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In my role on the crisis team in the emergency department, we relied heavily on partnerships with local police in supporting some of the most vulnerable members of our community. I saw that the officers were essentially providing mental health outreach with very little to no mental health training. The mental health needs of our community increased exponentially which I can bet has increased the number of mental health related calls for our police.
Through the children’s mental health unit, I worked closely with the administrators, our teaching staff and CYWs who supported the education needs of the children admitted to the unit. I could see their roles and expectations changing at the same rapid pace as the hospitals. They also
were unsure of what policies or procedures were going to change next and it seemed that all of this was getting in the way of them doing their job which was to help students succeed in the classroom.
I felt that I couldn’t separate myself from my work, it consumed me on my time off. I would get stuck thinking about the what ifs and worst-case scenarios. I was exhausted and had no energy left for my family at the end of the day, I had three young children who needed me to be 100%
present when I finally walked in the door. It was so difficult to leave the hospital because I felt a sense of responsibility to serve our community through health care. However, I have come to realize that I have a unique opportunity to continue to support those working on the frontlines so they can recover and forge ahead for our community. I have expertise from 20 years working as a social worker and the added experience of working on the frontline during a global pandemic. I am excited to see where this journey takes us.
Get to
know Catrina
I am a registered social worker with 2 decades of experience working in the legal system and hospital-based mental health care.
When I told my colleagues about my plans to open a therapy practice that supports these very specific helping professions, I was surprised at the number of people who told me they worked with a therapist over the course of the pandemic. What I was not surprised to hear was that they had difficulty connecting with the therapist because “they didn’t understand what we were going through”.
To say that those working in healthcare, emergency services and education went through an absolute nightmare is an understatement. We were asked to do things that we could never prepare ourselves for and we were required to change almost everything about our jobs that we knew before the pandemic.
