A big Thank You to all our mental health caregivers. Mental health management is complex but vital to help people who suffer from anxiety, depression, stress, addictions, complex PTSD, and chronic pain.

I think social workers are one of our most overlooked caregivers. They have a very important, but often frustrating, traumatic, and difficult task. 

Isabel Allenda, in The Sum of our Days, has written about the challenges social workers face and how their job is not one to be envied. 

(She) had to work with children who had suffered abuse and neglect, children who were shuttled from one institution to the next, who were adopted and then returned, children terrorized and filled with rage, children who were delinquent, or so traumatized they they would never lead a more or less normal life. (The social worker) fought the bureaucracy, the institutionalized negligence, the lack of resources, the irremediable wickedness of humankind, and, especially, she fought time. There weren’t enough hours to study cases, visit the children, rescue the ones in the most urgent danger, find them a temporary refuge, protect them, save them, follow their cases. The same children passed through her office again and again, their problems growing worse with the years. Nothing was resolved, only postponed. 

Please take care of yourselves even as you are taking care of others. 

All the best

Judy