My heart's been hard, I have been blind, I have often worked so hard to keep You from my mind
One of my clients jumped of the Disraeli Bridge on Thursday night.
She'll be okay. She only jumped from 30 feet...she was high and showing off impulsively not trying to kill herself. She had to have spinal surgery though and she has some other fractures. She's on the trauma surgery ward right now...drugged out of her mind. The staff are afraid of her, and they have a right to be, she's very psychotic at the moment besides being in a lot of pain. She has a full time security guard and is on so many medications that she is not awake a lot.
What bugs me though, is how we as a staff reacted to it. And I'm not sure it bugs me so much as puzzles me, which is why I thought I'd write about it and see what you guys think. The way we reacted to it, is that we didn't. Sure, we were concerned, and my supervisor and I went to visit today (she was too drugged up to know), but there really wasn't a big reaction. People inquired, but it's not like we sat down and had a "wow, a client jumped off a bridge time to debrief" meeting.
Maybe though, as social workers (and other professionals) that's how we have to be. We can't respond to stuff like that. I mean besides this over the weekend one of my clients got kicked out of addictions treatment and another got breached on parole for using solvents, and that's just the beginning. We learn as social workers to have boundaries, to keep our feelings away from our work. And it's good. Our client base at PACT is extremely volatile and stuff happens all the time. If we let each and everything affect us we would be in BIG trouble.
Anyway, just something I've been thinking about...
She'll be okay. She only jumped from 30 feet...she was high and showing off impulsively not trying to kill herself. She had to have spinal surgery though and she has some other fractures. She's on the trauma surgery ward right now...drugged out of her mind. The staff are afraid of her, and they have a right to be, she's very psychotic at the moment besides being in a lot of pain. She has a full time security guard and is on so many medications that she is not awake a lot.
What bugs me though, is how we as a staff reacted to it. And I'm not sure it bugs me so much as puzzles me, which is why I thought I'd write about it and see what you guys think. The way we reacted to it, is that we didn't. Sure, we were concerned, and my supervisor and I went to visit today (she was too drugged up to know), but there really wasn't a big reaction. People inquired, but it's not like we sat down and had a "wow, a client jumped off a bridge time to debrief" meeting.
Maybe though, as social workers (and other professionals) that's how we have to be. We can't respond to stuff like that. I mean besides this over the weekend one of my clients got kicked out of addictions treatment and another got breached on parole for using solvents, and that's just the beginning. We learn as social workers to have boundaries, to keep our feelings away from our work. And it's good. Our client base at PACT is extremely volatile and stuff happens all the time. If we let each and everything affect us we would be in BIG trouble.
Anyway, just something I've been thinking about...