Stress Man

I've been stressed to the gills for several weeks now so I thought I'd write about it in hopes of alleviating it. I get like this in the middle of every semester so far. It feels like that guy in Hellrazer with the fishhook things that are pulling at his skin from every direction. I keep waking up at 3-5am with my mind racing about one or all of these things:

Balancing the crazy schedule. I have four 3-hour classes per week plus 2 full days of internship at the hospital. My lovely bride is taking care of us by working at least 40 hours/week, sometimes more. I have assignments to complete and research papers to write. Daycare is absurdly expensive and generally not part of our child rearing philosophy so someone always has to be at home with the kids. Managing all that puts us both on edge. At least it only lasts until next April.

Too much damn school work. This is actually a bit better this week. I just got beyond the mid-semester crunch and I only have a few small assignments to worry about this weekend. Several big papers coming up though. Just the level of reading they ask us to do each week is comical. Every week it totals out at about 150-200 pages of articles / textbook chapters per class. That's sometimes about 1,000 pages over all per week for all classes. I've resolved this issue by simply not doing the reading anymore . We don't have in class exams so I only have to read enough to write the papers or take-home exams so there's no point in trying to get everything done.

Our professors know that we've all stopped reading and they joke about it in class. They are apparently pressured by the "curriculum committee" to have us read as much as possible so they give us 3-6 textbook chapters and 8-10 articles per week to read just to pad their syllabus and satisfy this committee. Some of them are kind and put asterisks by the articles that are actually important and not just part of the scholarly game they have to play.

Will I get a job that can support my family? Once April of next year comes around I have to get my ass back out there and re-enter the workforce. Homeschooling necessitates one parent spending the majority of time at home. This means that my income will have to maintain a relatively comfy middle class lifestyle. Very difficult in a country where two incomes are usually required just to keep folk's heads above water. And, for some reason I decided that being a social worker was the career to do that with.

I don't really feel bad about leaving my old job, though. I might, except that the corporate / cubicle life I used to have literally gave me recurring thoughts of suicide every Sunday night as I dreaded having to return there the next day. I have a hard time thinking of a more spiritually vacant, soulless place than a cubicle farm at an automotive company. I did have the chance to work with some really nice people who I respected and admired, but automotive consulting just wasn't for me. I'm really happy so far with my new career choice. I really, really like helping people / families in times of personal crisis. It just sucks that it pays for shit.

Is school teaching me what I really need to know? A whole classroom of us were talking about this the other day. It has become obvious that the things we are being taught in class are not preparing us for our future careers. A lot of my fellow students are very angry about this. Our actual training comes from our internships. The actual "school" part of our time is so far not very helpful. Interesting sometimes, but not helpful. For example, drug and alcohol addiction is a pretty damn huge problem out there in the real world and one which I will have to help people with in some way on a pretty regular basis. You'd think that my very prestigious school would know this and would focus a lot of energy in helping us to understand addiction and how to help people with addictions. Nope. I just found out that they recently added one elective class in the subject. I'm going to try to take it next semester if it fits into my schedule.

Also, I keep waiting to be taught a specific type of therapy. Instead, they keep teaching us about therapy in vague, superficial ways. They teach us that specific theoretical approaches exist, and we discuss each of them for an hour or so in a class here and there, but that's it. Apparently graduate school is not the place to go for detailed and specific knowledge in a subject matter. Apparently you get this kind of knowledge and experience on the job.

What freaks me out is the idea that I'll need to have that knowledge BEFORE I'm able to get a job.

I like my current internship, but it makes me really sad. I'm at a local hospital where I have two sets of responsibilities.

First, I do what they call "hospital social work" with kids who range in age from a few weeks to 18 years old. I interview these patients and their families to determine one or both of two things.

First, I try to see if they need help with anything. This can range from getting them bus tickets to helping them find furniture because their home burned down (hence, the visit to the hospital). Sometimes people don't have insurance or they don't feel like their child is getting proper medical care or something. Second, I have to determine if the reason the child is in the hospital is due to abuse or neglect at home. So far I have called CPS (Child Protective Services) twice on different families.

I hate this part. I knew when I went into this field that I wanted nothing to do with taking people's kids away. Let's face it, foster care is not a guarantee of a non-abusive, non-neglectful environment for children.

We worked with a family last week who was simply poor. They were not abusive. They were not neglectful. They were just broke and had lost their home and had no place to go. One of my colleagues spent all day trying to find them a shelter to stay in, but there wasn't one. In the end she called CPS and had this family's 11 year old son taken away by the police because we couldn't allow him to be living outside on these cold November nights. My colleague had no other choice. The mother, father and child were all crying and trying to hold on to each other while the cop led the child away and took him off to a foster care.

The family said that someone stole their SSI check and this set off a series of events that left them homeless and childless. All we know about the end of the story is that the child was taken away from them and that the mom and dad were asked to leave hospital property because they had no business there anymore. They walked out into the cold night with no money, no car, no home and without their son. Yay us! I didn't hear about this case until after the fact. I'm not sure if there's anything I could have done differently.

The other part of my internship is more of what I'm actually interested in, but it still makes me sad. I think I've mentioned this before, but just to clarify....

The hospital offers psych counseling to children and teens who have witnessed really violent things and are experiencing symptoms of PTSD / trauma. In some cases the kids might have watched while one parent murdered another, or they might have witnessed severe domestic violence. In some cases they might even have been the victims of attempted murder, where their father stabbed them several times and then committed suicide, leaving them for dead but instead they had it in them to call 911. These are kids. The cases I mention above involve children 3-8 years old.

These kids are experiencing a huge amount of grief, but beyond that they are terrified. They often have trouble sleeping or eating. They have recurring stomach or head aches. They might be very angry on top of scared and are acting out at home or at school.

What we do is try to initially address to fear; to create a very safe environment and to create a trusting and accepting relationship in which to help them grasp and understand just how afraid they are... to reassure them that whatever hurt them before isn't going to hurt them again. If we can do that, then we can try to begin addressing the grief itself. There is an organization nearby that offers specific training to become a "Trauma Consultant." I'm thinking of getting this certification after I graduate.

The kids I work with are often the same age as my kids. This creates a lot of anxiety for me because I see these kids at the hospital and I imagine my own children going through horrible experiences like this. It is irrational, I know, but it freaks me out.

Every day at the hospital I see so much extreme pain... families at their worst and going through a kind of hell I have a hard time imagining. Last year, working with adults with schizophrenia, I found it easier to separate myself from their situations. This year, because I'm working with children and families, it is harder to not become emotionally involved and to take those feelings home with me.

I want to help them, and I think we do help, but what I want to do is take their pain away and make it "all better", which just isn't possible. Still, this is so much better than my old job. Despite my stress lately, I'm a much happier person now than I was 2-3 years ago. Even if I can't do everything to help the people I'm working with, just trying to help as much as I can makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile in the world. I never felt worthwhile in my previous career.

Ugh... apologies for allowing this post to get so long. There was just a lot on my mind this morning and, as usual, I couldn't sleep worth a damn.