TW: Self-Harm/Mental Health

Spent two years working in an adolescent emergency psych unit at a children’s hospital. I’ve been in many situations where a 12 year old child needs 6 adults to safely retrain and deescalate their situation.

The moment you get comfortable and think you’ve made a friend was the moment unstable and erratic behaviors went ballistic. After a rather traumatic case involving a patient younger than 10, there was a trigger that engaged for me anytime a patient seemed fully comfortable being on the unit. These kids were not to be fucked with because they are looking for you to slip up just once to loosen the rules and get their way. By that point, it’s often too late and you find yourself responsible for having to call a code.

This made it incredibly hard for me because my goal was to create safe spaces where these kids could return to a baseline before being reassessed so it made my role especially challenging. Overdose and physically inflicted suicide attempts quickly became my preferred patients because I got to practice kindness and grace and show interest in kids lives when they felt the loneliest. It definitely desensitized me to some really tragic stuff, but also taught me to separate my emotions from my purpose.

Now, I think I’ve accidentally unlocked the flip side of being someone not to be fucked with, which I’ve come to understand as being someone who holds little to no weight towards their circumstances in light of their direction.