Celebrating small differences

I haven’t written a blog post in quite a while, mainly because university has been pretty mental. My exams are now finished, and I have recently found out I have been accepted onto a local authority graduate scheme which means I will get my second placement with them and if the placement goes well and I like it and they like me, pending an interview, I’ll be offered a job there for the next two years. I’m very excited about it although anxiously awaiting to find out which team I’ll be placed in. My top choices would be LAC or young offenders, as my instinct is that that is the area I’d like to work. And if not those two, then I’d like child protection as I think the experience would be invaluable. So we’ll wait to see! I now have about 30 days left of my placement and a month to complete my portfolio – it’s weird being able to see the end in sight, and I’m trying to sort out my summer. I’m waiting to find out if I’ll work on a residential camp with young people and have a few other places I’m in contact with, as well as dissertation work and a holiday planned! So, diary aside, recently there has been some big stuff happening on placement. My first client, who I have spent a great deal of time working with, will be leaving soon, at short notice, for a range of reasons I won’t go into for confidentiality purposes. As a result of this imminent departure, I felt that I did the first piece of work that I felt really proud of, and one of the reasons I’m writing about it, is because it’s nice to celebrate the good stuff that we do, particularly as it wasn’t really recognised at all by my placement and I think sometimes this stuff should be. Or maybe it just felt like a big deal to me but either way I’m happy. My client was going to have a choice to go to a different placement that they were offered or not take it, which would likely mean she would find herself homeless. As I predicted, when offered the placement she said that she did not want it. She was angry at the organisation and refused to listen to what was on offer nor did she want to consider the consequences. The assessment at the new placement was lined up for the same day, so if she could not be persuaded to go, a few days later she was likely to be homeless, so it was a pretty important day. I couldn’t bear the idea of my client being homeless. Despite certain unacceptable behaviour, I had seen so many great qualities in her (not to mention that no-one deserves to be homeless) and had formed what I think has been a really good relationship through the ups and downs and so I was determined to support her to make the decision that I really felt was best for her. I sat with her over many hours, sometimes just with her, sometimes in a meeting with the housing department which she had organised and sometimes over the phone when she left to talk through her options. At one point while she was angrily shouting about not wanting to have anything to do with the organisation, I stopped her and just said firmly, ‘I’m speaking to you as an adult here, what will you do on Monday, if you don’t take this placement’. And it seemed to work/ She stopped talking and just thought about it and then asked me why I cared so much and I was glad to be able to say that I’d really enjoyed working with her over the last 5 months so it was really important to me that she was ok wherever she went next. She said she would think about it and a few hours later called me to say she’d take it. For me, I guess this was a pretty big deal, it felt like I’d made a bit of a difference. She may well act out in a similar way at the next placement, as she so often has before. But I knew from her CPN that no other options were available, and I’m hoping that after so much rejection in her life, knowing someone cared, might have made a tiny difference. This will be a difficult week as I’ll really miss her and hope it goes well. But I think it’s important that we celebrate the small differences we can make. Particularly because I find that in my placement, differences are so often intangible and up and down, mental health has no quick fix solution – nor do any of the issues our service users come to us with, that the small peaks have to be noted, to help us get through the frustrations that many days bring.