Blog. Roll.

Added some folks to the blogroll. Maybe I'll put some more non SW stuff on there.

The weird thing is that I was clicking around, following links, and there was one with links like the Cato Institute. Um, libertarian social worker? There isn't even a joke there...

Actual thing happening in the world

So, there's some kind of news on the New York LCSW front, but it's a bit hard to decode.

The history, through the veil of my own muddle: in the last ten years New York created a tiered licensure system like most states now have instead of everyone just being CSW. Ostensibly this would benefit um...clients? Maybe insurance companies?

In fact this would benefit people lucky enough to get grandfathered in as LCSW or those with the foresight to get it quickly, because suddenly a huge class of people were shut out from getting the credential that would enable them to bill insurance companies for private practice, but also to apply for a good number of upper level jobs.

The other beneficiary, it should absolutely be noted, is the licensing board in Albany and ASWB, both of whom could make a lot of new money off the licensing process. Win/win, although more accurately win/win/lose. If you graduated around 2004, you were in the lose, because unless you immediately got a job in what would turn out, several years later, to be one of the approved settings, you were out of luck. Pretty much permanently, because a lot of those approved jobs are clinic work that pays so little nobody in his/her right mind would go back to it after 4-5 years clawing a path up the shallow incline of the social work payscale.

A lot of people got screwed but good. There was an active listserv about it, which was hard to make a lot of sense of but satisfying for bitching, and in any case seems to have disappeared. A lot happened behind the scenes, apparently, though it's been hard to follow because it isn't exactly big news, well-covered. Some debt of gratitude is apparently owed to the NASW for advocating for the broadening of what is an acceptable setting, and this is the news that broke recently.

Me, I spent thousands of dollars and a lot of my time on private supervision. It was a gamble. My work isn't therapy, but for a while the rules were vague and everyone knew it and what you did was hire a private supervisor who saw what you did as clinically substantial enough that you should enter the elect class of those able to increase their earning potential and maybe someday pay off their debt. Everyone knew this. But, of course it could go wrong if someone decided that things were going to be more by-the-book, and it did.

The question here is what it means to create these divides and whether anyone actually benefits from them. It'll never be reformed, because things don't tend to go backward that way, especially when someone is profiting from it not doing so. But in a profession that already has a kind of beggars-can't-be-choosers thing going on in terms of who signs up, it is a wilfull act of worsening to tell a number of the smart ones who sign up anyway to go fuck themselves.

I have the letter somewhere in which I am told to go fuck myself. I wrote back and forth a number of times and was none too pleasant myself. But if I can find the letter, I'm posting the guy's name here and anywhere else I can think of as a tiny protest and a tiny publicization of one of the people who made this field weaker. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has thought of leaving rather than saying in my meek little social worker voice "oh well! Fucked again!"

Ah, here's some actual information. Which I will now read. Except, eh, part of me has given up on it.

Define "irony."

"(does Smearcase enjoy social work?… being a social worker?… hard to tell, at times)"

This from a gracious link coupled with a gentle critique yonder at Asocial Work.

I'm afraid this is going to prompt more me-blogging for the moment, but I can't resist the question, once asked.

It seems to me I may have had some idiosyncratic reasons for going into Social Work. I mean, it wasn't wholly divorced from the vague "tikkun olam"* impulse that drives a bunch of other people in, which by itself is a roller-coaster to burnout, but without which, why would you bother?

Well wait. Why do people go into social work? If I were to generalize from people I knew in grad school, I'd say "because they have an undergraduate degree in psychology and are 21 and aren't brimming with good ideas." If I were to turn an equally awful eye on the people I've met since graduating, I might say "because they really like kids and think that's enough."

Whatever my other mistakes, I was creeping up on 30 when I applied to my MSW program and, though I was on my way out of a PhD program I was hopeless at, and needed something new PDQ, I had put a reasonable amount of thought into the whole question. I had sort of jumped the fence because of the 2000 election from "vaguely lefty because Mom & Dad are democrats" to "passionately though still often ill-informedly lefty" and I think this had something to do with it as well.

Mostly, though, I had had some jobs and met some other people with other jobs and decided that the main thing I wanted was a job that didn't make the world any worse, but also didn't make me want to run screaming into the sea. (I was in Chicago at the time. Long run.) And here is where I made the world's most laughably naive mistake, which I will confess for your Schadenfreudian delectation.

