PSYCH CLINICAL DAY 1

To be perfectly honest I was not looking forward at all to this clinical.  I had some experience with being inside of a mental institution in my camera assisting days.  I worked on a documentary  called The Living Museum.  I was booked two days on the project while the director conducted interviews patients at Creedmore in Queens.  One of the fellows we shot,  I found to be a bit unnerving.   For those of you interested in working with psych patients the documentary might be something cool to check out.  Here's a link to get info about the documentary and the director :

http://vimeo.com/jessicayu

The patients I encountered on day one of my rotation reminded me of a lot of the people you see every day on the trains and in the streets of NYC.  We are surrounded by people that are psychologically unstable, it's just we're so busy with our own personal lives that we usually tend to just tune them out.

There were no Hannibal Lecter types lurking about the floor.  So for those of you worrying about getting stabbed in the eyeball with a pencil or something, you can chill out.  Kind a.  I mean don't turn your back on the patients, but you don't need to be freaked out either. 

Most of the days conversation centered around the patients' desire to introduce themselves and express their desire to get back out into the world.  Seeing new faces and wanting to tell their story in hopes that we could somehow change their situation around.  

With regard to the goal of psych clinicals, what I gathered from what the professor was saying, the most important thing for us to try and accomplish in this rotation was the ability to sit down and have a conversation with the patients,  lead group projects where we teach the patients about different types of mental illnesses, and engage in recreational activities with the patients without saying anything that would disturb them or set them off.  That was the message I walked away with after our first clinical day.

Oh yeah, and also to go in and out of all doorways as quickly as possible because some patients will try to abscond if you provide them with an exit and a chance.  

One interesting piece of information we learned was that due to recent changes made by managed healthcare organizations aka those folks that provide us with health insurance, the new goal of nurses and doctors working in psych wards is to get an acute, unstable, patient stabilized as quickly as possible and then release them.  The goal is to accomplish this in under 11 days because the health insurance companies won't pay beyond that.  What that essentially means is that people that may need to spend more time to really get it together beyond the point of not being a danger to themselves and others won't get that time.

They come in, get just stable enough for release, and once turned back out into the street God only knows...