It is a Friday at 1:30 PM and I am at home wondering how I got here. I left my job as a supervisor at a mental health treatment facility almost a month ago and now I am wondering what I will do with myself next. I am sure that leaving the healthcare field was the right decision for me, but I wonder if it would have been the right decision if the system worked better, if it was really about making people better instead of making ends meet.
Every night I came home with knots in my shoulders so tight that I couldn’t sleep. My reproductive health was such a disaster that no one knew what to tell me. One year and $2,500 dollars of health debt later, I had only one diagnosis: stress. My husband couldn’t recognize me anymore—I was uptight, I wasn’t singing anymore, I wasn’t laughing. I went from being the happy go lucky boss with an open door policy to a boss that locks herself in her office and prays for the day to end.
I left work early one morning as I found that I could no longer control my frustration with the system in which I worked and made the best choice I knew how. I called every therapist in the phone book, looking for that magical counselor who didn’t deal with insurance. You see, my company offered my husband and I a high deductible health care plan in which we needed to reach our yearly deductible of $5,000 in order to have any health services paid for. The company couldn’t afford stipends to employees to receive counseling and I was told that I could speak to a crisis counselor over the phone free of charge. And so, in order to pay less than $150 per session (and be able to sit face to face with my counselor), I needed a counselor who wasn’t required to charge me the rate they charge insurance. A counselor who didn’t spend so much money on the overhead attached to obtaining insurance payments that she could see me at a sliding fee scale.
I found only two counselors who provided a sliding fee scale in a city with the population of 60,000 people and two hospitals. I can only imagine how difficult this would have been for someone who had no experience in the mental health field. I was lucky that one of them was a good match for me, because otherwise I would have gone without the basic mental health services that I, as a mental health professional, needed to continue to be healthy.
You see, it was rarely the kids, or their families that made me want to pull my hair out. I was working for yet another company that was so lost in the search for enough money to keep things running that they forgot to care for their people. And their people were dying. I was dying.
That weekend I went to see my mother in law who had been a pediatric nurse for over 30 years. We talked about my story and as I watched her, I remembered that I am not alone. After over 30 years of service, my mother in law was so physically and emotionally handicapped that she could no longer work. She was on extreme doses of pain medication daily and could barely stand or walk without it. She left her job and applied for disability. Her insurance company proceeded to spy on her in the community, taking video tape of her shopping and doing basic necessary functions to live. I will repeat, after 30 years of service as a nurse, where she worked nights and sacrificed important time with her family for her profession, she was spied on and wrongfully accused of disability fraud. This woman may have delivered your child safely one day when the Doctor was rushing in from the page. This woman may have sat by your side and held your hand while you lay in pain. This woman was, and still is, kind and caring and dedicated to making other people’s lives better.
Lucky for me, I have faith. Maybe a bit too much faith. I had faith that if I left my job and followed my heart I would find my way, and so I left my job and started watching the pennies fly out the door. I have faith that there is a solution and that we can find it together. I have faith that healers can work long professions in the field without loosing themselves. And I have faith that our community values our healers enough to make sure that they don’t continue to die.
As I begin this blog—my first ever blog—I am begging you to ask yourself, your friends, your spouses, your parents and your co-workers the following questions:
1. What will we do if our healers can no longer heal us?
2. How do we want to treat our healers in this nation?
3. What do our healers deserve for putting their lives on the line for others every day?
4. What can we do?
I hope for people who follow this blog to share their own stories. My intention is not to spend time on my story, but to collect stories from all over the country. We have a crisis in healthcare; how much of that crisis is because we don’t take care of our healers? How much of that crisis is because we spend so much time trying to make ends meet and negotiating with insurance companies that we forget to take care of our most precious resource: People who genuinely want to and have the ability to care for others. Share as much as you can and let me know what you think. Possibly we can blog our way to a solution.
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Thank you for this! I can't wait to hear what people have to say and I'll try to keep some hope for a solution. These caretaking/healer fields have needed a way to support their counterparts for WAY to long.
ReplyDeleteI too, have given this a lot of thought. I was in the social work field for 12 years doing a job that most people burn out in just a few years. I too found that it was not the families who caused me the most grief, but the upper management trying to survive; paying more attention to the bottom line than workers and our families who desperately needed help.In child welfare, where I worked helping drug addicted families. In January 2006, the US Federal government began to require more paperwork of child welfare agencies and offered less funds for the increased workload. At that time, as a worker, I began to spend more time behind a computer, than in the field helping and supporting clients. I was frustrated that I had become a paper pusher, to assure all dots were crossed and t's crossed, so the organizations would be able the funding they needed to stay a float. Child welfare was receiving less funding to do more work. As workers become stressed and leave. I too was feeling the effects health wise. I lost my uterus to the cause of helping others. There were moments at the computer key board I would have to think twice about why I was there and why I was doing what I was doing. I was headed for compassion fatigue as the effects of stress were setting in. But I loved working with others. I hung on as long as I could. Finally, I determined that in order to safeguard my health, I needed to return to school. My job ended, and I did return to study mental health counseling and move on to license as a Licensed Professional Counselor, another few years in the future.
ReplyDeleteMy desire as a social service worker and later as a counselor is to provide a refuse for public health workers where they can come to gain eduction, regarding how to uproot their stress daily, as they prepare for another day of service. I wish to teach the tools I learned to help others survive their demanding public service jobs, and when they are burned out, offer a community where they can live inexpensively as they prepare for another career, as a thank you for their dedication and hard work. I envision a community where issues of compassion burn out is addressed, healing occurs, and the time and space for a new career preparation is given.
Since leaving my job, I have been blessed with the knowledge I need to care for my mental health. Like physical health there are things we can do that will help us with our mental health. There are principles that one can follow as they learn how to holistically heal. I feel that public healers and servants need a place to go that is inexpensive and meets their needs for the cost of food, and a room to stay in. a base price of about $450 for a month's stay that includes food, room and board, and services for the mind, body, spirit and relationship healing. It is my desire to be a healers' healer. Helping and teaching other healers with the services they badly need.
We need our healers to be healthy. My deepest desire is to educate healers face-to-face. Teaching what has helped me to survive a public health job that has a burn out rate of three years, for 12 years. what I have learned helped me to find my balance again. and allowed me to keep healing.
Healer's we need you to be healthy as examples to others who are facing the same stresses and challenges. I am willing to teach all that I have learned from my experience with others. I desire to help and be of service. I am preparing myself to fulfill this goal and dream.
Rayelynne Booth