Read Missing the Big Picture Online
Authors: Luke Donovan
In the fall of 2005, I started graduate school at the University of Albany. At the time I was still unfamiliar with the field of social work, but I wanted to stay in school. It was always my problem that I just wanted to avoid certain things. In a way, I was scared to grow up. I was out of college, and I just didn’t want to face the realities of the real world. Ironically, I was very happy the six months that I spent working at the day program, making nothing. At twenty-two, I didn’t know that happiness was in the eye of the beholder. I had graduated early, so I loved knowing that I was ahead of the game and my friends were still in college. I had no real sense of identity, so my source of happiness came from accomplishing tasks that I knew other people hadn’t yet reached.
I knew the importance of getting an advanced degree in order to maintain a competitive employment position. The only problem was, I didn’t know what exactly to do. The SUNY Albany social work program was quite competitive and 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 though I was never supposed to be left alone with the children, it sometimes just happened to turn out that way. Once when I was supervising, three girls who were supposed to be engaged in quiet hour started dancing to music. Quiet hour was from four to five o’clock each day, and the children were supposed to spend it reading or doing homework. I found it frustrating that the schools never let any of the children take books home. Most of the children went to a special school for emotionally handicapped children that was operated by the same service provider as the Sanchez group home. When I would tutor the kids in math, I would encourage them to use their textbooks, which also helped me verify that what I was remembering from high school was correct; however, the girls would often tell me that they weren’t allowed to bring their books home.
One girl that I spent a lot of time tutoring was Sage. Sage was sixteen and often suffered from delusions and extreme paranoia. At first, many of the staff members were alarmed that I was working with her because they suspected that she had a crush on me. She was very paranoid and would often tell the other children not to eat certain vegetables because the staff was poisoning her. She tried to escape from the van when it was running, and if she saw that the staff was having a meeting, she would often wonder what they were saying about her.
Being with Sage made me uneasy. If she didn’t understand something, she would always blame me. Like a typical adolescent, she always blamed her math teacher as well and said he didn’t help her in class. I was spending four thousand dollars a semester for a graduate degree in social work, and I would often just tutor children, attend meetings, or watch the news or some MTV show with the kids.
I was there three days a week, and each day I would count down how many days I had left. Lisa, the house social worker, attempted to teach me how to conduct therapy. All she told me to do was put my hands on my face and tell the children, “That must be really hard for you.” She didn’t meet with the children weekly, and she would spend most of her day socializing with the other staff. It’s funny—I knew I did like social work, but I definitely didn’t feed the stereotype of the social worker with the bleeding heart. I wanted to help people. I understood mental illness and the effects that it could have on the individual, family, and society. Misbehaving or disrespecting somebody is not a symptom of mental illness, nor should anybody who has a mental illness be allowed to abuse somebody without consequence. The children routinely beat up the staff, and I attended staff meetings where multiple staff members would be wearing slings.
I would often get mad when people blamed the children’s violent behavior on the mental illness. I had suffered from hallucinations, depression, and anxiety, and I never hit anybody.
At the same time that I began graduate school, I started to meet people online. At age twenty-two, I had never kissed anybody and was a total prude. Corey, my friend from SUNY Albany and Home Depot, told me that Craigslist was “a great way to get laid.” The only difference was that I was interested in meeting men, not women.
Matthew. 7:1 Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
I
t ruined my life for years. When I was fourteen, I started to feel attracted to men. The feeling wasn’t something that I welcomed; in fact it just lowered my already low self-esteem. I wanted to commit suicide because of it. Before and during this time, I still felt attracted to women—just not as much as I felt attracted to men. I just wanted for people to like me, to fit in, to be respected. I wanted a regular life. I didn’t want anybody to judge me or place expectations on how I should act. Plus, I didn’t like effeminate men. If I didn’t like butter, meaning women, then why would I like imitation butter, meaning guys who acted like girls.
