First off, obligatory I’m on my phone so expect typos and weird formatting.
I just need to vent a little bit about my current internship and thus far experience with my field of work/study. I am currently studying for my Masters of Social Work and as part of that I am required to do a clinical internship, which is already bullshit being an unpaid position. Especially with the fact that it’s going to be a lot of direct work with clients and so on. But the thing I’m getting really frustrated with at the moment is how the semester hasn’t even started yet and I’m already being bombarded with emails and tasks to complete and being required to email and coordinate with a bunch of people i don’t even know to set up meetings on my off time for something I will never see a penny for. I’m in my thirties, I have a kid on school vacation. You have any idea how often me and my kiddo actually have concurrent vacation time? Like never and I’ve made it a point of spending as much time as I can with my family prior to the start of the semester when things kick off. And this place has literally emailed me multiple times daily with shit to do since my field office reached out letting me know this is where I’d be placed.
Furthermore I’m facing a fuck ton of frustration and at some points anger around the behavior of those in my field. I’m a social worker, the people that’s sole purpose in society is to try and make it more livable for everyone. And like I’ve never been in a field where the work/life balance/boundaries were this fucked up. Nor an industry as toxic and I’ve been in both the digital media world and the military. New social workers coming into the field are regularly shamed for complaining about ridiculous workloads and shit pay. Not a day goes by where there isn’t a “I’m burned out and need help” post on the SW and mental healthcare providers subreddits.
And that’s not even to mention the joke that has become to purpose of working towards social justice. Organizations that hirer social workers don’t actually want us to do social work things. They just want us there to manage the “trouble makers” and get them to be productive again. I got fired from my last position because I called out a nursing instructor for violating a student’s ADA rights. My boss told me it was unprofessional and made the instructor feel uncomfortable around me. She was actively bullying a student with a MH disorder out of the program and admitting it during staff meetings.
And then there is the actual practice as a mental healthcare provider. Like how can you “fix” someone who’s depressed because this system they are stuck in sucks and is actively exploiting them? How do you help those who are actively being traumatized by the system, when they have no other choice but to participate in the abuse? And like yeah we are supposed to always be working towards social justice causes; but what impact do we actually have? And holy hell how the profession has fallen from their socialist/anarchist foundations, and holy hell how it has embraced with open arms capitalism and all the harm that mentality brings.
Thanks for listening to me vent. These thoughts have been weighing on me recently.