“Among the throngs of homeless people in the streets and shelters across America, the severely mentally ill are arguably the most vulnerable. One in every three homeless people suffers from a mental disorder that is both severe and disabling. People in this group are more likely to remain homeless on the streets and in shelters for longer periods and suffer from multiple health problems that incur high social and economic costs to society. While it is widely acknowledged that the decline of the mental asylum led to the emergence of homelessness in this subgroup, there has been significant progress in finding solutions that warrants greater recognition at the public policy level.”
If you have just tuned in, these are The Disciplines and they are part of my ongoing quest to illustrate the various fields of study! I will probably have about ~120 total when I am done (I currently have about seventy of them at ~90% completion on my computer). I’m covering everything from natural and social sciences, to the humanities, the arts, the trades, the mystic artes, and fandom studies.
So this week, the only one of these 5 that I actually redrew is Psychology, but I’ve spiffed most of them up in some smaller ways! It’s also nice to have these in related groups rather than scattered across other posts.
As a social work student and person with a certificate in social work, I completely agree with your comments about the ineffectiveness of social workers right out of university into a new community. You’ve got to know your community to be a good social worker, and a lot of people just don’t realize that.
Even more so, they attach themselves to some idea that everything they need to know they learned at school. I think what horrifies me the most about social workers is that you don’t have to have training in anti-oppression or privilege or any of that. You can get by with one or two classes specifically addressing that. And more so, I find that in social work programs, queer folks are kind of held to this huge “YOU KNOW EVERYHTING ABOUT ALL QUEERS” idea, so few white, female-assigned, non-binary, middle class queers actually address the fact that they don’t know what the issues affecting all queer people are. /end rant
I really appreciate your story (as a white “FAAB” genderqueer) because it helps me reconsider how I can be an ally with trans women and not reconstruct transmisogynistic power imbalances when having them as clients. Thank you!
This is an important point. Back when PartyBottom was a teenager and nascent social work student, her second required class was called something like, “Working With Diverse Populations” or whatnot, like, an introduction to cultural competency, which, while taught in some seriously questionable ways, at least introduced a class of mostly-white state school doofy 19-year olds to concepts like, “sooo, reverse racism does not exist,” which, I have to say, was a BRAIN ESPLODE moment for about half the class.
(However, I still use skills and knowledge I attained in that class, especially the unit on gerontology, which has been both helpful in my volunteer work at SAGE – an org called Services and Advocacy for Gay Elders, here in New York – as well as being a good friend/family member to people who are dealing with the difficulties that come with having an aging family member who is having trouble: hoarding, sundowning, dementia, anxiety about routine and attachment to sense of place, etc.)
I currently have a friend who is in an NYU MSW program and she on the regular hears the shittiest things come out of people’s mouths, but that is perhaps not not tied to the fact that NYU is an incredibly expensive private school and most of the students there are hoping to hop on to a pipeline that will eventually lead to very lucrative private practice dealing with yuppie neurosis.
Also I would like to agree with and echo your comments about tokenization and its more sinister ill effects: when you are called on to be the spokesperson for “the community,” it is important to realize that you are a select representative of many communities, many of which share only the loosest of ties. Say, even if we’re talking about “the trans community in New York,” this is a misnomer, as there are dozens of trans communities in New York, broken down by age, income, education, specific gender affinity, location/borough – and, perhaps most importantly, language and race. It bugs PartyBottom when people try to individually speak for all these constituencies, and it is something I hope to be wary of as I continue this blog.
inthis post i said i have had a couple of really bad experiences with mental health practitioners. i would like to talk about some of them. this first one is not très tragique or anything, but i do think it impacted the course of my life in some significant way.
less than a year after i came out as trans, the apartment where i was living burned down. i was on technically-illegal hormones at the time, with no medical supervision. (where i was living at the time, it was very difficult and super $$$$$ to go the legal route.) i figured out my name change stuff by filling out legal forms i found on the internet. because my house had burned down, i was like, well, shit. i don’t want to have to buy all boy clothes that i will just have to throw/give away after a while, so i might as well just go ahead and “go full time” (ugh, the early 2000s.) i was, at the time, enrolled at an enormous public state college, studying social work.
