Spin-Off: Mentally Unstable People with Advanced Degrees

[AGDee]

When I was working on my Masters in Clinical Psychology, we were strongly encouraged to attend counseling ourselves to 1) better understand our own motivations for going into Psychology and 2) be able to understand and work through transference issues with patients (ie. the patient that reminds you of your abusive ex-husband, etc). That was from '91-'93 (I didn't finish because I got pregnant with my daughter and I'm not superhuman like some people.. I was working full time, going to grad school part time-evenings and couldn't do that and deal with first time motherhood too). The majority of my co-workers throughout my career were quite stable and it was THE MOST supportive work environment I ever had. We worked so strongly as a team in every single work place and those work relationships were stronger than any I've experienced since because of it. When you work on psych units in hospitals, you have to have total trust in your co-workers, know that they are alert and have your back, and communicate constantly, not only about the status of patients, but about your personal status because your job is very dependent on your own personal emotional state being steady. After an extreme situation on a unit was resolved, the team would get together to make sure all the staff were ok, not just physically, but emotionally and then to process how it was handled, if anything could have been done differently, if there were signs ahead of time that something was awry, etc. When I was working at one adolescent psych hospital, the communication was not as good. We took a group of patients to the circus for an out trip (used to test how they were going to interact with the real world environment before being discharged) and two of them escaped (we used the term eloped, but most people consider that running away to get married..lol). When we got back, one of the social workers told us that one of those girls had just been told that on discharge she was going to a locked residential unit instead of home. She never should have told this girl that right before an out trip. AND, after she did tell the girl, she should have alerted the team because that kind of news almost always makes a kid an elopement risk. We would not have taken that girl with us. The two girls ended up being found and hauled back to the hospital, but those kinds of things shouldn't happen.

The only time I was ever injured was when a staff member decided it was better for her to take her break on time, leaving me alone with 12 girls in an off-unit activity room, than to wait until another staff member got there to relieve her. Two girls got into a physical fight within seconds of her leaving the room. Being the only staff member present, I had to physically get between them to protect them and one of their punches landed on my jaw and my jaw was dislocated. Thankfully, some staff walking by the room heard a commotion and came in to see if everything was ok and rescued me from that situation while I was physically holding one girl back and moving her around the room to keep away from the other one, who was still trying to attack her.

Both of those incidents were at the same hospital and involved the same patient! I left that hospital shortly after that because I didn't trust the STAFF there.