Wednesday, November 11th
I get into work and within 5 minutes I get a call about a hysterical student at the high school and the need for a risk assessment. So much for the counseling schedule today. Off I go and do my psychologist shtick. I decide that the student doesn't need to be sent out for a screening but does need outside therapy. The student has started to engage in cutting behaviors and it appears to be escalating. The guidance counselor and I contact the parents who come in a short while later to see their child. When they arrive, with meet with the student and her parents. I go over everything and mom and student are tearful. Then out of nowhere, the father bursts out crying. Then the guidance counselor is crying. Now I'm not a cold person but I figured someone needed to hold it together. The end result is that both parents are obviously supportive and love their child very much and agree that counseling is needed. The student goes home for the day with her parents. That was the unpredictable.
The predictable was the follow up from my phone conversation with a parent yesterday. The one that I was elusive about in yesterday's post. So due to previous experience (and as someone once said, I think it was a talk radio shrink the only way to predict future behavior is by looking at past behavior), I knew what the parent's response was going to be to what had transpired. So, I prefaced my phone call to the parent by saying, "I think you'll be asking me for my supervisor's phone number by the end of this call." She said, "I think you're right about that." I delivered my message, she asked for the supervisor's number. Then I asked, as an aside, "Are we still on for our meeting next week?" She politely replied in the affirmative.
Those were the highlights of the day. The only other thing was a phone exchange with the psychiatrist of a student that I'm evaluating. Everything else was email exchanges and paperwork. Tomorrow I start catching up with my counseling from today.
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