Friday, February 21, 2014

Schlock Therapy


For three years now, my day job (that is, the one I get paid for) has been in Behavioral Health.

Mental Heatlh.

A psych ward.

Now, at my previous facility (I have since moved halfway across the country), I worked first and second shifts, which meant that I had a lot of interaction with patients, something I kind of miss now that I’m a third-shifter. Anyway, on Tuesdays from three to four in the afternoon, there was a group scheduled, but there was no one to lead said group, which resulted in the patients simply sitting in the dayroom and watching a video. There were two problems with this: one, we only had two videos that actually worked and two, any patient who had been there before (and there were a few) or had been there for more than a week had probably already seen both of them. I felt bad for the patients, having to sit through the same two depressing videos over and over again, so I asked if there was something else we could do.