There are no emergencies

URGENT! SOCIAL WORK NEEDED ASAP.

That’s the email subject line I received a few weeks ago, on a Monday morning, of course. My body reacted before I even fully digested the words: I could actually feel my blood pressure rising. I believe I even said NO, out loud, to my phone.

This is not the first time I have seen this subject line, of course. In my eleven years of social working, some version of it has been deployed for any number of reasons: someone wants to send their loved one to rehab against their will (not a thing); someone’s stairs are falling down inside their home and they think the city should fix it (maybe a thing but good luck); a family has deep, ongoing, intergenerational trauma that can only be fixed with literal years of internal family systems therapy but actually one of them is dying and so everything needs to be fixed within the next three to five days (this happens monthly in hospice; when will we learn??). Use your imagination to think of the most complicated and devastating stories and then imagine someone (a doctor, a nurse, a dietitian) saying, “oh, the social worker will fix it.”

Let me change your expectations: the social worker can’t “fix” anything.

I don’t mean to sound flippant here. I guess I should be flattered that there are people who think that someone with an MSW will possess the mysterious magic answer that has eluded everyone else. And if I’m being honest, that’s partly why I chose this profession: I wanted to help people. I wanted to make people’s lives better. But the thing about this work is that there are no magic answers. And there are no emergencies. There are huge, frustrating, systemic barriers to helping real people in real time but no amount of “urgent/emergency/ASAP” email subject lines can fix those.

Which is not to say social workers can’t be helpful! We can be; we are. But I have found that maybe 20% of my job is explaining how why I can’t help. I hate those moments when they happen with patients; I hate them even more when they happen with my co-workers. It’s my own ego that gets in the way here: I don’t want my non-social work partners to think I’m bad at my job, or worse, lazy. I don’t want them to stop asking for my opinion, for my expertise, for my help. But I also cannot lie. Some problems are not fixable. And—I will be saying this with my dying breath--there are no social work emergencies.

When I got that email, I had my mini temper tantrum and then I took a deep breath and called my supervisor. We came up with a plan, which I shared with the family in need. And then I don’t know what happened. Because that is the other piece: all of these issues—the rehab placements and falling down stairs and troubling family dynamics—eventually they get solved. We don’t always get to hear the end but there is an end, every. Single. Time. It bears remembering that we are just part of the process, not the process itself. There are, as always, no secret answers except to keep moving and helping and breathing; there’s no rush.