Boiling this down to the form in which it makes me look most idiotic (as the card in Slacker says: take the most embarrassing detail and amplify it) I became a social worker because I didn't want to do paperwork.

How this bit of epistemological slapstick occured is that I dreamed of jobs where the substantial part of your work was also the valued part, where you didn't have to corporately market the spending of your minutes, and the job that most matched up in my head with this was psychotherapist. This had to do with going to therapists and not knowing what bullshit they had to do later to get paid by the insurance company, and by watching for instance The Sopranos where they never show Dr. Melfi screaming "THERE WAS NO OBSERVABLE BEHAVIORAL GOAL THIS SESSION IT IS FUCKING THERAPY NOT PUTTING TOGETHER A FUCKING IKEA TABLE" as she writes a progress note full of colorful Italian-American expressions and unrecognizable Sicilian pronunciations of lunch meats.

But for real. I thought: therapy is a job where you don't have to meet some standardized metric. You listen, you talk, you proffer Kleenex, and the session ends. Self-contained, non-commodified, perhaps non-commodifiable helpfulness. At worst, not that helpful. At best, fairly helpful!

And then the last eight years happened and I realized that if you get really lucky, you get a job where you do a little good instead of being a full-time bureaucrat with a quaint little hobby of talking to people when not tending to the papers. Granted, this is the low end, the "trenches" as we sometimes say. Higher up it may be different but I haven't smelled the air up there.

I mean therapy and casework can be really helpful, but you have to fight for it to be, and I have never relished fighting for what should be given. So I have not enjoyed a lot of it. I feel good about what I do, which I'm sometimes nervous just means I enjoy having some built in moral superiority, but it has been only intermittently satisfying.

Do I enjoy it? Eh, define "enjoy." As work goes, it seems relatively non-soul-crushing. I enjoy my coworkers. I enjoy the good cases I get here during the interview and some of the writing process when I'm in good voice so to speak, but not the collateral interviews with overly concrete parents, not the phone tag with programs, not the primitive ritual you participate in to get records. I enjoy getting my perfectly ok paycheck. I enjoy it as much as one can expect to enjoy a job, I think? I'm not sure it means much whether I enjoy it. I get more or less what I expect out of it.

There is once in a while the tingling sensation in the top of the head to be had from the feeling of having done something well. "I really helped him with behavioral interventions for anxiety" sez Me The Imaginary Therapist or "I really got what his story is about in a way the D.A. would have to be an Ayn-Rand-reading reptile not to be moved by" sez Actual Me. It's infrequent. When I find something likely to produce it more often, maybe I'll jump on it.

So that's the direct statement of my unsurprisingly discursive answer. Whether that makes the navelly directed gazing of the other entries more digestible, I do not know.

*Hebrew for "to heal the world." Why I feel compelled to include it in this form is anyone's guess. My lovely gentleman companion recently noted that Jews blame our worst characteristics on Judaism which--just between you, me, and my overly assertive Ashkenazic eyebrows--may be true. The thing is, we also ascribe all our best to it.

Things I have done lately

1) Explained the blogosphere to my therapist

2) Made a cufflink out of a paperclip so I could fake looking presentable in front of a judge

3) Penned a long entry for this thing about unions and my predictably mixed feelings about them but deleted it because it seemed incoherent even by my standards

4) Took two benadryl at work because I thought they didn't particularly have any effect on me like for instance, say, making me have to say to my officemate "close the door. I need to go to sleep on the floor" and then sleeping for an hour under my desk.

Sheep

Feeling sheepish about having whined for comments. Real entry later I think.

Extreme Sports

This is not about social work so much as work in general. It's on my mind right now because, well, the cat kept waking me from about what I'd guess was 5 a.m. to feed her, only it was 5 a.m. so I couldn't figure out what she might want and kept just pushing her aside, muttering obscenities you wouldn't usually say to a cat, and going shallowly back to sleep for three minutes until she redoubled her efforts. No, I promise this isn't going to be catblogging. We are not on Livejournal here. It's just that I am especially unable to perform ordinary mental tasks this morning, because I do not function at all well on sleep deficit.

