I'll probably keep this post short because not much has happened this week. Really, after being at the Obama rally two weeks ago and seeing Rob Pattinson last week, I would have had to fuck Johnny Depp to top all of that. My life is so awesome, I know.
Anyway, I do have stories about this one class I'm taking. We have to take a course on "Vulnerable Groups" because we're obviously all sheltered, rich babies who know nothing about "those less fortunate." My personal opinions on our curriculum aside, they did make this class more interesting. Instead of being talked at for a couple hours a week, the coordinators of the class arranged 20 different sites for us to choose from. We would pick our top five sites and they would assign us to one of them for three weeks. There were some genuinely cool ones. I picked a rehabilitation center for brain injury patients as my top choice, which I had heard great things about. Planned Parenthood was also listed as a site, and we could watch them counsel women on abortions and watch them perform abortions. That was my second pick. Of course, I got my last choice.
I was assigned to a substance abuse group session at a residential facility. I figured I may not be very interested in it, but I would most likely be prescribing people narcotics in a few years. It would probably be handy to recognize signs of substance abuse and maybe learn a little about counseling drug-seeking patients. Two other classmates were part of my group, and we headed up together for our first session.
We got to the residential facility, which, to be honest, I thought it would be a rehab center. I was wrong. Residential facility does not mean rehab. It was a care facility for severely mentally ill people. Surprise! This was not just a substance abuse group. It was a group for psychotic people who abused drugs. Somehow - I really do not know how this happened - but they failed to mention the part where these people were completely disabled, not by their substance abuse problems, but by schizophrenia or severe depression. Now, I know substance abuse and mental illness go hand in hand, but there are varying degrees. I have done a lot of work in psychiatry for a second year, and I wanted to see more substance abuse recovery this time. And I don't know if any of you have tried speaking with schizophrenics, but it is not very fruitful if you have no idea what you are doing and you are creeped out by their blank stares.
Also, the care facility was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Apparently, not much has changed since then, except we no longer lobotomize people for shits and giggles (and yet, ECT lives on...). There was a very distinct smell, which was some combination of shit, cigarette smoke and disinfectant. There was the stale, hospital-like atmosphere trying too hard to be warm despite the fluorescent-lighting and bright white walls and floors. And then there were the mentally ill people. Just very Cuckoo's Nest. I don't know how else to describe it. There were the lower functioning ones who sat away from the group, shaking their heads, laughing and talking to themselves. That was creepy. Most of the group members were nice and seemed to care, but I don't think they realized that we were not actually doctors. We got a lot of questions about how they could get out of the facility. One guy wanted our contact information, including our addresses, which was frightening. I don't know why people think we know things.
Then we got the random comments that left us speechless. One guy talked about how people have receivers in their heads telling them what to do. There were a lot of conspiracy theories about how the staff at the facility were withholding money or trying to kill them. The winner was the story, which one of the patients shared freely, about how she pushed her husband out of a second-story window. He was fine, but died two days later...Yeah. I'm speechless. We also learned that most of the psychiatrists working at the facility were committing fraud by milking Medicaid for care they were not really providing. Good times.
I am just so at a loss as to what to think about this. It's not like I didn't know these things happened or that these sorts of people existed. I worked at a free clinic in Berkeley for a year, and lived there for five years, so I know there are crazy, poor people out there. I just do not know what I am supposed to get out of this. I am not interested in psychiatry, and even if I were I doubt I could help anything. It's clearly not making me more compassionate, which I think was the point of this whole thing. I guess it gave me something to blog about, though. I'll take that.
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