Week Three Down, Pt. One

Another week down.

This week I finally got to work with the adult population at the psych hospital. The pedophiles, drug addicts, and schizophrenics were a nice change from working with kids--though many of the kids were also sex offenders, drug addicts and schizophrenics, so I don't really know what I'm saying.

However, it is easier to be cynical about adult patients for some reason--and for some obvious reasons--and I need that cynicism. Many of the adults joke about being crazy, which is something that is too much for the kids to face down, worried as they are about labels. (One adult patient who pointed out during snack time that serving mixed nuts to a group of mixed nuts was kind of funny.)

In general, there is more humor among the adults. Less play, but more humor. 

I often have to bite my tongue to keep from using one of my favorite phrases: "That's crazy!" and yesterday, I had to keep myself from suggesting a game of Crazy Eights while I was playing cards with a couple of patients. I told my instructor later that we were going to have to rename the game "Behavioral and Mental Health Impaired Eights" and that the only reason I thought to suggest the game in the first place was because they had suggested a game of Old Maid, which I took as a knock against me personally.

See? Jokes!

After a morning of playing cards and sitting in on the unit meeting (rules rules rules), the patients went down to the gym and I, being allergic to all forms of exercise, stayed on the unit to interact with the handful of patients who also stayed behind. We continued to play cards and then someone asked me to photocopy some pages from a coloring book so that everyone could color. So I did and we did.

Then there was lunch. I get to leave the locked unit for lunch, so I went with the instructor to meet up with the rest of the students down in the cafeteria. Our lunches have gotten progressively longer, from a strict half hour in week one to a leisurely forty-five minutes plus. Everyone is getting tired.

In the afternoon, I returned to the unit. The patients had finished their lunch and started something called "Reflection Time," which basically means that they have to go to their rooms for an hour. I'm not allowed into their rooms, so I cozied up to a computer and looked at patient's charts. I'm glad I hadn't looked at patient charts earlier, because I had spent the morning playing cards and coloring with some dangerous people. But I suppose that's a risk you take in any card-playing scenario, on a locked unit or not.

In the afternoon, there was art. I went down to the art room and talked to people. I allowed myself to get roped into helping a patient paint an army of small ceramic aliens with metallic blue acrylic paint. When she was finished, she insisted that I take them all home, but I said I'd take one. She countered by wrapping up two of them and handing them to me.

It was getting to the end of my clinical day, or at least the part where I interact with patients. We have an hour long "post-conference" at the end of the day, during which we discuss various things involving mental health issues and patient care. Sometimes people bring up difficult patients or difficult situations. This time, we talked about the right to commit suicide, about involuntary versus voluntary admissions for patients with mental illnesses, and about a couple of problematic patients. I happen to have a lot of problems with how coercive treatment can be for patients with mental illnesses, so that tends to be my jag during post-conference.