[1025] Bang

Do I have to talk about it? No, not really, but it’s probably more unique and entertaining than what you’ve been up to today.

I feel like it never fails. When I think I’m going to be “done” with my day, wrap up the last of my responsibilities and psychologically transition into the headspace that anticipates drinking beer at Winterfest and seeing a comedian, pain and tragedy knee cap me at the finish line. Mine is a profession where I’m walking the razor’s edge of others’ sense of stability. A “normal” work day might end with someone genuinely expressing how convinced they are that today is the day to die.

There’s procedures, of course. When someone tells you in 5 different ways with a tone that leads you to believe they’re serious that they’re on the suicide train, you’re supposed to get their answers to a questionnaire! The questionnaire will then determine if you need to create a “safety plan.” The ensuring that you have this timely documented will protect you from liability when you’re otherwise ill-equipped counselor might open themselves up to (not really) consequences if they botch the engagement.

This is what I’m paid less than inflation-adjusted minimum wage though for, right? Not to just cope with derailing where my head wants and needs to go for “self-care,” but juggle life and death? You know what you tell a person who’s on the verge of killing themselves? It’s a gamble. You’re not in a conversation or negotiation, you’re on the other end of a desperate confessional. And your alleged supports are tried-and-true social-working despots who know well in advance that they can’t really save anyone nor is it necessarily their fault if someone dies. It’s not an unpersuasive or unreasonable place to come from, but it is woefully incomplete.

This is the kind of danger you run into though when you take this “wide net” cavalier approach to admitting people under the auspice of “some help is better than no help.” It’s presumably better for profits or for your self-conception that you’re reaching more people, but it plays out as a series of cascading mini catastrophes. We attempt to “counsel” people in groups sometimes comprised of people who haven’t been in the program for even 2 months. During that 2 months their attendance might be miserable, and we might discover they have some pretty severe mental health concerns that this environment is in no way equipped to deal with.

What happens to the group? They see someone “nodding,” and they have no idea if they’re just tired or high. They hear someone slurring. Is it a speech impediment, or are they drunk? They hear someone manically ramble. Are they just high energy? An anxiety disorder, unmedicated, turns a member incredibly hostile. Depression, abusive relationships, and ongoing illegal activity in the misappropriation of medication gets downplayed as mere details undermining the broader effort.

This last week I’ve had people do a timeline exercise. They put emotionally compelling instances from birth until today on a list, their ages next to them, and then we proceed to develop questions to unpack what’s on the line. If you have a traumatic memory at 6 and then the next one at 18, what was going on in those 12 years between? If you have 7 tear-inducing thoughts all coupled over a short period, who was around? Who died? Did you move? Did you drop out? Did you switch from incidental use to harder things? It gives you a chance to create a flow that unpacks deeper memories and magnify areas of your life you’ve condensed in the stories and habits of your self-conception today.

I’ve talked with some of my clients for 7 months. I’ve learned more about them in one week with this exercise than I have the entire rest of my time. Everyone’s been molested. Everyone’s had their favorite and most important emotional support die on them. Everyone’s witnessed or on the receiving end of violence. Everyone’s still blaming themselves for things they did as children. Human depravity knows no bounds, and it’s working its way through our bodies and minds like air and water.

You know how you conquer addiction? Incorporating the feelings associated with all of your disassociated memories. You break, by recognizing and redirecting, the automatic response to mask, blame, hide, or self-destruct. You know what you can’t really do surrounded by people you don’t trust 5 to 15 minutes at a time once a week? That isn’t to say there aren’t productive groups or people who take thing seriously and consistently attest to the utility and appreciation they feel. But we’re playing doctor. They have brain boo-boos, I provide the Band-Aid version of surgery.