The first thing to go is my ability to multi-task. I'm not good at it to begin with. I'm better at mono-tasking, which I believe in ancient times was called "working." Actually you know what this makes me think of is the time I interviewed to work at Large HIV Organization of Anonymity and I was totally digging the interviewer until she said to me "how are you under pressure? Because at Large HIV Organization, we don't multi-task, we hyper-task!" Or maybe it was mega-task. Something really self-dramatizing and redolent of corporatization and a professional ethos that makes me insane, about which I am using this entry to kvetch.

Well wait. This does turn out to be specifically about social work. Because I'm afraid there's an unpsoken, eh, thing* where we assume our jobs are going to suck the life out of us and accept it, so organizations don't make much of an effort to prevent this.

Here's another bad interview story. This time, substance abuse treatment, and at some point in the interview for the job (which I don't really want, which I'm not good at hiding) I stumble on the answer to a question and say "I don't really know how to answer that," to which my interviewer extremely sourly responds "well, this is a job interview." Later in the interview she'll ask if I have any questions and I'll say "sure, is this a good place to work?" and she'll say "I don't know how to answer that question" and I will spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn't say "well, this is a job interview." Sometimes late at night I consider trying really hard to remember her name, googling her extension at the agency, and leaving her a voicemail consisting of me screaming WELL THIS _IS_ A JOB INTERVIEW.

All I'm really talking about is the idea we have that we are going to be have enormous caseloads, have to mega-task, get minimal support, get Dangerfieldian levels of respect, and of course make too little to comfortably pay back our loans. This is of course the fault of agencies, and of a society uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might need help and so, to some degree, with the idea that anyone might get paid ("my hard-earned tax-payer money") to provide it. But I think we're complicit in it. We identify with our misery, make it part of our professional culture. Those sad fucks in Far the Fuckaway, they neither expected nor seemed to want better, you know? It's no way to live.

I don't know where one begins to address this. I'm just running it up the flagpole to see who salutes.

*Vocabulary is the second thing to go.

In which two clients misbehave very slightly

Yesterday was a Rikers day. I posted on facebook that those are like little holidays gilded with despair and burnout, but the fact of the matter is I can get up at 10 if I need to, or really even later, on a Rikers day. It takes a fucking long time to get there but...I'm getting ahead of myself. I did need to get up at ten. Twelve hours earlier I was in the Atlantic in my underwear, no kidding, and then you have to figure in slow service at Volna and two medium-length subway rides and it all adds up to, well yeah, fun, but also a stack of unwise choices for a Sunday night.

I had two clients to interview on Rikers, but the great news was that they were both at the same facility which, all told, cuts about an hour off a two-client day, I'll wager. Just check in at mission control or whatever the hell they call it, get on the 4 bus which happened to be right there, interview, interview, back on the 4, Bob's your incarcerated uncle, and you're done.

Both were good interviews, which means the same thing it meant last time I was yammering about this: able to describe what went wrong in some detail. More generally: able to participate actively in their own defense by doing things like providing the names for a bunch of people who will say "he can do better." One was kind of a fast-talking, I'd have to say charming young guy who breaks into cars for drug money. I'd anonymize that except it's quite anonymous already. The other was a middle aged addict who wants to leave New York but meanwhile breaks into cars for drug money. See?

The funny thing is that each one, in the course of a good, ready-to-use interview said something a client has never said to me. In each case it put me mildly on the defensive. Maybe both are worth thinking about for a sec?

Client A had refused my request to be produced at the courthouse because he works at night and wouldn't have gotten any sleep. Client A was really pissed at his attorney but didn't take it out on me, which plenty of them do. People with public defenders often assume that the things that suck about their situation are because of having a public defender, primarily the difficulty they have getting in touch with their attorney.

And some of this is probably fair, though they'd do better to blame the state for things involving funding and therefore caseloads.* Client A said "she's had my case six months and I've never met her." I kind of doubt this, as the attorney in question is diligent and organized, but I also don't know why he'd make it up altogether, though exaggeration seems likely. Exaggerating is just part of complaining. Ask me. I know.

Client A gets a bunch of credit for self-control or something like, since I actually started the interview by saying "listen, we're not in great shape because you refused my request and I have to have something done by your court date on Thursday." Had the roles been reversed, I would have been defensive and petulant, but the kvetching about his attorney actually didn't come up until the end. And suddenly I realize none of this has much to do with what he said to me but whatever, you may be used to this by now.

