 5 or 6. NYC's Administration of Child Services (ACS) workers discovered her and her two younger brothers neglected, malnourished, and neglected in a dirty abandoned apartment. She's grown up in the Bronx, has an IQ of about 68. She carries around a doll whose hair she braids over and over again.
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She tells me that she wants to do fashion when she grows up, but she wears these red paisely sashes around her neck over her pink t-shirts. She was only allowed to start having a therapist after she took a razor blade and cut two slits under each of her eyes.

Her foster mother is 62 and is preparing a HUGE load of collards in the kitchen while she intermittently yells something at my client into the bedroom where I'm conducting a home inspection.
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My client tells me that her foster mother's biological grandchildren say she stinks and never want her to sit next to them at the table. She wants more than anything to go to a (fat camp) over-night summer camp.

I was able to get her a $1500 scholarship from a really neat upstate NY camp after putting in about 40 hrs of research, phone calls, and arrangements. The foster care agency can put $300 towards the price, but we were still short $350, and THERE'S NOW WHERE TO GET IT.
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If I hadn't been a poor, unpaid intern, I would have paid it myself. I briefly flirt with the idea of asking my rich relatives for money, but I understand that this is just ONE poor foster child out of the thousands and thousands just within a 30 minute drive of where I'm working.

(Samaritan Woman at the Well )

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I was assigned a pretty sweet job of entertaining some of the foster kids while workers met with their parents. One afternoon I played scrabble junior with another worker’s foster child while the worker was talking with her mother, and the girl kept telling me my words were cheating because they were written on the sides of the board game.

It was the end of a LONG day, and I hadn’t slept much the night before because I had been submitting independent study course work, and then this 7 year old was telling me that I was cheating at Scrabble.

I was ashamed that I had to push myself to be the mature adult. The foster child was still in her mother’s care but had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend multiple times. I stared at this beautiful, spunky child and couldn't understand how such monsters like her mother's boyfriend existed in this world.

The truth was that she was kind of lucky? Lots of times when teenage girls accused their mothers' or foster mothers' husbands or boyfriends of sexually abusing them, the mother chooses the man over their daughter (sorry I have no stats to back that up, though).

(Perhaps a subject for another post: It's PRICELESS to find good foster parents. Some of the great ones I saw in my work will be my heroes for the rest of my life-- giving homes, love, and security to teeny, neglected, abused, scarred children. And sidenote, Arkansas recently passed a state stature that "made it illegal for any individual cohabiting outside of a valid marriage to adopt or provide foster care to minors. While the measure was proposed primarily to prohibit same-sex couples from being adoptive or foster parents, this measure would apply to all otherwise qualified couples who are not legally married.")

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I grew up being taught that we need to help those in need. But from my comfy white, middle-classed home, the biggest victims I saw were the homeless kittens at the SPCA and myself when grounded from using the telephone for a week.
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The real-life situations since moving on from my sheltered childhood in South Carolina are what have shaped me and convinced me that the society and government we live with is NOT working for everyone.
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Many of the people I work with get what some people call "handouts" -- food stamps, Section 8 housing, disability, medicaid, and other forms of government assistance.
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It's probably just because they're lazy... or African American... or sluts... or drug addicts.*
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They don't want anything better for themselves or else they'd just make it happen like the rest of us hard working, middle class folks do.*

*Italics denote sarcasm.

My goal for this post isn't to produce anger, but maybe give a taste of what I do for work and what life's like for a lot of our neighbors.