Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

only accepted 50 percent of applicants; that is what school officials told us the first day of orientation. I wrote in my application essay how I wanted to help people with mental illness and keep them from taking their own lives. At eighteen, I wrote, I had been extremely suicidal—to the point that I had a plan for ending my life—so I wanted to help others who endured horrible mental illnesses like I had suffered from. I had seen the tremendous impact that my mental health issues had on my mother and myself, and I wanted to help people who had fallen through the cracks of the mental health system. Plus, I just wanted to stay in college forever.

I decided to leave the day program in August 2005 to go to school full time. I was sad about leaving, but I knew I could never make a living wage on the work that I was doing, though I did mean something to the clients.

Part of my curriculum was completing two five-hundred-hour internships. When I went to a seminar about completing internships, the faculty gave me a placement working in a specialized school for adolescents who were described as “emotionally handicapped.” Most of the students had extreme behavior difficulties—in layperson’s terms, these were “bad” kids.

A few days later after I received my placement, I went to the assistant director of field education and requested a new one. It was only four and a half years earlier that I had been in high school myself, and I hadn’t yet moved past all of those horrible memories. I knew I didn’t want anything to do with at-risk teens.

School had started two days after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, terrorizing parts of the United States. There were countless opportunities to donate money in the Capital District, but I still struggled to decide where I was going to do my five-hundred-hour internship. The field education office again placed me at a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed adolescents. I was so frustrated, and the day that I was supposed to meet the agency’s assistant executive director, she was an hour late. I was about to walk out to my car when she raced after me. She told me about the different programs the agency offered, and I said I wanted to work at the group home that was co-ed and housed adolescents who had at least one or more mental illnesses. I was very annoyed the school did not listen to me, as I wrote in many e-mails that I had no interest in working with at-risk youth. However, the semester had already started at this point and if I wasted any more time, I would not have been able to obtain the amount of hours that I needed. So, I just accepted working with the adolescents at the Sanchez group home (a pseudonym). That group home was totally different than the one that I was used to at the Center. There were set rules for everything, and with all the children, it was always loud and some drama was always going on.

To me, mental illness was something I endured. I was significantly depressed as an adolescent, just staying home, studying or working—never taking part in anything social. Most of the children at the group home had conduct disorders and were labeled “oppositional defiant,” meaning they had issues with accepting authority. The first month I was there was all classroom training. I learned about the agency, how to write up an incident report, and how to do physical interventions. I had to go to a training in therapeutic crisis intervention, a curricula developed by the New York State Office of Child and Family Services to help staff properly restrain students and avoid crisis intervention. I wasn’t good at any type of restraint, and my pants kept falling off because I wore baggy clothes during the training.

During our classroom training, we often had to role-play scenarios, wherein one staff member would be the staff member and another would be the child. When I was playing the child once, a woman told me, “I was in prison eighteen years ago, and they all told me to put an H on my chest and handle it.” I was too scared to ask her what she meant by that. The same woman attacked me personally, calling me “pretty boy” and “spoiled brat.” The qualifications to work in that type of setting were low—just a high school diploma. Like most other nonprofits in New York, we had a staff shortage and constant turnover.

After about a month of classroom training, I finally got to spend my first day in the house with the kids. The staff there was diverse, with five of the ten staff members being African American. The management of the house was all Caucasian, and the house supervisor was a small blond with only six months of experience in child welfare before she was promoted. When the buses first started bringing the kids home, chaos would ensue. Within fifteen minutes after the children arrived, I witnessed my first restraint. One of the female staff members told me, “You do not want to go up here.” The girl was getting restrained on the second floor because she kicked a staff member repeatedly after she found some money over the weekend and was told to return it.

There were twelve children living in the house. Six were boys and six were girls. All of the children were Caucasian except two who were African American. Historically, according to my supervisor and the house social worker, Lisa, the girls were much more challenging. During the six months that I was an intern at Sanchez Group Home, two of the male adolescents I encountered were sex offenders. These two boys were the best behaved of the children. In fact, one actually took a liking to me and would always ask me to play Magic or Pokémon with him.

At first I was a total pushover. Even