An Ode to Working in Social Services

Where I work is more than a testament to psychiatric deinstitutionalization (aka the shutting down of "legitimate" mental hospitals), it is a testament to how easy it is to be lost in this atomizing, broken society. The space I occupy professionally represents a general malaise that is rendered invisible by a deep class structure that positions us all in an overarching hierarchy that legitimizes some, while rejecting others. It is a microcosm of the bigger picture. There, the rejected and the legitimized not only co-exist, but enable one another to exist.

It is a known as a drop-in centre for people with diagnoses of mental illness. It serves as a makeshift asylum for the "unhousable," the "non-compliant," the "deconpensating," the "concurrently disordered." Many of the regulars are abjectly broken: they are known as under housed, addicted and medicalized bodies. They are viewed as the unproductive members of a capitalist society; they are labelled individuals who are considered at once victims and con artists.

Everyday as staff we come face to face with the hopeless realities of many human beings. We are intimately acquainted with the symptoms of a broader problem: from bed bug infestations, slumlords and chronic illness, to suicide threats, "disordered" thinking and drug abuse, violence, the effects of lives spent in institutions and filled with trauma, and a lack of food and shelter amidst so called plenty. But we cannot solve these problems: there is no solution only grey areas. There is no housing, there is no justice despite humanitarian rhetoric, there is no room for everyone to be productive in a society that values productivity above all else.

And poverty is a productive industry.

So we “reduce harm.” We are the paid facilitators, working under the middlemen ( the layers upon growing layers of management), we are the redistributors of scraps.  We are forced into the role, implicitly, of determining who are the deserving vs. the undeserving poor: who gets to have that expired sandwich for cleaning the washrooms, and who gets turned down for a pair of donated boots because they have a history of selling goods on the street.

Yet once you spend enough time on the service provider side of the line you begin to question this distinction, provided you are fortunate enough not to find yourself completely consumed by the contradictions. You realize that we too are inhabiting a grey area, that the divides and boundaries are abstract constructions that barely hold it all together. With increasing certainty, you come to terms with the fact that we are all to some degree "messed up;" that it is the world that is insane, that you were fortunate enough to land on the right side of the divide because you were able to pull it off, to put forth and maintain a mask of respectability. 

I love my job but sometimes the contradictions drive me to the brink of hopelessness when I start really thinking about the implications of the fact that my job exists, that I am spending my days doing what I am doing and that this is necessary, that I love my job. In order to do this job well, it seems you need to find a tricky balance between forgetting the bigger picture (because if you dwell you will go insane) and remembering (because if you don't you will become jaded and even cruel). 

Thankfully we also exist at an everyday, interpersonal level and the people I work with (on both the client and staff spectrum, but major love to my coworkers!) are some of the most amazing folks I have ever met across the board. 

The Only Difference Between Me and a Madman is That I'm Not Mad!