My suicide-ideating client said she needed to be locked up somewhere. She had been thrown into her dark place by getting treated incredibly unfairly by probation, a therapist at shithole-doesn’t-begin-to-describe-it Centerstone, and against her best effort to keep it together in spite of her mental health problems and relatively new introduction to the program. She needed to take a call from probation while we were talking. She didn’t respond to my texts for 10 or 15 minutes, so I called in a wellness check. She didn’t meet their criterion for forced detainment and transportation, and she agreed to go to the psych ward. She told me she lived 20 minutes away and would text me or have the hospital do so when she arrived. She had packed and said she was leaving as we hung up.

An hour later, I text her asking if she made it, she responds she’s in the town that’s about halfway there. I’ve heard nothing else back.

As with most people, I can usually identify when you’re cursed with being too smart for your own good. She’s highly emotionally intelligent and intuitive. She’s one who came into groups swinging with awesome contributions and no pussy-footing about discussing explicitly what she needed. That kind of gusto and confidence is, unfortunately, a red flag in these kinds of environments. She’s not an entitled rich person with every reason to believe undying delusional self-confidence is going to result in continued unearned prosperity. She’s desperate. She’s like my guy who complimented and thanked me for how much help my advice was contributing to fixing his marriage, and wouldn’t you know it, he wants to be a counselor too! And he would greatly appreciate any information I could provide.

The next day, he’s calling me and the office over and over again, before work, and while I’m in group, panicking over slipping up and failing a drug test while on probation.

Then it comes out his mental health, that he was in control of on medication, is not where it needs to be because he can’t find someone to prescribe him what he has been taking for 6 years. My advice, 15 steps ahead of what he needs to focus on, is twisted into this “help” that realistically barely, if ever, accesses the roots of any given individual. I’m expected to maintain a certain level of persistent positivity and “support,” as the waterfall of unaddressed and potentially un-addressable issues eeks out over months while we’re otherwise talking ourselves in circles.

While you’ve been reading this, have you just been screaming to yourself the “obvious” answers and conclusions I should draw from this? Are you so deeply thankful that the people I describe aren’t you? Do you thump your own tale of tragedy and mental health struggles that keeps anything new neatly boxed in and away from your responsibility? I do. I call every person their own black hole for a reason. I write dispassionately, forever, because they are variables on the stream of what I’m conscious of, but not to be blamed for. I care, right? At least enough to not let my “intellectualizing” turn into the psychopathic antagonism or negligence of my colleagues and colleague-adjacents.

The struggle is not the notes. The struggle is not the hour or two I have to do something annoying, be it in service to the housekeeping of the job or to try and get someone pointed in a not-dead direction. The struggle is with the shape systems are destined to take when people are at the helm. Is this the best we can do? If she’s dead tomorrow, do I shrug it off and say, “Hey, I tried!” and point to the risk assessment I attempted to do? You know, the thing that’s hard to interject between each line that might then signal a “click” and destroy your ability to keep her talking after reducing her to the paperwork.

I don’t take any special pride or feel some sense of nobility as a feeble Band-Aid. If, and it’s a big if, you encounter people genuinely interested and capable of “fixing” themselves or “stabilizing” and creating whatever their version of “better” is, they’re still human. They can persuade themselves they’re worth nothing, the effort doesn’t matter, no one cares, and it all ends as the inevitable heat-death of the universe. And they’re right. They’re not more or less right than if they described the exact opposite opinion of themselves on some transcendent upward spiral. But they’re right enough for them in any given moment that they wish to be convinced of what they say or feel, and wish to justify their next act.

That we feel equally justified to persist in our ego and psychological trappings forces me to consider the desperate psychosis of the culture writ-large. You see, in reality, we’re complicit co-conspirators in the unsustainable exploitation of literally every resource. You can chalk it up to law-of-the-jungle and natural cycle dynamics if you please. You can extoll the virtues of capital and technology to obscure the underlining intentionality and machinery. You can maintain a persistent moral delusion and solipsism or be born dumb enough to never find yourself even considering. We must wish to die too if this is how we’ve chosen to go about caring for one another.