As my first month as a "consumer recovery specialist" with the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services come to an end, my thoughts on where I am in life and what exactly I'm supposed to be doing have absolutely been all over the place. I accepted the position thinking that my experience over the last 17 months has given me the ability to empathize and show compassion to the people that seek our services in some of the darkest times of their lives.
It didn't take long for me to start to wonder "am I in over my head?" The patients that come to the Oklahoma County Crisis Intervention Center struggle more with severe mental illness than addiction struggles that I'm used to working with. My experience is more with those who struggle with drug addiction or alcoholism and not so much people who struggle with things like schizophrenia. It has been very easy for me to leave after an eight hour shift at work thinking to myself that I'm not having any sort of positive effect on these patients. It's frustrating.
I had been working on this post for well over a week, and I thought it was almost done. I stepped away from or it for a day or two and just came back to it... it was way too much and it was just a bad case of word vomit. It was a good representation of what was going on in my head, though. After several good conversations that I've had over the last day or so, not to mention being off for a couple of days, I feel a lot more calm and collected. So I decided to scratch it and start fresh.
My mind keeps going back to a presentation that I heard while at the "New Employee Orientation" that was held at the central office two weeks ago. The presenters seemed like they would trade off between talking about the more boring department policies and procedures or talking about the deeper reasons of why we are here or how we're helping the community as a whole. It was pretty easy to see that there is an overwhelming need for mental health services and the resources just aren't there. The services that are needed sometimes make the difference between life and death.
One presenter got up and spoke about how sometimes it is difficult to see that we're making any sort of difference or progress. It is important to remember that these people we work with are carrying so much stress, trauma, illness and other baggage that they can't do it alone. Our job is to walk along side them and carry their hope for them. After they seek services and make that progress, we can hand that hope back to them to carry on their own. That simple, but powerful explanation of what we're doing stuck with me for the rest of the orientation and (luckily) has stuck in the back of my head since then. I think it's made a difference on the fact that I'm still hanging on during this difficult transition.
So, my current position isn't going to necessarily see people "cured" of their illnesses or I'm not going to be seeing something similar to seeing a patient get their one year sobriety chip. My position is down in the trenches, during those first few days. These people don't see any hope or that it can get much better. My job is to show them that smile, listen to their stories and share mine as well. I'll hold on to that hope until hopefully they can hold on to it themselves.
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