Welcome to Week Sixteen ofĀ Once More, With Feeling.
When I was right out of college, just a babe in the working woods, I took a job as a residential caseworker in a group home for adolescent girls with mental health and behavioral struggles. It wasnāt an inpatient setting, but given that many of the teens were flight risks, the doors were locked twenty-four hours a day. We caseworkers held the keys. Given the dire state of staffing such programs even decades before a labor shortage issued in a real crisis in the human services field, it was mostly me and a few other early-20s, immediately-post-undergrad women who ran the entire program. There was a masters level counselor who came by once a week to provide the clients therapy, and occasionally a director from one of the other homes in the agency would check in. But by and large we handled the daily care of the clients and problem-solved the very thorny issues that arose.
One day we got a call from the regional director. We were told that a new client was being transferred to us, a mere twelve years old. Letās call her Jackie. We were instructed not to be deceived by Jackieās young age, that she actually had more severe behavioral issues than most of the clients we worked with. That we needed to be careful. We should not be afraid to use the ānon-violent physical restraintā we were trained in more readily than we usually did. They used the word ādangerous.ā
Jackie was Black.
I arrived early for my shift, and Jackie was sitting on the couch. She didnāt look dangerous to me; she looked nearly comatose. She was staring at the wall. I think she might have been drooling a bit. (Later, thumbing through her file, I would realize that her drowsy state was due to the truly criminal number of psychotropic medications she had been prescribedāthatās an issue for a whole other newsletter). I called out a friendly hello that went unanswered. Uncertain how I should proceed, I left her on the couch and began the busywork involved at the start of a shift.
My coworker Lindsay soon arrived. She entered the same situation I had entered, but reacted entirely differently. She assessed the setting and then immediately took a seat on the couch next to Jackie. She took Jackieās hand in her own, and began talking to her softly. Jackieās shoulders relaxed, her face animated, and they engaged in quiet conversation for some time.
While her precise race and ethnicity is lost to the sands of my memory, Lindsay was a woman of color.
Afterward, Lindsay joined me in my busywork. āSheās incredibly sweet,ā she told me quietly, a tight shake to her head.
I followed Lindsayās lead in Jackieās case from that point on. Jackie was, as Lindsay said, incredibly sweet. She also was very bright and had a warm sense of humor. The preteen relaxed, opened up, and one by one the psychiatrist dropped her from a huge pile of meds down to just a few helpful ones.
This is the memory that came to mind as I read Amanda Calhounās powerful call to action The Life-and-Death Consequences of the Shortage of Black Mental Health Workers. āIf we want to improve Black youth mental health,ā she writes, āwe desperately need more Black mental health care professionals. And we need them in positions of power and influence.ā We need this shift not just for the reasons illustrated by my opening anecdote and by Dr. Calhounās stirring first-hand accounts. We also need this shift because increasingly and understandably, young people reaching out for psychological assistance desire therapists who can relate to their experiences, whom they feel comfortable opening up to. This is particularly true on college campuses, where the counseling centers are largely staffed by white clinicians.
While on the subject of necessary changes to mental health care, psychologist Ben Miller argues over on his own Substack newsletter that weāre in the beginning of a necessary paradigm shift, where we should expand the number of support services at the community and peer level. Doing so is more feasible than greatly expanding services at the specialist topābut even better, it benefits both those who need higher levels of services and those who might just need a little extra support. Ideally, better community could also serve as a preventive for lower levels of distress transforming into more severe suffering.
Community care as a base of this pyramid also calls to mind an incredibly moving podcast, an npr Invisibilia episode called āTherapy Ghostbusters.ā It tells the story of a community of Cambodian refugees who were misdiagnosed by probably-caring but culturally ill-informed clinicians, only to receive proper care from another clinician who spent years first developing relationships with them in community before doing the work of therapy. It is a remarkable tale not only of the importance of community connections and relationships as the grounding for any real psychological change but also how culturally incompetent care is hardly care at allāand can actually harm.
Recruitment and retention of diverse mental health workers, especially BIPOC mental health workers, more investment in not just targeted, specialist treatment for specific mental illnesses but also expansion of community care for all, and heightened attention to culturally informed care is quite a ambitious list of reformsābut the stakes couldnāt be higher.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
The meteoritic rise of ChatGPT Discourse seems to have reached its peak and begun receding a bit, which is a relief to those of us who would rather roll up our sleeves and focus on the work of good teaching, which has always involved assessments that prioritize self-relevance, creativity, and nondisposability.
In non-AI teaching and learning news, The University of Mississippiās Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning recently held an open webinar called The Future of Grading (see below flyer) that seemed to attract some thousands of participants and most of teaching-and-learning Twitter. It was moderated by Emily Pitts Donahoe and Derek Bruff, and featured Susan Blum, Courtney Sobers, and Josh Eyler. It was a brilliant conversation, and I did my best to capture the highlights in this livetweet (I missed the last few minutes due to another obligation).
Finally, Jim Lang interviewed me about emotions, teaching, and writing advice for 6 fun brief minutes over at OneHE. Check it out here.
OUR MONSTERS, OURSELVES - Uncertainty, Challenges, Mental Health
See the opener of the newsletter for some updates from the world of mental health.
In closer-to-home news, I was thrilled to join Rebecca Mushtare and John Kane over at Tea for Teaching for my first podcast interview about the new book! Sadly, I yet again disappoint them by drinking coffee instead of tea.
In case you were wondering :), Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge is indeed still available for pre-order!
INCIDENTALLY - Earth is Losing Its Memory
My writer and paleoclimatologist cousin Summer Praetorius published an extraordinary essay in Nautilus magazine that bridges the topics of memory, loss, trauma, and climate in a truly haunting way.
āEverywhere on Earth, amnesia is smoldering. Ash from our most ancient libraries is raining down on us, lofted into toxic smoke that circles the globe, darkening glaciers that accelerate their melting, sending thousands of years of history pouring into the ocean, where it steadily rises up to erode the banks of our futures. Those who canāt shake the shivers of ill ease are the ones who have always sought wisdom from the past, and suddenly there is an eerie silenceāstumps of history, no longer talking back.ā
Trust me, it is worth your time. You can find it here.
The days are slowly getting lighter, newsletter friends.