At one point I thought I was bisexual, but I finally realized that vagina was too confusing for me. I would just have to put up with being called a pussy but never experiencing it. The way I saw things, women were like salad—beautiful and crisp, but they didn’t fulfill my appetite. Men, on the other hand, were like steak—rough and lean, and able to satisfy my hunger.
So, at first I looked through the personals. This all started when I was 22. Now I’m not implying that all gay and bisexual men are promiscuous, but most of the ads I saw were from men of all ages who wanted to either give or receive oral or anal sex. I remember seeing a naked picture of an attractive young man, and the ad said that he wanted to give a guy a blow job. I responded. The man kept asking me for a picture, but I didn’t want to give one. I felt weird being exposed to this new, different element. We ended up chatting on the phone a few times. I knew that he owned a bookstore and later found out that he lied about his age—originally he told me he was twenty-three. So I agreed to meet him outside of a Bruegger’s Bagels. I was nervous and terrified—and then he never showed up. I didn’t know what the man really looked like, so I was just expecting some middle-aged guy to come up to me and offer oral sex. He never showed up, though, and luckily I never asked anybody. A couple weeks later, I gave him a second chance. He e-mailed that he was significantly older than what he originally told me, but that “I do love to suck dick.” So I met him at Bruegger’s. Luckily I just looked at him, and we both walked away. That wasn’t something that I was proud of. I was twenty-two and had never had any type of sex before. I was vulnerable, and when I found personal ads about casual sex, my vulnerabilities came into play.
I never thought I would ever tell anybody that I liked men. Homosexuality was something I hated. I was a white male who always did well in school and was seen as a member of the majority, so why would I want to face discrimination as a minority? Still, in the midst of my grad school studies and my internship at the Sanchez group home I started to meet people on the Internet. I remember the first time I actually went to a guy’s house. I had heard the horror stories about meeting people online and how it was best to meet in public first. The man who I met first actually just convinced me to go to his apartment. He was actually twenty years older than me and a bodybuilder. It was tax season, and he was an accountant. He offered me a drink, and then we started to fool around. I remember being incredibly nervous and feeling his disappointment. He also mentioned that he was in an open relationship with his partner, meaning they had no restrictions on who they could both sleep with. I wasn’t convinced that his partner accepted this fully. I already had his phone number, and I was new to the casual sex/hookup scene, so I kept calling him for days. It was by far the world’s worst hookup. You’re just looking for a one-night stand, and you get this kid who has never done anything physically before, and he then constantly hounds you. If that isn’t a lesson about not cheating on your partner, I don’t know what is.
All I can remember was that as I was lying there with that man, besides noticing his amazing body, I kept thinking that this was so much more exciting than working at the group home. I was a master’s-level intern, and all I did was watch cartoons and reality shows with the children. My supervisor was very burned out. In fact, in my interview she actually mentioned that most social workers get burned out in only three years, and she’d been there three years at that point. Once when three of the children were being restrained, the direct care supervisor told me to get the social worker, Lisa, to assist the staff in de-escalating the situation. Lisa was meeting with another social worker and told me, “Well, we got things we have to do.”
I dreaded going to my field placement every time. Sometimes I would talk to staff members who had been doing that work for ten or twenty years. Many people in this country feel that teachers are underpaid, but I believe that direct care staffers who make sacrifices and put their own safety at risk to help abused children are true American heroes. One woman, Sandy, was a direct care worker for seventeen years and always came to work with a smile on her face. No matter what any of the kids did to her, she always cared for them and listened. All of the staffers brainstormed ways to reduce the incidents of violence that occurred in the home. Each time a physical intervention had to be performed, an incident report had to be filled out. Then a panel of incident review committee members would meet and develop ideas on how to prevent future incidents. However, for most of the children, the group home was their last resort. Knowing this caused a lot of anxiety, depression, and anger among the kids. Before coming to the home, a lot of the children had been bounced around foster families and different family members. None of it had worked out.