So his surprising statement happens this way. I ask him a question that is useful what feels like exactly 50% of the time, and I phrase it this way: "aright, this is kind of a dumb question but I always ask it because sometimes people have interesting answers. What do you get out of getting high? What does it do for you?" He doesn't have much of an answer [Client B does, by the way. 50/50.] but when I sense that from his fumbling around in no particular direction and reiterate--for reasons of my own need to feel like I'm not asking dumb questions--"ok, well, no big deal, sometimes it's not the best question," he says in a completely non-confronatational way "I've heard all these questions before, you know. A lot of times."

Of course I know. But, presumably because saying so does contain some baseline degree of frustration--not just with me, but with the way people with problems are treated when those problems are inconvenient for society--people never, ever say to me "ah right. Next you're going to ask about high school. Could we mix it up a little?" So I'm able to pretend that my interview is searching, original, a veritable cocktail party, a veritable appearance on Larry King. I said "I know you have" and left it at that because usually I'm pretty good at not making clients take care of me.

Client B said something less revealing but, to me, kind of funny. Basically started by thanking me for coming out to Rikers--all but a very few clients hate being produced, because they get them up at 4:30 a.m. or something. I have heard this so many times that I started saying to clients I did have produced "I'll try really hard not to have you produced again. I know they get you guys up in the middle of the night." Once in a while someone says "are you kidding? It beats the hell out of being at Rikers" but not as often as you'd expect.

So he starts out by thanking me sort of effusively for not putting him through that particular ordeal. But then he says "anyway it works out for both of us. I know when you guys come out here, you don't have to go in to the office for the day." I actually got kind of flustered and started to say how it's a schlepp to Rikers but trailed off with this because yes, it is in fact a tiny holiday gilded with despair and burnout.

It was just funny how discomfiting it was to have that acknowledged. We want gratitude, of course, and there is a sadistic element to this wish, especially when it's frustrated. In a worse mood, let's say if I had ended up going to Rikers in the rain (newsflash: not fun!) I might have gotten frustrated with him, maybe given him a shorter interview though I think/hope not. But, his luck: he had already charmed me a little. So I just took it home to think about and maybe blog about, which I have now done.

*By which I just mean that's where the blame is properly lain. If you can't get in touch with your attorney when your court date is coming up, of course you're not going to write to your senator.

On a stupider note

The Red Dress

I always saw, I always said
If I were grown and free,
I'd have a gown of reddest red
As fine as you could see,

To wear out walking, sleek and slow,
Upon a Summer day,
And there'd be one to see me so
And flip the world away.

And he would be a gallant one,
With stars behind his eyes,
And hair like metal in the sun,
And lips too warm for lies.

I always saw us, gay and good,
High honored in the town.
Now I am grown to womanhood….
I have the silly gown.

--Dorothy Parker

Some little boys dream of machine guns and some little girls dream of tiaras and then for fun, sometimes it's reversed. Fortunately there are other options in between.

I'm not making this up: since I was a kid, I wanted an office. My parents were professors and my dad in particular had an office with lots of interesting-looking books and a bulletin board with pictures and lefty political buttons and a desk drawer full of cup-o-noodleses. We sometimes walked over there from our university-adjacent lab school and waited to be driven home to what you could just barely call the suburbs, and one time Dad was late and in feigned terror/seekrit delight we plotted how we would make it through a harrowing night marooned at an office not far from the mean streets of East Jesus.

There's nothing of clinical or otherwise professional interest to say in conjunction with this, just I have the silly office now* and secretly, when my officemate isn't here and the day is over and I'm not even pretending to get things done anymore, I love the place. I have a bulletin board with pictures and (now rather rueful) buttons from Inauguration '08 and a trillion tchotchkes work friends and I started buying for each other on trips. I sometimes stop in here on a hot day because it's like a tiny pied-a-terre, perhaps an orteil-a-terre, a quiet place to duck out of the city.

There's a shelf whose contents ought to be somehow diagnostic, lots of clinical books I don't touch, a stack of opera CDS, a lint brush, various digestive remedies that don't work, four kinds of tea, and two small empty tequila bottles (Russian more amusingly says "two small bottles out-from-under tequila") that I drained surreptitiously at critical moments. On the wall, my broken Risperdal clock which may be right only twice a day but you'll pry it from my cold dead fingers. My license. A map of the world from Doctors without Borders, because in aforementioned critical moments, I like to pick a place I've never been and pretend I'm there despite my dread of travel.

