Hello everyone, short post about something while it is top of mind. I made it shorter than I thought it would be because continuing past where I was, I’m afraid it would devolve into your run-of-the-mill “get off my lawn” post. Enjoy - H.P. DeV
New semester, new crop of students. A new cohort of young people who hate binaries yet refer to everything only as either cringe or sus, who wish to speak with no cap, and who sometimes feel that individuals are behaving in ways that exceed social expectation, i.e. that they are being too extra. And with every cohort of these roughly 100 students I teach each semester, there are at least 15 among their ranks who approach me before or after class, or during office hours, or through a tortured “wall of text” email with no paragraph breaks, notifying me that they have an ISSUE.
And let me tell you, hearing that someone has an issue is most certainly not based and is extremely sus, but if I don’t talk them down from being pressed then I would get dragged, possibly even canceled. Like..bet.
In the past, the most cringe of these “issues” were those of flights to Hawaii they “accidentally” scheduled two days before the final exam, or complaints about their clinical placements they’ve accumulated after a mere four hours of on-site orientation (super sus). But more and more, especially in the last three years, I have a new brand of issue, and this one is seriously affecting my drip. This issue is not so much cringe as it is sus. And in this case, I am not using the term sus as shorthand for “suspect,” but rather as shorthand for “deeply sad and spiritually anguishing.” This issue, of course, is the issue of feeling unsafe.
It is not that I’ve never heard the term in this context before, and as a millennial we are partly to blame for its nascent repurposing, mostly because many of us very cynically used it to put our boomer managers into a weird double-bind, i.e. “I just don’t feel like I can staff the front desk with only one person…I just don’t feel safe.” But this term has now been weaponized beyond a simple failsafe word you used to get out of a Sunday morning shift when you had a particularly agonizing hangover.
It is now a nuclear weapon, detonated at any time as an automatic absolution of responsibility. It is a rare genius word; one that implies the threat of both a moral and legal failure. It says to the person it is brandished against, “if you make me do this thing, you risk not only my mental breakdown, but also the threat of lawsuit or public shaming.” Thus, those of us in positions of authority - who by this point are well-attuned to this culture in which anyone can choose to not do anything at anytime if they check off certain boxes - often find ourselves acquiescing to a ridiculous narrative of overstated harm and overblown import.
What is particularly striking is that my students are in school to become healthcare providers. I won’t say the exact field, as I am not fully ready to dox myself yet, for I still need to save up enough money so that I can support myself for two months after being fired first. Oh!
Which reminds me:
…I won’t say my profession or the area I teach in, but let’s just say it is a respected healthcare role in which aspirant practitioners must make clinical rotations in several areas of practice before graduating, at which point they will often specialize in one practice or another. And in this program, I am responsible for guiding students through the psychiatric portion of their studies. All of this takes place at a relatively strong academic university located out here in CALIFORNIA OR DETROIT OR CANADA, where I may or may not live.
After going through the first 13 years of my career never hearing anything remotely close to this, it is now a regular occurrence that students come to me and inform me that they simply cannot attend the class lecture about suicide, or substance abuse, or end of life care, or (the fake) dissociative identity disorder, or paraphilia, or myriad other areas of study that are considered core competencies in my field’s practice. Or -and this is even worse - they say they cannot work with those types of patients (as if those patients identify themselves as such upon admission). Or that they can’t work with a mental health patient because they said something “problematic” to them (barely matters if the person said it while floridly psychotic).
“Hey sorry you’re in pain, what’s going on?”
“I broke my leg!”
“Oh no, that’s terrible, let’s get you some help.”
“Thanks…what a terrible day. This stuff happens all the time. I’m cursed…sometimes I think it would just be better if I wasn’t around anymore…”
“I’m gonna stop you right there…I don’t work with suicidal patients” (looks at camera and winks)
Further, if there has already been an incident (or what they refer to as an “incident,” which could include anything that is other than a completely stress-free interaction in which they receive praise for existing), they will ask that I fire the person overseeing their rotation experience, cut off relationships with our partner hospitals, or a variety of other entitled actions that a person could only imagine they had to power to do those things…OR…if they had a whole group of people constantly telling them that they do have the power to do those things, eventually saying it to them so much that they actually make it true. In “academia,” in as far as it can be called as much, this is now the role of administrators.
The first time it happened, I almost wanted to laugh in their face. But it’s not like I’ve never granted such a request. After all, I’m not a monster. If someone had a family member or close friend kill themselves two weeks ago, I’m going to let that student hang back in the rotation and get their shit together before shoving them back into the fray. But this was not that. This was a student going into healthcare - who chose to be a healer - who was asking for an exemption based on being triggered? No way, and fuck you very much. Surely this had to be the line; after all, we aren’t talking about Russian Literature here. If you don’t know your shit, you risk killing someone or, in this case, you risk not intervening before they kill themselves. Even the Americans with Disabilities Act says we must only accommodate reasonable requests. This isn’t even a disability, but even if it were, it wouldn’t qualify. A rare “open and shut case” of responding to woke self-obsessed posturing.
