As the years flew by, a small Asian woman, Anisa, entered the fray and turned out to be our Superwoman. She saw the most clients and took some of the most severe cases. Her commitment to work was unmatched. Every crisis center should have a woman of her caliber.

That was the good, now onto the bad. We had some filler employees who could not counsel their way out of a wet paper bag. I cannot even call them social workers because I believe you have to have at least a bachelor’s degree for that title. Two in particular were well known in the recovery field so the administration thought they would be an asset to the facility, but that proved very wrong.

One was a big 12-step guy. Because of this, each interview of his turned into an AA meeting. In fact, he made the clients fill out the forms for him while he quoted the things that Bill W. said in the “Big Book“. And, this 12-stepper was also a social butterfly. He got out of working by visiting other units in the psychiatric hospital and making friends. Perhaps they were reading the Big Book together, I’m not sure. All we knew was that we were treating 5 people to his 1.

The last slacker was Preacher Man. This guy was studying to be a minister! I swear he was trying to pray the devil out of many of the clients. At the end of one particular shift, I was faced with a pile of assessments to complete so I asked for someone to help out a new client who just entered the unit. He agreed to help out and five minutes later this client darted out of the interview room in hysterics. I rushed to her assistance. She told me he was calling her names and said she would be a whore her entire life and live on the street. Eventually, he and Mr. 12-Stepper were ushered off the unit.

Then there was me. I was the round hole in this square peg society. Oh, at first I took my kidding. Dr. J. would announce, “There goes Dr. Scott, about to do his Love Therapy.” And after a number of years, guess what the staff was doing? Yep, Love Therapy.

Therapists are an unknown quantity in crisis management. The usual is making a brief assessment and getting the doctor to write them a medication script, or in our case, start a person off with the medication supply we had. However, in one hour I could help stabilize people by giving them psychological tools that were targeted to their needs, and many of them didn’t need any medicine at all.

Then came the really tough clients. I could write a book on them. Or, even better a television series showing how whacked out both staff and clients were. Soon, I had the most difficult cases ushered to me and the ones I couldn’t handle Anisa or Roz would step in. In the most extreme cases, we had Dr. J spend two minutes with them, give them samples, and rush them off the unit. Hey, would you like to sit down with somebody who wants to bite your head off? For an entire hour? I sure didn’t.

This was my home away from home. A staff who wanted to pray with people, do a 12-step meeting, actually had fist fights with them (meaning the 12-stepper, who fought like a girl), called clients whores, slept with one another, and tried to heal people’s auras. And the funny thing about all this – I miss that place.

We initiated a cuss jar where people had to put in a quarter for every negative statement they made. The staff had a habit of venting which often upset newer staff members who hadn’t done much work on themselves. So we appeased them this way, raised enough money each month for a few pizzas, and made a party out of it. I too, donated my fair share into the cuss jar fund on particularly difficult shifts.  

What stands out the most in that unit was our Halloween costume contests. Each year Dr. J would pay the top person $100 so we were motivated to create the most elaborate costumes. Unfortunately, every year the woman who showed the most cleavage won. Not wanting that to deter me, I decided to go for shock value and dressed like a baby. Oh, this wasn’t a pleasant sight. I wore a diaper, had a cropped t-shirt that showed my belly, a baby bonnet, and had an oversized bottle. And I won!

I had a blast that day with Supergirl Anisa spanking me with her whip, Dr J, dressed as Batman squaring off, where he gave me a new nickname – Baby Man! Lots of great fun, though HR didn’t agree with this and asked me to never dress like this again, with a chuckle.

11 years, 7,000 clients I personally saw. We treated an average of 27,000 people a year and never needed to put a person in restraints. We were proud of that fact the most. Through it all, our staff had each other’s back. If it got violent, we came together as one and calmed the person down. We got it. We knew the struggles that people with mental illness had.

I talked to my group yesterday about how people with a family history of psychosis had a higher percent chance of having a psychotic break if they experimented with Meth or XTC. One 18-year-old was taken to a rave by his buddies after he received a full-ride scholarship to Cal State Berkeley. There, his friends gave him XTC and he went psychotic, losing the scholarship and having to take antipsychotic medication for the rest of his life. Our mental make-up can be fragile so why isn’t this taught in school?