I've actually spent a few minutes this morning making the place look less, er, symptomatic, because I'm not unconvinced of the perhaps behaviorist notion that the physical gesture of smiling can and sometimes must precede actual happiness so perhaps the office of a functional professional will encourage things like motivation and efficiency, though I have my doubts. I guess the next step is to take the grocery bag full of shirts to the dry cleaner but they exist in the gap between my newfound sartorial aspirations and my income. (Dry cleaning: not cheap.)

(((Very most tangentially, I have stolen twice in my entire life, both times out of spite rather than need. I just looked up at the books on the shelf and realized that I absconded from the Fuckaway Center of entries past with a book called The Adult Psychotherapy Progress notes Planner, which I have not once opened. Also up there: a bunch of analytic writings I wonder if I'd understand anymore, reference materials for a few languages the most interesting of which is a grammar for Haitian Creole that was really hard to find, and a few books that have nothing to do with anything but got exiled from my home for reasons of space. On days when I'm not really present in this job anymore, I think apprehensively about the moving on process and lugging all these books away to my next office.)))

*though not a university office, alas. The world was spared the misguided misprofessorialization of me, the would-be Dr. Smearcase when I dropped out of my PhD program.

More Postcards from the Drug War

When I took this job we had an orientation or maybe it was just an early training I went to where we discussed our worst fears about our work and our clients. In retrospect, this was both a profoundly considerate impulse on the part of management and maybe something that should have been done in a different context.

What I mean about context is this, I guess: I have said to interns over and over "you're not a therapist to your clients. You'll meet them a few times. You have to find a good balance between giving them space to really open up so you can make a good case on their behalf and not opening up a can of worms you're not going to be there to [oh god, all I mean is "deal with" but I've started an analogy here and I'm not sure what it is one does with worms, least of all canned ones.]"

As usual, not the point. We did indeed discuss our fears about our clients, and I think most people said suicide, which is a reasonable thing to top your list with. Perhaps trying to be different in resistance to go-around-the-room exercises, I skipped right over suicide and said "I don't want my clients to be sent to a facility where they're just kind of there so someone can say they're being treated, but nothing worthwhile is really happening." Or words to that effect.

My uber-supervisor is someone I have a somewhat vexed relationship with, but she clearly and immediately understood my Worst Fear and gave me a nice piece of shorthand for it. "You don't want to feel your client has been warehoused," said she, perfectly. I've thought of the term a hundred times since then, succinct and also evocative of just the right despair.

My generation does a lot of job-hopping. I don't know, we get bored easily? On alternate days when my near-ideal work environment no longer makes up for the deadening tedium of having done the same thing for almost four years, I wonder about working in residential substance abuse.

This will never happen, mind you. A dear friend from grad school visited me two weeks ago and, sitting in a kitschy ice cream parlour on the Upper East Side, we talked about the fact that social work kills the impulse toward the broadening of horizons--neither of us, we agreed, would be capable of the financial hit we'd have to take to be more of a generalist in the field. I think I'd lose 20% of my salary if I took an entry-level clinical job now. Never, ever gonna happen.

But it's a shame. My old officemate spent years working in substance abuse treatment and loved a lot about it, I think specifically the fact that progress is observable, a detail that taunts those who have worked in ordinary counseling where change takes forever and may or may not be a result of the treatment itself.

Beyond that, I refer people to drug treatment constantly. It's a strange, blind process since I've never seen the inside of a drug program. I've gone on program visits, but that's about it. I make my judgments on where to refer people based on 1) who has been responsive and easy to deal with in the past, 2) conventional wisdom around the office, and 3) my conviction that it probably doesn't matter. 3 is obviously something of a problem.

Eh, I don't know. I have someone coming in later today who completed his program and then fucked up in some small way and is in hot water. I wonder what they're going to do to him. Send him upstate? Tell him to do another program? It's perplexing to watch, but prosecutors really do seem to have this idea either that treatment is a kind of punishment, incarceration-lite (which maybe it is) or that--as in newspaper scandals, if anything goes wrong, you go into rehab and that fixes your addiction/habit of sleeping with young girls/habit of sleeping with a gender your constituency would prefer you didn't sleep with/problem Not Otherwise Specified.