Talking about it with my administrators, however, I heard a very different story. Which is often the case when a person like me, who has extensive training, licensure, education, and experience in a field has to petition approval for my academic choices from people who have a master’s degree in “Community and Equitable Justice Studies” or “Student Life and Educational Leadership” or some such imaginary shit like that. These administrators have a whole repertoire of things they say both vague and acutely infuriating. They might say, “I know this does put some burden on you, Gnosuch, but surely there’s a way that we can work out a situation for this student that is amenable to both of you?” or “Students really do know themselves better than anyone,” or “I think it’s important that we avoid putting students in a situation in which they feel unsafe.”
Unsafe.
You know, young people have always had stupid ideas. This is the first time in history we are making each and every one of their stupid ideas into policies.
Unsafe. Really? Unsafe to me means wolfpack, grenades, battleaxe whirling toward me. Not “feeling mildly awkward.”
When did this happen? When did we grant this universal “get out of jail free” card for anyone who knew the right sequence of stupid meaningless phrases to utter? Furthermore, how are we okay signing off on someone to enter the workforce, when we cannot verify their ability to assess for suicidality? Forget about this student in front of me, what about the thousands of patients who just needed one person to ask them about their feelings to prove the world wasn’t a cold dead place, but then never gets asked about feeling suicidal, or being addicted to drugs, or having a terminal illness, because “it feels seriously…like…seriously like…like triggering.”
How can this person be a healer if they cannot even look at this small slice of human darkness? How can a person think they are worthy to pull someone from the depths of the deepest human pits, if they only want to put their hands down into certain pits - the others are too dirty and the people are unsavory. This is not the orientation of a healer. A healer should be the one who stands tall in all of the places that scare others. A healer seeks to pull one who is lost from the dark and back into the realm of the living. A healer has courage, not “documented accommodations.”
But this is a theme, and one that is hard to articulate despite the fact that I think everyone can sense it. Teenagers and young adults right now are judging this world, their choices, their place in it, and the rights of others through a misleading lens. It would be, for example, easy to say “why is everyone so mad about the economy when there’s so much structural racism,” when they do not realize that almost all of their subsistence is being drained from people who made money thirty years ago.
It is easy to play Call of Duty in the basement and wear sweatpants all day and go on reddit to thank Biden for two upvotes and a “take my energy” sticker, when the basement and the house connected to it are wrought from resources that are rapidly depleting and not being replaced. Such is the problem in my field, in which we have no shortage of individuals asking for care, accommodation, “respect,” fairness, peace, wellness, and compliance with their every whim, yet we have very few who are able to give it and our ranks are similarly being depleted.
In other words, there are a lot of people with no skills and no abilities to endure enough social friction to be productive in any resource generating arena, and yet these people think that everything is fine because they live in a cardboard world being held in place by the last shreds of people who built things and moved things forward, and learned how to heal people. What happens when the builders and the movers and the healers all die? When there is no teet to suckle comfort from anymore? What happens then?
Whatever it is, it is guaranteed to be pretty sus.
Hey everyone - thanks for reading. I really am trying to build up trajectory to quit my job in academia so I can write with more honesty and put the weight of my voice and ethos behind my writing. But I have a way to go before I have achieved “escape velocity” of income and especially insurance. If you’d like to become a subscriber, please do consider it. I am planning on even more paid subscriber only posts this year, so be the first to get them. If not, just subscribing for free means a whole lot to me.
-HP DeVeer
What I notice most here is the raging lack of resilience, true self awareness and abundance of immaturity and privilege of these alleged ‘healers’ - and I say alleged. It is a profound calling, that of healer, and those that herald the call do so in a manner that embraces all of humanity, that is what healing is. Helping one to scrape the wound, let the light shine in, hell, to be the beacon of light in the event they feel as though they’re falling into total darkness. A hand to hold, a guide, a sounding board, someone to see you in all of your imperfection and still believe you are worthy of support.
I appreciate those that specialize in particular issues, those that others may simply not be equipped for/ focused on. That being said, all healers undertake general, expansive training for a reason....
I really hear you, loud and clear, and could not imagine a scenario where I am in an emergency situation and a ‘healer’ decides that they ‘just can’t.’ Chunks rise.
We’re here for you - wherever you are. Human healers will still be needed, for a long while, I hope, lest we surrender entirely to the AI future and just gather together in our small pods of sanity while those that you describe here flail and keep captive their AI support audience who might help them feel safe, but will they help them truly heal?
Ah, the future.
I've often thought that I would be in a world of hurt if I were still lecturing at the university I used to work at...and this confirms everything in the most hilarious way. I hope you find what you need to move on but also am happy that there is still some sanity hiding in academia.