Magellan Part two- The beginning of my Franklin

Hello,

For the summer of 2018, I completed an internship at MHY family services, this stands for Mars Home For Youth and is an placement facility that takes in kids for both short and long-term stays in order to help them deal with mental and behavioral issues. I will go into more detail on this institution and what I have learned from working there over the summer in another post. For the rest of this, I would like to explain why I chose this organization and how MHY's work is connected to me and my Magellan from last summer.

Last summer I shadowed several mental health professionals at UPMC Children's mental health office in Wexford. I got to sit in on several doctors, therapists, counselors, treatment visits with their patients, and I got to watch therapeutic practices I had been learning about in school. It was an amazing experience and if you would like more details please refer to my other blog posts from 2017.  After completing this past Magellan, I knew I didn't just want to watch these therapeutic practices, I wanted to work with kids myself and see if I could effectively administer relief to those who needed it. So I began the next school year doing research on organizations in which I could complete an internship and really get experience working with children myself.  In the end, my decision came down to two different organizations, one worked with children on the autism spectrum through direct care in Pittsburgh and the other worked with children who have trauma, PTSD, and other behavioral disorders. I have always had an interest in working with trauma patients and so in the end, I decided to intern at MHY family services, specifically with their DAS unit.

The DAS units stand for Diversion Acute Stabilization and these units can hold twenty kids between the two units, ten on Ryman and ten kids on Collins. Both of these units take kids in for an average of twenty-eight days, the goal is to stabilize them with a routine and on their meds while hopefully working with them therapeutically so they will be stable enough to routine home and reintegrated back into society. If our program cannot match their needs our administration works to get the kids placed in RTF programs, this stands for Residential Treatment Facility. The youngest child the DAS program will take in is nine years old and the oldest is seventeen. Both units are co-ed but the rooms are separated by genders. The units do take a child's sexual orientation and gender identity into consideration when they receive a bed, but it must first be discussed with their therapist and the unit must be able to accommodate, meaning there is a bed available in the child's preferred gendered hallway, and two, that it is safe for that child to be moved.

A lot of the children who come to the DAS programs have trauma backgrounds, mental and physical abuse and therefore aggressive tendencies. They may or may not have plans to hurt themselves and any other person who makes them mad or gets in their way. This is why before I was allowed on the unit I had to receive a week of TCI training, this stands for Therapeutic Crisis Intervention and involves training on how to de-escalate the child verbally and how to restrain them physically if the situation would deem it necessary. MHY takes all their new employees and puts them through NEO, New employee training which lasts exactly a month long and walks all the new hires through every situation they may have to deal with and leaves them feeling very prepared to work on the units and with the kids.

Once I was trained I would be "unleashed" as the senior staff called it, and I would be working on the units and dealing hands-on with the kids until I would be required to return to school for the start of my senior year and Washington and Jefferson College. For the summer months, I would gain so much experience and knowledge as I learned from both the senior staff and the kids themselves. I would have the opportunity to bond with kids, engage in therapeutic activities and really connect with some children. I would also learn about the emotionally heavy side of working with direct care, and the importance of self-care after working a hard shift. In my next few posts, I will go into some detail about both the good and the bad, and why no matter what, how gratifying this job was in the end.