Tangling With a DMHAS Staff Member Part 2
Now that I have calmed down a little bit, I can continue my story….
Over the course of the last several weeks, the DMHAS caseworker that I had dealt with last Summer was again assigned to assist me in procuring appropriate services for our son. At first, I did not realize this was the same person that I had dealt with last summer — I thought this was a totally different person. Our first conversation was interesting in that this man was very charming to me right off the bat. He told me that he had several emails in front of him. These were emails that I had written to various entities in CT, and he had them all laid out in front of him. He also stated that he had been given these emails in preparation for calling me to see what he could do to help. He then said that he remembered talking to me last Summer about our son. But it still didn’t click in my mind — mainly because that man was not nearly as pleasant as this one was during our initial conversation. But the voice sounded vaguely familiar — I just didn’t make the connection — yet. So we talked on about our son on a very surface level. He said he had read in one of the emails I wrote that our son had been arrested for shooting a paintball gun out of a car. I said, “Yes, I remembered that incident.”
He then said a strange thing. He stated that our son’s behavior wasn’t anything unusual, in fact it was behavior very typical for a young adult male. He continued on to say that he was sure our son was just a good guy who was acting like he was immature, and that he did not want me to pathologize our son. He mentioned the word pathologize two more times in our conversation, and he used it in the context of the first time — that he didn’t want me to pathologize our son. I felt like he was beginning to trivialize, or minimize, our son’s mental illness and its corresponding issues.
Then this caseworker asked me to tell him about some of our son’s mental health issues and needs. So, I looked down at the recent neuro-psychological report that we had completed on our son in August 2007. I began to read some of the more important information from the testing results. Right away, this caseworker told me NOT to read from the report, because he did not “hold much stock in them, because psychologists tend to pathologize the person they are testing and they all say the same thing anyway.” I was quite shocked at this remark and as well the tone of his voice was very flip — as if the information in the report really didn’t amount to more than a hill of beans.
Next, the caseworker told me to tell him about our son in my own words. I explained that since I have learning disabilities and ADD, it was actually easier for me to read from the report, so I would be as accurate as possible and not get off track in our conversation. The caseworker’s response was the same as before — he did not want me to read from the report and he was not at all interested in what was in the report. So, I told him what I could about the bipolar issues, learning disabilities, etc, and as I started to go into adult performance issues and everyday living, he stopped me and said he had heard all he needed to hear. After that, the conversation was almost totally one-sided and I was told how he was going to get our son and I back to CT in the next couple of weeks. He said he had a plan.
I will go over the plan in the next post. Believe me when I tell you that the story only gets “better” from here!
