Monday, February 8th

I arrive at work and start work on the psych report from Friday. In the background, I'm hearing the sounds of my coworkers socializing, the whole how was your weekend thing. Stupidly, I begin to feel a little morose. A lot of the talk sounds much like "girl talk" so I don't try to include myself. So its another stupid instance of feeling status of the token male.

I go to the office of a coworker, one that I had worked with in a previous career, and hang out with her for a bit. I help with some IEP software issues. While I'm sitting with her, one of my supervisors comes in and I immediately sense a risk assessment coming, just by the look on her face. She tells me that she has one of the high school guidance counselors on the phone who has a student in her office. I speak to the counselor and grab my cheat sheet and head over to the high school.

The student reports that they had made two attempts to kill herself the day before. The end result is that the student needs to go out for an assessment at psychiatric emergency services. The two main things that lead me to this decision, aside from that the student reported making attempts, was that the student said that if they hadn't been interrupted they would have completed the acts; and that when the student was in the moment of the attempts, she wasn't afraid and that "it felt right."

Following the wait for the parent to come in and pick up the student and my explanation to the parent of the decision and the follow up, I return to the office and have lunch.

After lunch, I spend time beating my head against a report and speaking with my office mate about normal child development and how being in this line of work makes it hard to tell what is normal. I joke that I'm very good at telling what is abnormal and that if I were to encounter a "normal" student it would be so out of my experience, I would probably just classify it as a category of abnormal that I hadn't encountered before.

Follow this, I do a little paperwork and put some stuff in the mail and head for home.