i was stressed out, to say the least. i had a lot of normal problems that 22 year-old college girls have: body image issues, self-esteem problems, boys, blah. i went to the college mental health clinic to make an appointment with a therapist.
i told her basically ^^^ (minus illegal hormones part) and this is what she said to me:
i don’t feel competent to treat you because i have never met a transgender person before. it would be like if someone came in requesting a letter of psychiatric recommendation for gastric bypass surgery, and i had never met a fat person before. i’m sorry, but i can’t help you.
i tried to explain to her that i was not looking for her to sign off on any letters – there was no way (i thought at the time) i would be able to afford any surgery at any time in the then-near future. i just wanted to talk about being depressed and anxious.
still, she refused to treat me.
eventually, the anxiety and stuff got so bad that i stopped going to classes and dropped out of school and got a job (which paid $7/hour.) to this day, i have never finished college.
i am not blaming this counseling lady for my dropping out. but it’s like, when trans people reach out for help – help that they really need – and are smacked down, there can be serious consequences, that range from mild set-backs to the heart-breakingly tragic. i mean i guess in a way it’s good that she admitted her incompetence? but in a way i wish she had not just dismissed me, especially after i had admitted all the deeply personal things that i had admitted to her during a psych intake (anyone who has ever been through one of these will know what I mean.)
BUT BECAUSE PARTYBOTTOM IS ALL ABOUT POSITIVITY, i will end on a nice note. unexpectedly, it wasn’t until i was diagnosed a few years later that i found a really good therapist who i was able to see through an ASO (AIDS service organization – like a nonprofit that provides services to HIV+ people.) here’s the weird thing: i was 25 at the time, and she was 23. she had just graduated from the very same program that i had dropped out of.
can i repeat, she was twenty-three years old? i remember, on our first visit, she leaned over to throw something away in the trash and she had, like, a full on tramp stamp on her lower back! i was was like, oh lord jesus.
but you know, even though she didn’t have that many trans clients and didn’t know a whole lot about trans stuff, she was just open-minded enough to be caring and warm. it was a very fruitful therapeutic relationship that lasted for three years. she helped give me the courage to publish my writing for the first time, and eventually to move to new york.
(i know i have complained about bright-eyed baby social workers before, but i will make a distinction here: her job was not to be my case manager, ie, someone who helps you navigate all the conflicting systems that control your life when you are living in poverty with a chronic illness, it was to be my therapist: to listen to my problems and feelings, to offer empathy and insight, and to help with the acquisition of the right set of emotional coping skills, whatever that looks like.)
in fact, us both being so young and so close in age really worked out well in some ways. i could be all like, okay, this will sound ridiculous, but kimora lee simmons said this thing on the style network the other day that really resonated with me, and she would be like actually, i saw that episode of LIFE IN THE FAB LANE and i know exactly what you mean by that.
and she really did, is the thing. sometimes i think that’s all it takes.
when my doctor first mentioned this to me, i was like, I thought gardasil was for 13-year-old girls so they wouldn’t get HPV, not old slags like me who have who knows what kind of sewer garbage swimming around in my anus. but, lo and behold, they say that getting this vaccine is supposed to reduce the instance of anal cancers in hiv+ people something like 78%. so i like them odds.
- got flagged down and hassled by case management.(⊙_◎)
i have sort of determined that case management at this place is kind of useless (for me, anyway). in the less-than-a-year that i have been getting medical care there, i have been assigned three different case workers, because people keep quitting and/or getting fired. i have said before and i will say again, rapid turnover in social services hurts poor people. often there are good reasons that people leave when they leave and bad reasons that people get fired when they get fired, but it usually has something to do with 1) organizational culture (white at the top/POC at the bottom, authoritarianism & bureaucracy, other weird internal hierarchies) and 2) normal shitty labor stuff (overwork, low pay.)
