The Key to the Mental Health Field is Kindness

I just had my first interview for a mental health agency. The second interview is this week. They do a lot of the same work I've been doing; they act as a community, and rather than focusing on clinical work, they're more about the strength-based approach and providing clients with nearby resources. It's very similar to what I've been doing with my mentee. Their goal is to significantly improve the lives of the adults with mental illness that they treat, not to cure them. It's about progress and planting seeds, and change isn't something that will always be immediate.

I was struggling with this very idea just this week. I went to my ADP class and everyone started talking about their cases, and I felt incredibly self-conscious about mine. Everyone else seemed to be doing so well. Their mentees seemed to be on cloud-9. I compared my case to theirs, and decided I wasn't fit for this kind of work. I wondered if everyone else in the class wondered the same thing based on what I shared about my case.

Then my therapist told me about how you can't judge progress in mental health based off if the client is doing great. Everyone is different and some people aren't ready to want to change for themselves. She told me to focus on all the seeds I'm planting that my youth will come back to later in life. My classmates don't know my mentee just like I don't know theirs. I'm helping a sixteen-year-old kid who has had a very traumatic life and who still does. Just because I'm not seeing instant results doesn't mean I'm not helping him. Him and I have a great relationship. The fact that he looks forward to meetings and conversations means I'm doing something right. The negative part of me tells myself he only likes coming because I take him to do fun things. But we do so much more than that. He wouldn't come to volunteering or job-related things if he didn't want to, and he wouldn't be thanking me for no reason. And worse case scenario, even if it really is just about getting out of the house for him now, it may be more for him at a later time. I've already known that mental health for me personally isn't simple, it's definitely not been a linear line, so why am I putting all this pressure and stress on myself?

Working in mental health is hard work, and it's needed. It's a needed, demanded field. Something else my therapist told me was that therapists don't make significantly more than teachers or other lowly-paid jobs. It surprised me. Not enough to make me want to change fields because I was never in it for the money in the first place, but because I feel like a field that is demanded should have more money going into it. It shocks me that doctors make so much more than people who study and work on the mind. I get that doctors would make more because there's a lot more that goes into surgeries and stuff like that. But to me, mental and physical go hand-in-hand. I just want to be in a world where mental and physical illnesses are treated with equality. Those with mental illnesses are a marginal group in society and mental illnesses are very much stigmatized. With all the work and passion and heart that I know social workers have to offer, it saddens me it's harder to make a living out of it than it is to be, say, a doctor.

Again, pay isn't going to make me want to quit. I will always have a passion for helping people. Something lately though that has been weighing on me is whether or not I'm strong enough to handle sad, traumatic situations. I've seen some pretty awful things at this point working with my youth/junvenile. I've seen what it's like for a kid to grow up with parents telling them they won't surmount to anything. I've seen insecurities in a teen that other children have planted in him. I've seen trauma after trauma pile up. I've seen poor attendance due to circumstances out of the teen's control. I can't even say or express the severity of what the reality is for some people. I have so much to be grateful for.

Even though I cry at the situations I hear and even though my empathy feels like a weakness, I feel like I'm passionate enough to keep at it. I care more about trying to help than I do the results. I'm very goal-oriented, but I feel like my experiences have allowed me to be more lenient with goals. Goals can be based on improvement rather than based on actual grades. There's a lot of bad things that go on in the mental health field, but me helping is better than me not helping. Bad things are going to happen no matter what. The least I can do is try to make things better the best I can. I get a high from the smallest of wins. Something like brushing my teeth or getting ten minutes of peace and quiet may not be a win for me, but that can be a win for a lot of other people.

Even though the mental health field has challenged me a lot, I still feel like I'm in the right place.

What I do is help people recover from a lack of kindness that they've encountered in their life. My job is to be kind, but anyone can be kind. You don't have to be a social worker to be kind. You can prevent some mental illnesses just by treating people with respect and kindness, so I urge you to do it, no matter what you do. If you see your kid or friend picking on another kid or peer just because they're a little different, please correct them. It doesn't take long for bullying to turn into a mental illness and for that to turn into a school shooting. That's just one cascade example. There's many more. It starts with being kind. That's it.

Always choose kindness.