My Job as a Social Worker in the Pandemic Almost Killed Me
Trigger Warning: Mentions of Suicidal Ideation.
This is not an exaggeration. I was in the Emergency Room in May for a psychological evaluation. I had a panic attack at work and revealed that I had been having suicidal ideation since about January. This does not mean I was directly in danger right then and there, but nonetheless, it was agency policy to call 911.
How did I get here? I am no stranger to panic attacks or suicidal ideation for that matter, but they had been increasing significantly since the pandemic. For one thing, as a person of Asian Descent, commuting has become a potential battleground for me. I find myself scanning, always keeping my eyes out for a potential threat; and as an essential worker, I was back working in person in May of 2020.
My day-to-day work did not seem hard, but performing everyday tasks became a mountain to climb. I didn’t have so much at work going on that was daily insanity, but dwelling on such hard circumstances after work hours finally got to me.
My mental health has always been a challenge for me, but I’ve managed it for a decade now. What changed? The world was launched into chaos in my already chaotic field, I found myself with a potential target on my back because of detrimentally violent rhetoric from the most powerful politicians in the country, and my job didn’t care.
That’s not to say that people in my job didn’t care about me. I deeply appreciated my coworkers and would not even have lasted as long as I did without them. The JOB- the INDUSTRY- that is, didn’t care. I still had to make face-to-face contacts with clients, I still had to travel, I was provided minimal protection. I was not unique in these facts.
As an Asian Adoptee working in the adoption industry, during an unprecedented pandemic, and it took me two years working as a social worker in direct services to finally burn out. I burnt to a crisp and beyond. There’s so much to be said about the industry — abolitionists, reformers, and advocates all seem to be fighting on the internet. I feel trepidation typing this out even as I no longer work in this industry. But I don’t want to talk about the industry’s shortcomings, I want to talk about how working in it nonstop for 2 years practically destroyed my mental health.
We in the social work field often talk about the terms, countertransference, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout. I’ll relate how all 3 came crashing into my life these last 6 months specifically.
Countertransference is when we let our emotions from work bleed into other parts of our lives. That’s inevitable in our line of work. It’s hard to carry stories and support others’ lives and leave that all at the office, especially when you don’t have an office. For most of the pandemic, if I wasn’t conducting face-to-face visits, I was working in my apartment. Calming, or attempting to calm down families; trying to provide them with emotional security that I myself had forfeited when the city shut down March 15, 2020. Boundaries didn’t exist for me, work-life balance didn’t exist for me. I lived for my work and my work was giving my mental health a beating. There’s nothing worse as a “professional helper” feeling so helpless to help yourself and others at the same time.
I increased my anti-anxiety and antidepressants 4 times in a total of one year since the pandemic began. The most recent in the past 6 months.
Secondary Traumatic Stress is a lesser-known offshoot of PTSD, which we still don’t know everything about as a disorder either. STS can be experienced by Doctors, EMS workers, Nurses, Social Workers, and even family members of sufferers of trauma. The Adoption Industry is a Trauma. It begins with Separation. People often look at adoption as a completely positive entity. They fail to see the whole picture. The journey to adoption is fraught and even then does not guarantee a happy ending.
I was experiencing the trauma of the families I worked with as well as my own trauma from the pandemic, the attacks on Asians, and still continue processing my own adoption trauma. These seemingly separate things have a tendency to compound, affecting my well-being in its entirety, and I was suffering for it.
Burnout is exactly what it sounds like. I slipped into a major depressive episode. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, nor did I want to. I felt like a complete failure. I couldn’t do anything right. Management in the Industry noticed. I took a month-long sabbatical in March. But it really was a bandaid to gaping, infected wound. As soon as I returned in April, the Industry continued to move on. Suddenly I was thrust back into the chaos and mistakes piled up. Management decided to write me up.
The day of my meeting with my manager discussing a corrective action plan was 9 am after I had spent 12 hours the previous day visiting my families. Upon seeing an itemized list of administrative things I had done wrong, how it could have negatively impacted my families and perpetuated the Industry’s reputation, I began to hyperventilate, I couldn’t feel my hands, I thought I was going to get fired, I thought I was going to die right there, my life in NYC would be over, not that my current life had been anything worthwhile during this period, but I digress. I told my manager I had been thinking about killing myself.
That sentence set off a series of events that ended with me being escorted to an ambulance by police officers — don’t get me started about calling the police for mental health emergencies — and driving to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. It was strange and familiar being a social worker on the receiving end of so many systems run by social workers. I was literally asked what I was doing there when the nurses in the psychiatric ward of the hospital saw my professional dress and my occupation on my paperwork combined with the rough gray hospital socks.
They took my phone and watch in the ER. I had no access to the outside world the 5 hours I was in triage, waiting for the psychiatrist to evaluate what I already knew by then, that the episode and hysterics had passed and I just wanted to go home. I asked the large security guards for a book while I waited. They had a copy of the Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur. I’m grateful for the compassion of that security guard. I felt so small and lost in the hospital system. Being passed from one ward to the next as they tested me for COVID and finally discharged me.
I was immediately shown the door when I was allowed to leave. I took an Uber home. It was a Friday so I didn’t know what to think about returning to work on Monday.
I ended up taking another 2 weeks off. I had enough accrued PTO. I didn’t care anymore.
I was able to procure another job in early June. I called my supervisor an hour after I had a verbal offer. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I would’ve stayed. It was almost time for another audit, more court appearances, the Industry remained the same. My work was passed on to the next worker as if I had never been there.
New York officially opened up on June 15th. I began my new position on June 21st. So far my quality of life has seemed to improve trifold.
I’ve already reduced my antidepressants back to almost pre-COVID times. My therapist told me it was as if I was a new person. All of the sudden there was security in what I was doing. There seemed a renewed sense of purpose. I get to create something new in my new job. I get to finish work and write, knit, garden, be with friends. Even things that seemingly were not affected by my work stress seem to be improving. For example, my communication with my parents is much better, I find myself reveling in the small joys of simply waking up every morning rather than the anxious dread I had grown accustomed to.
Of course, I still have anxiety, the new job learning curve and all; I worry about the weight I gained through the increased medication, signing up for as many spin classes I can possibly take in a week, I even joined a new dieting group (that may or may not benefit me in the long run, but more on that later).
In the month since leaving work in direct services, I find myself able to look at life differently. Not every problem to be solved was life and death — it wasn't when I was working in direct services but it sure felt like it. This doesn't mean I’ll never work in direct services again, I just need some time to back away to see the bigger picture. The pandemic traumatized all of us and social workers are no exception. I hope my story can normalize social workers having their own mental health challenges and humanize us.