they were really unprofessional about several things (talking to me about private stuff in the waiting area where everyone could hear, trying to get me to sign a blanket un-filled-out HIPPA and had previously visited my house and talked about stuff in front of people staying here who don’t know about my status); and to top it off, yesterday my new “care navigator” called me “he” and “him.”
at my age i really feel like i should have a thicker skin about this, but it kind of managed to ruin my day. really the only place this happens to me is in health care settings, in part i think because most of the time people talk to you while staring at your electronic records on a computer screen because everything has to be so meticulously documented, and there is a big SEX: M(T) right by my name. it’s such a bummer. also, i really tend to internalize this kind of thing. it’s hard for me to stick up for myself because i assume that being misgendered is always *my* fault somehow. more on that later.
to summarize, dear doofy case managers:
however,
+ my viral load is undetectable!ヽ(*≧ω≦)ﾉ
which is cool and all, but “undetectable” is imho kind of bullshit, if for no other reason than they keep moving the target. scientists keep developing progressively more and more sensitive tests for HIV antibodies, so what used to be considered “undetectable” and awesome is now considered problematic (depending on how OCD your HIV doctor is, and most doctors became doctors by being kind of obsessive about everything.) like, tests used to bottom out at 400 copies/ml (of blood), and then 176 copies/ml, and then (when i started getting bloodwork done) 40 copies/ml. right now where i get tested “undetectable” is under 20 copies/ml, which means you have to be extremely adherent to your treatment in order not to get a lecture that’s like, why aren’t you taking your meds? what’s stopping you from taking your meds? what are you doing wrong here? you need to take your meds! even if par chance you develop totally normal blips of viral load, which are common, like, in the winter, and when you get a cold.
anyway it’s still always good news to get tho. proverbially, w00t w00t.
“I spent a lot of time babysitting [my siblings] as a teenager and I think it’s been a challenge for me to separate out feeling like I’m a parent to them.”
This has often caused rifts between the siblings into adulthood, Rosenfeld says. “I’ve always been somebody who thinks it’s my job to offer help, care, and advice even when it’s not asked for.”
How does someone learn that becoming self-reliant is safer than trusting others? Nakazawa believes that in destructive parentification, “you don’t have a reliable adult to turn to.” And if a child’s early experiences at home consisted of making sure everyone else’s needs were met, then the “child doesn’t feel seen.
This sense of responsibility and compulsive caretaking can follow them into future relationships as well. “You tend to project it onto other people in your life,” Rosenfeld says. This isn’t surprising, claims Jenny Macfie, an associate director of clinical training at the University of Tennessee and another prominent parentification researcher, as “adults who report role confusion in their childhoods may have difficulty with their identity development,” and this in turn, can affect a person’s romantic relationships.
We’re only beginning to understand the interplay between sibling dynamics, parental neglect, and health outcomes later in life. We need to see more research on prevention and treatment options.
This is a really smart idea - raising awareness of the proper use of 911 is essential in order to reduce wait times for those in need by avoiding unnecessary interventions that do not require first responders.
We’re starting our “metabolism” module at med school this week, and I’m dreading it with every fibre of my being. You see, I am going to be a doctor, and I am fat.
I’m not the type of fat you feel after you’ve had a big lunch, and your usually flat belly is protesting against the waistband of your jeans. I’m the real kind. My BMI hovers a couple of points below “morbidly obese”.
I worry a lot about what people will think of me as a fat doctor. For the smartarses among you, of course I’ve tried to be non-fat, it goes without saying. The thing is though, bodies don’t really like weighing less all of a sudden and are pretty good at reversing things in the long run. Mostly my body settles back to the same size 18 shape eventually.
I am always aware of my fatness, but perhaps more so here at medical school. We are training to work with bodies, and mine is a type of body we warn our patients not to have. It is the first thing described in every list of ‘modifiable risk factors’. A colleague suggests “just don’t let yourself get too fat” as we talk about preventing a certain type of cancer. A final exam question asks us to list four poor health outcomes associated with obesity. I sit through lectures with slides that have sniggering titles like “how BIG is the problem?”
