After the summer ended and I left Secret Harbor, I took a job at Martin Center, a residential psychiatric treatment unit for adolescents. Martin Center was one of those places where students fresh from college took their first job. The population by diagnosis was conduct disorder if they were boys and developing borderline personality if they were girls. The staff ranged from wise masters to quacks. A popular approach of the quacks was neurolinguistic therapy combined with regression therapy. This gave the unit an Alice in Wonderland feel on some days. I would arrive at the unit to find a 12 year old boy celebrating his first birthday. Shortly afterward he would run away in search of cigarettes and we would have to go look for him.
As is usual in those places, it was hard to distinguish as to who was more disturbed. One biker woman spent her Mondays calling around to see where she had left her truck. I was in my last two years of drinking. One of the senior therapists frequently came so hung-over that he reeked of alcohol on many days. We had a misnamed quiet room where the more disturbed residents howled in anguish. I also began to learn psychobabble. When I first heard it I was confused but I was a quick study.
Adjacent to the facility was a horse pasture. The playful and wise horses provided a contrasting backdrop to the madness across the fence. Whenever we got outside I would take the kids over to pet and sometimes feed the horses. At a staff meeting one day I was informed by a saccharine voiced therapist who always reminded me of a kindergarten teacher on Valium that “the clinical team has decided Terry should no longer interact with the horses.” OK. Welcome to bureaucracy, the rational decisions of those who know better than you.
At the weekly staff meetings we would staff each of the kids in turn. From the various view points we gained a clearer picture of each child until Nurse Distraction had her input.”I want to know what's happening to the towels. Our towels keep disappearing. I think the kids are not returning them to the hampers. When are we going to do something about this?” No matter what was happening. There could have been ten suicide attempts, a dozen runaways but Nurse Distraction wanted to know what was happening with the towels.
Another memorable character was a senior clinician who truly wanted to be an authority figure. His approach was to try and be tough by yelling at a kid while standing nose to nose. He lost three pairs of glasses in three weeks to the same resident who invariably punched him straight in the nose. That kid was frightened by loud noises.
The PTU became an unofficial internship for me. My college work was in English with a secondary teaching certificate but I was deep in the belly of the mental health industrial complex. In addition to the inept I saw the wise and the future wise. The serene and the wise never lasted long as staff. One gentle Quaker man was no match for the high level of anxiety and machismo. Today he runs his own outdoor school and teaches Aikido.
Inside of and around all the insanity I saw a common thread running through the diagnoses of the residents. Most of them had parents with addictions. Many of them had been horrifically abused. I saw that if this type of work was to be in my future, the true work lay in chemical dependency treatment. This budding viewpoint combined with my early sobriety and my observations of the often toxic mental health counselors led me down the counseling path I walk to this day.
Chemical Dependency Counselors are the red headed step children of the mental health industrial complex. Initially, only two years of college was required while a graduate degree was required for any mental health careers. In addition, in the early years of addictions counseling most chemical dependency counselors did little more than spout an expanded and plagiarized version of the twelve steps. Mental health counselors do not always endorse or support the disease theory of addictions. Doubting the disease theory is heresy for chemical dependency counselors. It's a duality made in nirvana.
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