Back to the beginning. As I said at the outset, I started at Chrysalis House as a practicum placement my senior year in college, and, as I also stated earlier, that education really did nothing to prepare me to work at the shelter. Being almost 22 years old, however, I didn't know that.
The first few weeks were somewhat awkward since Theresa, the director, didn't really know what to do with us. One time we hung posters around town advertising the support groups. Since the college loaned us a car to get to the shelter, we were also asked to run the residents around on a lot of errands. It felt like busy work to Cynthia, my fellow intern from the psych practicum, and me.
At one point we decided we would hold a parenting group for the shelter residents. Today I'm amazed at the chutzpah it took to think that we could do that. We were two idealistic college students who clearly did not have children or any similarity to the residents' backgrounds. I think we only tried it once and learned our lesson.
We must have said something to Theresa about feeling underutilized. What we didn't know at the time was that taking people on errands was actually a fairly significant chunk of the real job since there was no effective mass-transit system. The other thing we didn't know was that Theresa had a sweet, passive-aggressive edge. I remember her turning to us one afternoon and saying she had a special task for us. There was a woman at the homeless shelter who reported being in a violent relationship, so the homeless shelter, Safe Haven, wanted to know if she could come to Chrysalis. The problem was that, although she was receiving treatment, she was schizophrenic. Theresa wanted us to go talk to her to ascertain whether she was appropriate for the shelter.
This was a big issue for us. None of the staff at Chrysalis had the credentials or training to handle a mental health crisis. Plus the fact that the residents lived in very close quarters. It was probably stressful enough to be in the shelter without living with someone who was prone to outbursts or hearing voices. There was a public mental health agency we could turn to, I'll call them The Help Center, but we didn't hold them in very high regard. Mostly they seemed to go out of their way to NOT travel to meet any potential clients. Active mental illness, therefore, meant being a DNS - Do Not Shelter.
An aside - this was, and probably still is, a gaping hole in our mental health system. There needs to be emergency shelters that specifically cater to people with mental issues who may not require full-on hospitalization.
So Theresa innocently asked us to assess this woman's mental status because we were, after all, psychology students. I swear there was a glint in her eye. She probably knew all along that we were pretty ignorant of the real world.
So Cynthia and I did it. We went to the homeless shelter and talked to Mary. (Visiting the homeless shelter was in itself an adventure since it was in a pretty intense housing project.) Mary was a petite, upper-middle-aged woman with bottle-blonde hair. What I remember about her was that she was pretty quiet. She was stretched out on her bed clutching a pillow. I have no recollection what we talked about, but there was no loosening of associations, tangental speech, or word salad, so we thought she was fine. We returned to Chrysalis and reported to Theresa that she should come to the shelter.
Mary lasted less than 24 hours. She got kinda freaked-out her first night there and returned home.
She was the first of what came to be considered "Katy Intakes." My co-workers learned to be wary of Katy Intakes. The people I cleared for shelter had a higher-than-usual chance of having mental problems. Mary did return to the shelter at least one other time. There was also Donna, the developmentally disabled woman with bulemia, Christy, the wide-eyed waif with bipolar disorder, and Holly, who actually did get hauled from the shelter to the psych ward by The Help Center after having a conversation with herself in multiple voices. And these are only the ones I can remember right off the top of my head.
I apparently lack what can only be called "crazy radar." I have a high tolerance for different behavior, I guess, and so it rings no warning bells. What some people would call pathological I consider to be merely eccentric. What does that say about me?
I'm still pondering that one.
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