[humanser] Why did you choose your particular Human services profession?

[Cheryl Wade]

Dear Jonathan and List,


Boy, am I glad you asked this question! I think I actually could use 
some therapy just to make  sense of my decision and clean up the fallout.


I chose to leave journalism and become a rehabilitation counselor 
because I knew so many people who were blind and who pretty much stayed 
in their apartments or lived with their parents. They hardly ever got 
around in their communities, had tiny nuclear groups of friends and, 
most of all, seemed to have no expectation at all that they ever would 
go to work.


This problem grieved me for years. I decided I wanted to specialize in a 
practice with blind individuals at least 22 years old who never had 
worked for pay, and perhaps were overprotected by their parents. I 
actually wrote an outline of a program to deal with these problems.


About two-thirds of the way through my program, I realized the system 
was not, not ever, going to support me in this goal. Whereas I wanted to 
search out these people on my own, the system is based on referrals and 
selection of service and, oh, my, there's no money to do that.. I also 
learned that I never would be an employment therapist. I would be a 
gopher, a case manager, pushing papers to get people into services but 
never, ever helping them deal with the root causes of their difficult 
lives. In my first job, I did indeed work as an employment therapist, 
but we had no technology or assessments in place to determine function 
or skills. It was just, do it, however you want. It was wonderful but I 
now have very little feedback to report from clients.


So now I'm purely on the therapeutic side, licking my wounds that by now 
have festered and grown old. I am so sad, so disappointed, so terribly 
frustrated with my naive behavior. Now I have to answer questions like, 
"so, if we hire you, can we bill for your work?" I once was flatly 
turned down to even be looked at for a position in therapeutic work 
because, "you're just rehab." All my social work buddies were diagnosing 
folks and familiar with all kinds of disorders. My professor in the DSM 
class in the rehab program told us, "you won't have to make any 
diagnoses; the psych folks do that." While I was terribly relieved to 
know I wouldn't have to label people with disorders I'd not become 
familiar enough with, I quickly understood I would need to be one of the 
"psych folks."


Please forgive my rant. I want to let college students understand that 
the two forms of counseling are very different and that, in Michigan at 
least, rehab counselors don't have much time for counseling.


Cheryl Wade, MA, LLPC, CRC


On 10/18/2017 7:05 AM, Jonathan Franks via HumanSer wrote:
> Fellow Federationists,
> Many of us know that Human Services carries a vast range of different
> types of professions. Also, many of us chose this field for a certain
> reason. Whether you are working in your academic career or are already
> an  established human services professional, we are all working to
> serve our fellow human being. The question is why did you choose your
> particular field and what drove you to make that decision?
>
> Warm regards,
>
> Jonathan Franks BSW
> 1st Vice President
> National Federation of the Blind Human Services Division
> Graduate Student
> MSW Program
> Texas State University
>
>