Being the bridge

My role in this job is to see people for short-term issues. Think insomnia, smoking cessation, mild anxiety due to stress, etc. But maybe a third of my referrals are for patients who have a long history of mental illness. These are people who have been disconnected from mental health care for a long time. Part of my job is to be a bridge for them: connecting them to care and hanging with them until they can get into a therapist’s office.

So I have this patient who has seen about a dozen different psychiatrists over the years; in and out of psych in-patient, in and out therapist’s offices, in and out of intensive out-patient programs. To protect her privacy, I won’t go through the laundry list of diagnoses that follows her. But I will say that she has a handful of very complicated diagnoses coupled with a trauma history and a history of substance use. Very much out of my scope, both in this role and in general. But we started meeting anyway, every couple of weeks, to tackle her anxiety and (on my part) try to reconnect her to more intense help.

I like this patient; she has a good sense of humor and we just hit it off. But some of what she told me was just so far out of my experience, I didn’t know what to do. So I went to supervision.

It’s not that I didn’t know what I should do. I knew that she needed a higher level of therapy than I’m qualified to provide. But I didn’t know how to convince her of that. This is a woman who has been in and out of therapy for 30 years; she is deeply distrustful of psychiatrists and very reluctant to meet yet another therapist. But meeting in supervision helped me craft the right words: that while I like her very much and enjoy working with her, I’m not the right therapist for her.

Much to her credit, she was gracious and understanding. She appreciated my honesty and agreed to try it with someone else. So I referred her out to a therapist with a trauma background who was also trained in EMDR. I talked to the therapist myself; she had experience and she was taking new patients. What could go wrong?

It should not shock you, dear reader, that it did not work out. My patient called me after she had her session with this therapist to tell me that the therapist “couldn’t help her.” At first I thought maybe my patient was misrepresenting what happened (read: I thought she was lying to me). Again, I went to my supervisor. He pointed out that there are bad therapists; what she said could be true. I had to ask more questions.

More conversation with my patient made it clear to me that she didn’t misunderstand or misrepresent the session. She met with the therapist for an hour and it ended with the therapist saying, sorry, can’t help you.

Some self-disclosure here: I’ve seen bad therapists. I’ll spare you the details, but I have certainly left a therapist’s office wondering why they had chosen this profession; their rapport building was so subpar, their attitude so shitty, I felt worse than when I went in. So maybe the therapist I sent my patient to was one of those. Or maybe she wasn’t having a good day. It happens; we are, as I keep writing on this blog and saying out loud to the women I supervise, only human. Still, I was disappointed. I had convinced this patient to see someone else, only to have her be shown the door.

Luckily for me, my patient trusted me and she agreed to try again. This time I was a lot more diligent. I made about ten phone calls. I gave an in-depth report about my patient’s history (with her permission) to the people I spoke to. Just before I was about to give it up for a while, I connected with someone who agreed to see my patient.

This patient stopped in the other day, after she saw her doctor. She’s been going to therapy weekly, which was thrilling for me. She thanked me for my support and my help. She looked good. We got to share a moment of mutual admiration and respect that carried me through the rest of my day.

I know it won’t always end this way. I know I’ll make referrals that patients won’t follow through with or that won’t work out for some other reason. But man, I am holding on to this small victory for now. The combination of supervision and doing some extra leg work paid off and I’m so happy for my patient; she’s getting the help she needs. Often the best thing we can be for the people we meet with is a bridge to something better. And how fortunate we are to be that bridge.