Though the next gadget or experience may bring fleeting pleasure, research shows that genuine happiness is about how we feel inside. To really enjoy the holidays, try these simple, research-based practices that will help keep you in a healthy state of mind.
My love for evidence-based decision-making obviously extends into the holidays. It’s no surprise that priming ourselves for good experiences, savouring happy moments, taking breaks, practicing gratitude, being generous, and connecting with our inner child all help make our holidays happier.
Becoming disabled demands learning how to live effectively as a person with disabilities, not just living as a disabled person trying to become nondisabled. It also demands the awareness and cooperation of others who don’t experience these challenges. Becoming disabled means moving from isolation to community, from ignorance to knowledge about who we are, from exclusion to access, and from shame to pride.
Disability studies should be required for the health professions.
“[H]onestly Pokemon go is probably going to help a lot with people who have depression,” wrote Tumblr user The Awesome Adventurer. “[B]ecause rather than laying in bed all day we are getting up and going outside and actually enjoying ourselves.”
This is awesome! To echo Brute Reason, it doesn’t matter whether or not people are intrinsically motivated to head outside, it’s great that people are finding a reason to get outside.
“We have to pull it. Nothing else is covered.” The dentist would say, looking at me like I should be glad to get even that bit of charity. Tears would fill my eyes as yet another tooth that could have been saved was yanked from my head.
When I was younger, we were riding in my grandfather’s truck when my grandmother tickled me and I broke my front tooth on the dash, leaving the root exposed. The next day, we went to the dentist, who performed a root canal and placed a temporary cap on top. A year ago, I learned that my mother didn’t have dental coverage at the time and that the dentist had provided this service (and many others in my childhood) for free. I can smile confidently because someone went out of their way for me. Although no one should be shamed for the state of their oral health, everyone should have the right to a confident smile regardless of their ability to pay.
when you’re frustrated with yourself, ask yourself: if someone else was in my exact situation, would i expect them to be able to do what i’m expecting myself to do?
if the answer is no, you’re treating yourself unfairly. relax.
when you’re frustrated with yourself, ask yourself: if someone else was in my exact situation, would i expect them to be able to do what i’m expecting myself to do?
if the answer is no, you’re treating yourself unfairly. relax.
If you don’t know, I work in a homeless shelter trying to get the homeless population in my city housed. My client yesterday is an old paranoid schizophrenic who spent the majority of the meeting hitting on me while I was trying to do his paperwork. I shut that shit down firmly.
But anyway, I’m minding my own business walking to the shelter today and trying to cross a busy street. While I’m waiting for the light; I hear some heathen catcalling me, and it goes something like this:
“Heyyyyy, yo beautiful! I like the way she walks.”
I’m thinking to myself, “What in all holy hell?” Bear in mind that I’m dressed like a frumpy lumberjack with a flannel and jeans, so I don’t know what part of this outfit is so damn attractive to this dude. While I’m ignoring him, the fellow goes, “Aww, I don’t think she like that.”
In any case, I turn to this fool to rip him a new one and replied, “You said WHAT, now?” And I realize that it’s my same client from yesterday. But ol’ Romeo doesn’t recognize me because I’m wearing my glasses. I take them off and look at him and say, “Now, (name), I know you know better than that.”
And the look on his face was priceless. He places his hand on his heart and leans back and wails, “OH! UH OH, THAT’S MY CASE MANAGER!” And his friend loses it.
We are excited to celebrate completion of our second year. With more than 30 projects done in past two years, which value more than PKR 9million rupees in total, with more than a 100 volunteers and thousands of supporters, we have made it a very active Platform for the youth of Pakistan.
We will launch our report tomorrow. Be ready! Celebrate your Independence with your heart tomorrow.
![Pokémon Go Is Having an Effect on Players’ Mental Health“[H]onestly Pokemon go is probab](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c0438e81e2c4c4ef4905c63e931619fb/tumblr_oa6mox77nr1qmbaulo1_1280.png "Pokémon Go Is Having an Effect on Players’ Mental Health“[H]onestly Pokemon go is probab")
