SNWJ: The Beautiful Mess Series: You're Telling Me There's A Chance
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Your Telling Me There’s A Chance
John Paul Derryberry
The Beautiful Mess Series: Not everyone beats cancer, but we rightfully celebrate the fact that everyone fights the diagnosis. Not everyone wins their battle with mental health, but we only praise the people who overcome. This series examines why we need to change this view of mental health.
Remember we are using the pronoun “They” in these blogs to avoid revealing details about the people I’m writing about.
The Introduction blog http://jpderryberry.com/blog/mess
Story 1: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/themariojumper
Story 2: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/the-escape-artist
Story 3: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/theoldtownbully
Story 4: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/neverbeenkissed
Story 5: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/ithreup
Story 6: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/dontknowme
Story 7: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/madeforwalking
We spent six stories on the people suffering from mental health, how it's a beautiful process, and how they create moments of growth for those around them. Now we switch our focus to the dedicated staff who engage in this beautiful mess, who sometimes come home with bruises, bite marks, in tears, and emotionally exhausted. There is a reason why we do it. It is because most staff members understand that this field is about navigating the messy parts of people's lives and helping them see that they belong, deserve our love, and can create a better community.
(The staff in this story gave me permission to use identifying features and will be identified as staff or their preferred pronoun. The individuals in the story will remain unidentifiable.)
So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance
They were aging, difficult, and mistreated staff just about daily. They were an individual served with a tragic life history and a mental health diagnosis difficult to treat in young people. It’s downright impossible, when they are older, struggling with possible dementia and mental health issues, to put together a compressive enough plan to assist the individual and the staff to success. But there the program coordinator was in my office asking for help on this case. I slowly, point by point, laid out the difficulties we would have in achieving success by relieving the stress of the situation even 5%. I explained that more staff were going to quit because it was going to get worse before it got better. He asked one question, “Can your team put together a plan that will work?" I responded,” I think so, but no promises.” He took a couple of breaths, thought for a second, and then let out, “Let’s do it!"
If that were the whole story, it would perfectly capture the mind of dedicated social workers and caregivers who fight to the bitter end for a better life for their clients.
Often times we know that we are fighting a losing battle. Heck, I once had a long-time social worker say to treat it as a baseball season. If you are successful 30% of the time, you will be one of the best social workers ever. We know the decks are stacked against us. We know we may only taste the satisfaction of victory sparsely. Yet we march forward into an undefined space, not fearful of failure because it appears often, but we move in search of success no matter how elusive it may be. Yep, if that was the end of the story this social worker would have my respect for the rest of time. But that was not the end.
As the plan rolled out, the caseworker became more curious about the individual's mental health diagnosis and how to interact with them. He planned pieces of training, dropped off research for his staff, and even educated his client on what they were all doing to help them. This was met with curse words and throwing of objects at staff. He calmly told his client, it’s not right to change your plan without informing you and walked away while the temper-tantrum was thrown. And yes, a temper tantrum can be thrown at any age.
Our plan failed, blew up in our faces so bad that I chuckled about my abject failure. As I examined the data we had collected and incident reports from the staff, there was a knock at my door. I opened it and it was the same social worker who was in charge of the case.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“We try again,” I responded. He shut my door, sat down, and we got to work. To borrow another baseball reference, we were going to take another swing at it.
“Do you think we can figure it out?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I replied.
“So you’re telling me there is a chance?” he responded with a smile. We buckled down, talked strengths, weaknesses, what was working, and what had failed. Then he smiled and said, “This is fun and I cannot wait until we figure out the best way to help this individual.”