Helping Others Is What I Do Best

Helping people that don’t believe they need your help can be exhausting. Especially when those same people believe that you are punishing them and get violent towards you.

I am a Mental Health Rehabilitation Specialist (MHRS) for a residential mental health facility in San Diego, CA. We’ll refer to my job site as AMHS for this story.

As an MHRS I am the floor supervisor in charge of the building. I am responsible for ensuring that our residents (or clients) are getting the treatment, respect, and service they deserve.

Our clients are adults of various ages who suffer from mental health issues ranging from depression to bipolar to schizophrenia. Many of our clients don’t believe they belong in our facility and that we are holding them against their will. I guess, technically, we do, but it is up to their conservators and doctors to decide when they can be discharged. Not us.

Our clients can get violent. Not only with their peers but with staff, as well. When a client assaults another person or has an “outburst with potential for injury”, we call a “code green”, which means, “All qualified staff needed” to control the situation.

Each building is supposed to have at least 1 MHRS and 4 Psychosocial Rehabilitation Specialists (PSRS), plus nursing staff (1 LVN and 1 CNA) working during each shift. Unfortunately, we are very understaffed and tend to have 1 MHRS (me), 2 PSRS, and 1 LVN on my shifts lately. And we have had many code greens when short-staffed lately.

One day we actually experienced seven code greens in one shift! Six clients and three staff were assaulted that day. A client once spit on me.

So, why do we continue showing up to work day after day, despite being short-staffed? Despite knowing that an assault on one of us is imminent?

I believe that there is a fine line between sanity and insanity. Any one of us can easily be in the same position as our clients. I know this because my son has schizophrenia and I was with him throughout the onset of his symptoms.

I believe that the work we do is underappreciated by those that don’t understand what we actually do for our clients. I’ll admit that our jobs aren’t very physically or intellectually challenging, but I can tell you that our jobs can be extremely challenging emotionally.

I can tell you that not everyone has what it takes to work at AMHS. I’ve been at AMHS for just over a year and have seen many staff leave. We especially lost a lot of staff when we had a COVID outbreak in the facility. I was lucky not to have contracted COVID myself.

So, why do we choose to keep doing what we do? Why are we still here when others aren’t willing to stay?

I believe we stay because we know that we fill a role in our clients’ lives. We have clients in our facility that don’t have friends or family outside of the facility. Unfortunately, we are the closest thing to friends or family they have.

We stay because we see the difference we make in clients’ lives. We see clients grow more functional and stable. We see clients who are very delusional when they first admit to the facility. They have poor social skills and hygiene when they arrive. But when they leave, they are more cognizant and knowledgeable about their situation and their diagnosis.

For me, personally, this job has given me more insight into, not only my own mental health issues but into my son’s and girlfriend’s mental health, as well.

As I said earlier, my son has schizophrenia. My girlfriend has bipolar disorder and I suffer from severe depression. Learning how to help our clients with their mental health issues has helped me see my son, my girlfriend, and myself through a different lens.

I love my job because my job has helped me understand my son and my girlfriend better. I love my job because my job has helped me love myself a little more than I used to.