be forewarned: sorry to say, this is long, and it's been building up for a couple years so i'm pretty angry. i'm usually all sweet and sensitive, but if you are super sweet and sensitive you should probably not read this one
i have just about HAD IT. maybe i should go back to looking for some frakkin secretarial pool job or something - except that won't pay my bills (including my med-school worthy student loans)
ok - job rundown:
1) a mental health rehabilitation service agency. Medicaid funded. RIDICULOUS. sure, they say it's salaried, they say it's an amount that works, they say the insurance etc start 1st of the month following 30 days employment. that was between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2007, in a city 2-3 hours away from where i was finishing up my MSW. so i do the training right after graduation, i get an apartment and move to a city where i know nobody the week between Christmas and New Year's, and i start working. NOPE, i only got paid for contact hours - which kinda requires the clients to actually BE THERE - which is impossible with these folks. i still tried to gut it out until the week that started with a Monday where i started feeling sick in the morning on the way to my first visit of the day, decided to go back home and just get my paperwork done (which had to be turned in that afternoon) ... by the time i drove the paperwork to the office i felt like i was going to pass out, and when i got home and took my temperature i had a 104 degree fever - which lasted the WHOLE WEEK. when i tried to go see a doctor, i had to go to the ER because that insurance i was supposed to have? i didn't have it. this was LATE FEBRUARY 2008. 1st of the month after 30 days employment - yeah right. THAT's what it took to make me realize i couldn't continue that job. didn't help that the boss had no clinical background and was pretty much insane. the only good thing that came from this experience was that it was during this time i met the person who has been doing my supervision and walking me through things up to now.
2) "discharge planner" for inpatient psych hospital. got the job fairly quick at least. great insurance, that actually DID start when it was promised. but - when they offered the job, when i started, and the ENTIRE time i was there, they told me over and over,
"you are not expected to do the discharge planning for the entire census, and don't let any one therapist make you do all of their discharge planning for them" (because there was at least one therapist who'd been there forever whose attitude was that she was too doggone good for doing her own discharges). but GUESS WHAT - two weeks later, they hire a new therapist (who had been working at the same agency as my job #1!) - and tell him repeatedly
"don't worry about discharge planning, you won't have to do any of it yourself because we've already hired someone who will be doing it all for you." LIARS! so, not surprisingly, some d/c plans get messed up, and ultimately they terminate me saying that "nobody is taking ownership of [mistakes]." NO FRAK - they sure didn't "take ownership" of their lies
... yet whenever i would offer to help share the load with other staff they'd shut me down. was there about 3-4 months, but the only good that came from this gig was that i finally earned enough to TAKE the stupid Masters level exam. passing here is a 70, the state board claims they pretty much never see scores above 80 - i made a 78. gave me the stupid idea i was maybe actually good at this stuff. but, now i know better - stupid exam doesn't mean ANYTHING.
3) since i didn't have any USEFUL experience from #1 or #2, i floundered for a couple or three weeks before i finally (thank God) found a place that would take a chance on me. therapist for a partial/IOP, adult and geri psych, rural. worked there for about a year. looking back, i just shouldn't have ever left. but then again ... five groups a day? or four groups and two admits to do because other therapists couldn't bring themselves to just SHOW UP for work?!? oh yeah - that's why i left. but as i said - their kindness in offering the job and taking a chance on my inexperience really saved my bacon. i finally got to really learn how to do groups. but hmm ... this may have been where i first got a glimpse of myself slipping into the scapegoat role.
4) so after months of pointing out that the expectations of job #3 were at times unrealistic, my supervisor calls me up and tells me there's an opening at one of the (two) offices of the agency where he has been working for about five years. so i interview, and i'm all excited and everything, they offer, i accept ... i wrap up all my loose ends at #3, use that one week of vacation time i had FINALLY earned, and start the new job June 2009. partial with on-site residential, adult psych and dual diagnosis. GREAT, i think - take the group therapy skills to the next level, develop some new skills, get supervision paid and more of it, this'll be great. EXCEPT when the other office (where my supervisor is) starts going haywire, one of the nurses leaves, they start firing staff, the program director resigns, and another nurse (who by the way hates social workers, already crossed my boundaries, and interfered with my ability to provide therapy to one of the clients on my caseload) gets to be in charge. somewhere in there it got bad enough that i had to get on meds (antidepressant and sleep). this other nurse starts really getting high on all her power, firing people and being crazy overall ... but the psychiatrist knows her from way back and thinks this nurse can do no wrong, the owner falls right in line with that to keep the doc happy, and meanwhile my supervisor is up to his eyeballs in alligators at the other office and can't/won't go to bat for me. not even when the crazy nurse terminates me after about six months. that was in early December.
i've applied more places than i can count. all my supervisor says anymore is that he was telling me back in May '08 that i should look into hospice work ... i applied for the one that was hiring back then and was told i didn't have experience. i applied for the one that advertised that they were hiring IMMEDIATELY after losing #4, had a really good interview - and THEN was told that they're "doing some restructuring in the social services department right now" and "not in a position to hire at this time." whatever. i've had some other good interviews, at least so i thought ... but nothing that turns into a job offer. my supervisor seems to want nothing to do with me anymore. i'm so angry and depressed i don't know WHAT to do, and i'm afraid the biggest mistake i made was even thinking of trying to be a social worker. i wonder what else would be better off without me. i can't even see the therapist i'd started seeing during #4, because i can't pay him and because my car needs about $1500 worth of work that i also can't pay for to be safely operable. tack on a bunch of things going wrong with my family that i really can't do anything about, but that put me right back in that scapegoat role ... everything feels awful, disempowering, unmanageable. all that, and i got into this profession because a) i used to think i could accomplish things and b) i used to have some faith. but that was another life, that was before Katrina, that was before i even knew i was ending up the scapegoat.
anyway. sorry this is such a long rant. i really needed to at least try to get this out ...
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