Thursday, June 12, 2014

Off Center

A new staff member, who's been working for us less than a week, stays up all night and searches his room for missing money. He turns his bed upside down. He looks under his mattress. He looks in the trash. He searches the whole place.

He keeps his roommate awake half the night.  He makes veiled threats about what he would do if he finds out who stole his money. Finally the night security guard shows up and the man's drug tested because his behavior suggests he's using meth. Surprisingly, the test is negative.

And the next morning he finds the money in a compartment in his wallet. He says that whoever stole it must have returned it while he wasn't looking.

Because of his bizarre behavior, we fire him and move him to one of our other facilities. And within a few days we have to discharge him from there because he continues acting strange.

Because we accept any addict or alcoholic who asks for help we sometimes get clients like this man with problematic behavior.

By problematic I mean they often face an array of problems. No communication skills. Anger management issues. Poor life skills. Low self-esteem. Hygiene problems. Educational deficiencies. No job skills. The list could fill the rest of this page.

Now we expect that many who show up will face challenges. After all, if they were normal and well-adjusted they wouldn't come to a halfway house and ask a bunch of recovering addicts for help.

And when they're a little bit off-center we help them get back on track. And we mostly do it by relating their behavior to their disease. After all, in the halfway houses everything we do is peer counseling. We don't hire professionals for that part of our program.

But, sometimes a client is too far off-center for us to help them.  In those cases we usually refer them to a psychiatric facility where they can receive appropriate treatment.