Mental health professional with mental health issues: Self-awareness

My name is Ebone Kimber and I am a mental health professional who has her own mental health issues. I had to copy and paste this sentence from another blog post and make it separate because it is two totally different subjects that I feel needs to be addressed with helping professionals way more often than it actually is discussed. When I was working in Therapeutic Foster Care it was brought up often when we discussed foster parents who had multiple failed placements and reacted to certain situations very inappropriately which lead to the question of whether or not it was ethical to request a psychological for foster parents. (I will remain silent on this topic until a later time, I am not trying to run everyone away!)

This is certainly not something that was discussed with us at Grad school. I mean they mentioned the importance of being aware of your interactions with clients, establishing boundaries and some brief discussion about how to avoid burnout, but burnout is only a layer of mental health and doesn't address other things. For example what if a social worker suffers from extreme anxiety attacks that are only manifested by the thought of someone close to her dying tragically and she works with a family that works hard to get back on their feet, she builds a bond with the kids and then one day she gets a crisis call from the family that the police had to be called because mom and dad got in an argument and the kids are yelling loudly and crying for their parents and this send her into an anxiety attack?

Now anyone out there have a psychological done before they were hired to be a nurse, social worker, counselor, teacher, mental health worker? Um, no and I am not saying we should, but I DO believe we should better prepare our upcoming and even current helping professionals with the hardships that may experience, the flashbacks they may experience. I will use myself as an example. I was promoted to supervisor while I was working TFC (Therapeutic Foster Care). At the time I was in a relationship that was already on its way to failure. I was okay most of the time, I did a pretty good job at keeping what I was going through under wraps and performed my job duties with excellence. One day my now ex called me, something had happened and he was accusing me of all of this stuff and for whatever reason that day my anxiety and depression was high and I was devastated. I had already been dealing with extreme feelings of sadness and abandonment in the relationship and this just blew up those feelings. I emailed my supervisor and left out of the office immediately and cried my eyes out in my bedroom for about an hour and a half. The trouble was I was scheduled later that day to shadow one of my workers I supervised on an intake to help make sure she did everything right. She called me because I wasn't at the office, I had forgotten to let her now I was leaving so I told her I would meet her there. I was a complete wreck emotionally. I don't know how made it through that intake, but I did!

I just believe we set ourselves up when we don't explore our own experiences and/or feelings. And I believe as seasoned helping professionals we have some type of obligation to help others feel okay about this because the lack of discussion about it is negatively affecting our profession as evidenced by the difficulty in finding appropriate foster parents and mental health professionals resulting in individuals who are physically, verbally and emotionally assaulting people in facilities as well as social workers, counselors nurses, etc who are being investigated for poor treatment of their patients, unintended and sometimes intended death of those we serve The helping profession is under attack and preventing us from doing the very thing that we are educated and trained to do, protect, serve, care for, counselor, educate and advocate.

This is one person's opinion. chew.on.it

#Mentalhealth #Helpingprofessional #socialwork #counselor #therapist #copingskills #selfcare