Name: Bill
Location: Pacific Northwest
Content Warning: This piece does not contain descriptions of triggering events, but does discuss working in crisis support.
Social work is, almost inherently, a radical profession.
I work in quality improvement for a national mental health nonprofit, overseeing a service that’s nationally available. I play one cog in this giant machine of oversight.
I have been in the social service realm for about a decade, and I’ve been doing crisis intervention and suicide prevention work for about 8 years. First as a volunteer, then a call taker, then I was on the program management and administration side of things, and, now, I’m in the compliance and quality assurance side of the work.
I was interested in getting into social work as a field because I wanted to be in a, like, helping profession. I was interested in doing my work in high-risk, grimy environments and suicide prevention is pretty chief among those. You want to help people, and you want to help people in really acute, crisis-type situations. Where’s the opening for that? Overwhelmingly, it was crisis intervention and suicide prevention. I’m currently finishing up my M.S.W., but in a different life, I worked as a union organizer. I have an M.A. in labor studies. I was never going to make a good accountant or business manager or something like that — I needed to be on the ill-defined, sticky elements of the human experience.
At first, I was really interested in academia. Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States had just come out, and it was, like, this new wave, where the classroom — both high school and college — was going to an ideological battleground, and I was like, “That’s where I want to do the work”. Then, I spent enough time in college to go, “Alright, I think I’ve pretty much had enough of that. I don’t want to be on either side of the desk at this point.” But social work is, almost inherently, a radical profession. It starts from the assumption that there are unmet human needs, and there are existing resources to meet those needs. The system that we operate under doesn’t permit those two things to be married in any functional way. So, while it’s not necessarily as overtly political as, like, “I am your communist professor!”, doing the work of a social worker is almost necessarily anti-capitalist or, at least, non-capitalist.
Interesting is a diplomatic word to describe my current situation. I’m working in a social welfare context, but remotely, and cross-country, and not in direct client services. This is the first time I’ve been so removed from client-facing work, and I’m really in the bureaucracy more than on the front lines. Most of my work could be described in shades of tedium. I am improving services, but not directly helping, so this is a new chapter for me. For the first time in my trajectory as a social worker, a lot of my frustrations are actually more common in everyday life. Like, navigating a humongous bureaucracy that doesn’t work efficiently. This is the first time that I’ve really understood that bureaucracy is meant to standardize results, it’s not meant to find pathways for efficiency. Most of my day is spent merging this direct client experience that was so fulfilling and so immediate and impactful with being on the “corporate” end of things. I’m in a corporate excellence division, right? Being in meetings about meetings for other people to meet, to discuss meetings. It reaches a certain level of abstraction, right? Like, “How does my work impact the thing that I intended to be doing?” You know, like, if you wanted to be a mechanic, and now you work in sales for a credit company that sells car loans. I’ve found myself drifting further away to the corporate end of things.
When the pandemic started, and we all moved to work from home, I was working at a local nonprofit, and nonprofits are pretty classically known for their, like, flexitarian approaches to the labor arrangement. We were quickly voluntold to do all sorts of things that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing. I found myself back in a call-taking role. I was working to recruit volunteers and other things that weren’t within my immediate purview, and that’s largely remained the case in my current role. I take sort of a jack-of-all-trades approach, plugging myself into, like, service gaps or system inefficiencies. I never quite know what’s going to be expected of me, week in and week out. But that also has something to do with the the nature of the service that my agency provides, suicide prevention.
There’s a reason that there’s only so much lifespan for crisis counselors.
The onus of responsibility to connect the day-to-day work, which can often be so tedious, to someone reaching for a service that we provide, is an intellectual labor. There aren’t enough spreadsheets in America that you can put data into that will make you feel like you made a difference in anyone’s life. My current role is really data-driven, it provides meaning and a point and fulfillment to what we’ve done, as opposed to directly speaking with someone that I was able to assist in whatever capacity. On such a macro scale, what were formerly direct clients that I was serving are now case numbers, client IDs. Maintaining that intellectual thread between the things that are unsexy and unfun to do, and connecting them to the outcome for someone reaching out for help, that has to be continually in my mind, otherwise I could easily lose sight and think this is no different from any other sort of button-pushing job.
