nursingforsocialjustice

I am going to share an anecdote or sorts. Let me paint you picture constructed from a recollection of my moral distress.

I have a salient memory from years ago (5 or 6?) when I was working on an inpatient service for people living with mental health and substance use issues. A coworker and were in the middle of a 12 hour shift, sitting in the care team station. We were discussing the value and benefit of the program. They mentioned the thankfulness that the patients should have for the existence of the service, because in other provinces, and in other countries people who have substance use issues do not have access to similar services. I do believe that it is important that substance use services exist and that they are accessible to all who are seeking help. However, that memory remains salient for me, because all I could think about was the trauma, the inequity, the systemic racism, the inter-generational trauma, the unaddressed mental illness, the failures in the school system, the failure in the healthcare system, and the multitude of other things that contributed to the person standing in front of us who had a substance use and mental health issue so “persistent” and “chronic” that they exhausted all other services and ended up in that service we were working in. The language choice that was used to describe the admission criteria and the patients admitted to the program alone warrants some deep critical discourse analysis.

All I could think about were the failures in the system that led to the person standing in front of us today. The little voice in my head was screaming, why should they be thankful for a service that they accessed because of all the intersections in their life that led them to being in such a place of that they needed access to the service?

The one comment, intended to highlight the compassion of our system had a powerful on me. I could not stop the barrage of internal questions: should they be thankful that the system failed them? should they be thankful that the system dehumanizes them? should they be thankful that they have to live with 100 strangers at a place where they have limited privacy and everywhere is a constant reminder of how society looks at them? I could not let this go for the rest of my shift. I still think about this. This is quite revealing about my personal perspectives. I cannot let this go, the idea that people who work in services that exist as a band-aide to larger social issues like poverty, homelessness, racism, ableism, lack of tolerance and acceptance of diversity, unaddressed and unrecognized trauma, should be applauded for their compassion and caring to work with such a down-trodden group without the really critical exploration of why these services exist to begin with and how or if they do anything to change the situation of the people and populations who end up access those services.

Peace,

Michelle D.