I’ve been happy to see that a lot of the people that move the purse strings are deeply, quantitatively motivated. It’s always a good practice to throw in a cheeky success story when you’re talking about a pilot program or the efficacy of an initiative, but data is the only thing that really gets the goods. A nice story can only get you so much in grant funding, right? So, having this bird’s eye view of the totality of all the work that gets done presents its own opportunity to define fulfillment. It’s not intuitive, it’s much easier to give yourself a pat on the back after a tough phone call than it is to say, “Wow, that was one hecking data report I ran, I cannot wait to see how this is going to change lives!”.
I miss being in direct touch with clients, because that’s what fills up the emotional and spiritual gas tank, doing complicated and taxing work. At the same time, there’s a reason that there’s only so much lifespan for crisis counselors. The burnout rate is exceptionally high. Most centers in our network are still heavily relying on volunteers, not staffers. For the highly motivated, ideologically-centered person, the direct work feels like you’re really getting the goods. But I have enough self-awareness to know just how taxing that role was, day in and day out, and I was being paid for it, I wasn’t even a volunteer. I don’t know that I would want to go back in the trenches with direct client contact. The clients that I would be working with were in situations that would be seen as materially or socially advantageous, you know, like, someone’s fully employed, or their family offered to pay their bills, they have no crippling physical or chronic health conditions. But they still find themselves in a moment of total crisis.
There are people that would reach out and who would say really abhorrent stuff, but we’re a 24/7, 365 service, and even if you’re a piece of shit, you still deserve help. That’s eliminated a lot of binary thinking I had about, “What’s a good person? What’s a bad person?” Even people who have racist or misogynistic or xenophobic beliefs and articulate them in their moment of crisis, it would be so easy to write them off and say they don’t need support, or think they’re the author of their own poverty and situation, but moving myself from a less judgy and a more empathetic space came with all the years on the frontlines. We only have a very brief opportunity to know someone that we’re working with, given the acute, crisis nature of the service. To improve the quality of your work — it’s the only way to make it possible — is to see every single person that reaches out as worthy of support, even if they’re bringing along a whole host of unpleasant things.
A few misfortunes beyond my control, and now I’m in a crisis situation. Be aware of that. Empathy is not always easy, but it’s crucially important.
I think social service workers, in general, then more specifically, social workers, then even more specifically, social workers in crisis intervention and suicide prevention, are probably in the least advantageous position in terms of their material support. Social service work is underpaid, professional social work is underpaid, and crisis intervention is the highest stress and lowest paid of those respective professions. The case for me for a while, and certainly the case for a lot of people now is in making it make sense, right? Not in the sense of like, “Why am I doing this?” But in making the dollars and cents make sense. How can I do this long term if the institutional support is not there for this to be more than a hand-to-mouth occupation? Which it so often isn’t, for crisis counselors who find themselves working in some of the most heinous or stressful situations. It’s not just the emotional burden that comes with suicide prevention, but the material burden as well, that you could just as easily take the same experience and go be an HR associate, and never be burdened with any of the emotional labor that you do in this position. You would certainly be paid more handsomely. It’s a dual squeeze, both the nature of the work and how the work is valued.
I saw a billboard recently that said something to the effect of, like, “Beware who you hate, it might be someone you love”. It’s incredibly easy to consider someone a throwaway person or a perpetual problem or someone with intractable issues that can’t get themselves unstuck. But in the same way that all of us are only so many paychecks away from homelessness, we are all on the precipice of being a person in crisis, or being someone who just can’t seem to get it together, but I think our humanity is just that common — when you see the people that reach out, and for the reasons that they reach out, you know, crisis, and suicidal crisis most specifically, is an all-gender, all-income, all-ethnicity issue. Those people aren’t just around us, they’re often ourselves. That could just as easily be me. A few misfortunes beyond my control, and now I’m in a crisis situation. Be aware of that. Empathy is not always easy, but it’s crucially important. And if we think we deserve it, then others do as well.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 